Aesthetic Labour

Author : Ana Sofia Elias
Publisher : Springer
ISBN 13 : 1137477652
Total Pages : 402 pages
Book Rating : 4.51/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Aesthetic Labour written by Ana Sofia Elias and published by Springer. This book was released on 2017-01-18 with total page 402 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume approaches questions about gender and the politics of appearance from a new perspective by developing the notion of aesthetic labour. Bringing together feminist writing regarding the ‘beauty myth’ with recent scholarship about new forms of work, the book suggests that in this moment of ubiquitous photography, social media, and 360 degree surveillance, women are increasingly required to be 'aesthetic entrepreneurs’, maintaining a constant state of vigilance about their appearance. The collection shows that this work is not just on the surface of bodies, but requires a transformation of subjectivity itself, characterised by notions of personal choice, risk-taking, self-management, and individual responsibility. The book includes analyses of online media, beauty service work, female genital cosmetic surgery, academic fashion, self-help literature and the seduction community, from a range of countries. Discussing beauty politics, postfeminism, neoliberalism, labour and subjectivity, the book will be of interest to scholars and students with an interest in Gender, Media Studies, Cultural Studies, Sociology, Social Psychology and Management Studies. “This highly engaging, smart, and wide-ranging collection analyzes how, under the self-governing mandates of neoliberalism, the demands that girls and women regulate and control their bodies and appearance have escalated to new, unforgiving levels. A special strength of the book is its emphasis on the rise of ‘aesthetic labour’ as a global, transnational and ever-colonizing phenomenon that seeks to sweep up women of all races, ages and locales into its disciplinary grip. Highly recommended.” -Susan J Douglas, University of Michigan, USA the inherited responsibility that remains women’s particular burden to manage.” -Melissa Gregg, Intel Corporation, USA “This book incisively conceptualizes how neo-liberalist and postfeminist tendencies are ramping up pressures for glamour, aesthetic, fashion, and body work in the general public. In a moment when YouTube ‘makeup how to’ videos receive millions of hits; what to wear and how to wear it blogs clock massive followings; and staying ‘on brand’ is sold to us as the key to personal and financial success, ‘aesthetic entrepreneurship’ is bound to become a go-to concept for anyone seeking to understand the profound shifts shaping labor and life in the 21st century.” -Elizabeth Wissinger, City University of New York, USA

Author : Chris Warhurst
Publisher : SAGE
ISBN 13 : 152970202X
Total Pages : 237 pages
Book Rating : 4.26/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Aesthetic Labour written by Chris Warhurst and published by SAGE. This book was released on 2020-07-06 with total page 237 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This accessible and exciting new text looks at the implications of aesthetic labour for work and employment by contextualizing debates and offering a critical approach. The origins of aesthetic labour are explored, as well as the relevant theories from business and management, and sociology. Coverage includes key topics such as: corporate strategy; recruitment and selection practices; and discrimination. Key features include: - a range of case studies from across different types of organizations and popular culture - the exploration of topics such as branding, ′lookism′, ′dressing for success′ and cosmetic surgery - suggestions for further reading.

Author : Salomé Aguilera Skvirsky
Publisher : Duke University Press
ISBN 13 : 1478007079
Total Pages : 219 pages
Book Rating : 4.74/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Process Genre written by Salomé Aguilera Skvirsky and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2020-03-20 with total page 219 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From IKEA assembly guides and “hands and pans” cooking videos on social media to Mister Rogers's classic factory tours, representations of the step-by-step fabrication of objects and food are ubiquitous in popular media. In The Process Genre Salomé Aguilera Skvirsky introduces and theorizes the process genre—a heretofore unacknowledged and untheorized transmedial genre characterized by its representation of chronologically ordered steps in which some form of labor results in a finished product. Originating in the fifteenth century with machine drawings, and now including everything from cookbooks to instructional videos and art cinema, the process genre achieves its most powerful affective and ideological results in film. By visualizing technique and absorbing viewers into the actions of social actors and machines, industrial, educational, ethnographic, and other process films stake out diverse ideological positions on the meaning of labor and on a society's level of technological development. In systematically theorizing a genre familiar to anyone with access to a screen, Skvirsky opens up new possibilities for film theory.

Author : Danielle Child
Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN 13 : 1350022373
Total Pages : 240 pages
Book Rating : 4.79/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Working Aesthetics written by Danielle Child and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2019-01-10 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Working Aesthetics is about the relationship between art and work under contemporary capitalism. Whilst labour used to be regarded as an unattractive subject for art, the proximity of work to everyday life has subsequently narrowed the gap between work and art. The artist is no longer considered apart from the economic, but is heralded as an example of how to work in neoliberal management textbooks. As work and life become obscured within the contemporary period, this book asks how artistic practice is affected, including those who labour for artists. Through a series of case studies, Working Aesthetics critically examines the moments in which labour and art intersect under capitalism. When did labour disappear from art production, or accounts of art history? Can we consider the dematerialization of art in the 1960s in relation to the deskilling of work? And how has neoliberal management theory adopting the artist as model worker affected artistic practices in the 21st century? With the narrowing of work and art visible in galleries and art discourse today, Working Aesthetics takes a step back to ask why labour has become a valid subject for contemporary art, and explores what this means for aesthetic culture today.

Author : Dave Beech
Publisher : BRILL
ISBN 13 : 9004321527
Total Pages : 314 pages
Book Rating : 4.26/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Art and Labour written by Dave Beech and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2020-06-22 with total page 314 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book provides a new history of the changing relationship between art, craft and industry focusing and a new political theory of the categories of aesthetic labour, attractive labour, alienated labour, nonalienated labour and unwaged labour.

Author : Marion Crain
Publisher : Univ of California Press
ISBN 13 : 0520287177
Total Pages : 326 pages
Book Rating : 4.74/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Invisible Labor written by Marion Crain and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2016-06-28 with total page 326 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Demographic and technological trends have yielded new forms of work that are increasingly more precarious, globalized, and brand centered. Some of these shifts have led to a marked decrease in the visibility of work or workers. This edited collection examines situations in which technology and employment practices hide labor within the formal paid labor market, with implications for workplace activism, social policy, and law. In some cases, technological platforms, space, and temporality hide workers and sometimes obscure their tasks as well. In other situations, workers may be highly visible--indeed, the employer may rely upon the workers' aesthetics to market the branded product--but their aesthetic labor is not seen as work. In still other cases, the work occurs within a social interaction and appears as leisure--a voluntary or chosen activity--rather than as work. Alternatively, the workers themselves may be conceptualized as consumers rather than as workers. Crossing the occupational hierarchy and spectrum from high- to low-waged work, from professional to manual labor, and from production to service labor, the authors argue for a broader understanding of labor in the contemporary era. This book adopts an interdisciplinary approach that integrates perspectives from law, sociology, and industrial/labor relations"--Provided by publisher.

Author : Conrad Lashley
Publisher : Elsevier
ISBN 13 : 0080450938
Total Pages : 218 pages
Book Rating : 4.33/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Hospitality written by Conrad Lashley and published by Elsevier. This book was released on 2007 with total page 218 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The contributing authors provide tangible evidence of continuing advancement and development of knowledge pertaining to the phenomenon of hospitality. They draw on the richness of social sciences, taking host and guest relations as a means of studying in-group and out-group relations with and between societies.

Author : Annelies Van Assche
Publisher : Springer Nature
ISBN 13 : 3030406938
Total Pages : 298 pages
Book Rating : 4.36/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Labor and Aesthetics in European Contemporary Dance written by Annelies Van Assche and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2020-06-13 with total page 298 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This transdisciplinary study scientifically reports the way the established contemporary dance sector in Europe operates from a micro-perspective. It provides a dance scholarly and sociological interpretation of its mechanisms by coupling qualitative data (interview material, observations, logbooks, and dance performances) to theoretical insights. The book uncovers the sometimes contradicting mechanisms related to the precarious project-oriented labor and art market that determine the working and living conditions of contemporary dance artists in Europe’s dance capitals Brussels and Berlin. In addition, it examines how these working and living conditions affect the work process and outcome. From a sociological perspective, the book engages with the relevant contemporary social issue of precarity and this within the much-at-risk professional group of contemporary dance artists. In this regard, the research brings novelty within the subject area, particularly by employing a unique methodological approach. Although the research is initially set up in a specific geographical context and within a specific research population, the book offers insights into issues that affect our neoliberal society at large. The research findings show potential to make a relevant contribution with regards to precarity within dance studies and performance studies, but also labor studies and cultural sociology.

Author : Sianne Ngai
Publisher : Harvard University Press
ISBN 13 : 0674984544
Total Pages : 417 pages
Book Rating : 4.47/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Theory of the Gimmick written by Sianne Ngai and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2020-06-16 with total page 417 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A provocative theory of the gimmick as an aesthetic category steeped in the anxieties of capitalism. Repulsive and yet strangely attractive, the gimmick is a form that can be found virtually everywhere in capitalism. It comes in many guises: a musical hook, a financial strategy, a striptease, a novel of ideas. Above all, acclaimed theorist Sianne Ngai argues, the gimmick strikes us both as working too little (a labor-saving trick) and as working too hard (a strained effort to get our attention). Focusing on this connection to work, Ngai draws a line from gimmicks to political economy. When we call something a gimmick, we are registering uncertainties about value bound to labor and time—misgivings that indicate broader anxieties about the measurement of wealth in capitalism. With wit and critical precision, Ngai explores the extravagantly impoverished gimmick across a range of examples: the fiction of Thomas Mann, Helen DeWitt, and Henry James; photographs by Torbjørn Rødland; the video art of Stan Douglas; the theoretical writings of Stanley Cavell and Theodor Adorno. Despite its status as cheap and compromised, the gimmick emerges as a surprisingly powerful tool in this formidable contribution to aesthetic theory.

Author : Angela McRobbie
Publisher : John Wiley & Sons
ISBN 13 : 1509525084
Total Pages : 200 pages
Book Rating : 4.89/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Feminism and the Politics of 'Resilience' written by Angela McRobbie and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2020-04-20 with total page 200 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this short and provocative book, cultural studies scholar Angela McRobbie develops a much-needed feminist account of neoliberalism. Highlighting the ways in which popular culture and the media actively produce and sustain the cultural imaginary for social polarization, she shows how there is substantial pressure on women not just to be employed, but to prioritize working life. She fiercely challenges the media gatekeepers who shape contemporary womanhood by means of exposure and public shaming, and pays particular attention to the endemic nature of anti-welfarism as it is addressed to women, thereby reducing the scope for feminist solidarity. In this theoretically rich and deep analysis of current cultural processes, McRobbie introduces a series of concepts including 'visual media governmentality' and the urging of women into work as 'contraceptive employment'. Foregrounding a triage of ideas as the 'perfect-imperfect-resilience' McRobbie conveys some of the key means by which consumer capitalism attempts to manage the threats posed by the new feminisms. She proposes that 'resilience' emerges as a compromise, as hard-edged neoliberalism proffers the option of a return to liberal feminism. A lively and devastating critique, Feminism and Neoliberalism offers a much-needed wake-up call. It is essential reading for students and scholars of cultural studies, media, sociology, and women's and gender studies.