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Bodies of Work: The Labour of Sex in the Digital Age 1st ed. Edition Rebecca Saunders full chapter instant download
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DYNAMICS OF VIRTUAL WORK
Dynamics of Virtual Work
Series Editors
Ursula Huws
Hertfordshire Business School
University of Hertfordshire
Hatfield, UK
Rosalind Gill
Department of Sociology
City, University of London
London, UK
Technological change has transformed where people work, when and
how. Digitisation of information has altered labour processes out of all
recognition whilst telecommunications have enabled jobs to be relocated
globally. ICTs have also enabled the creation of entirely new types of
‘digital’ or ‘virtual’ labour, both paid and unpaid, shifting the borderline
between ‘play’ and ‘work’ and creating new types of unpaid labour con-
nected with the consumption and co-creation of goods and services. This
affects private life as well as transforming the nature of work and people
experience the impacts differently depending on their gender, their age,
where they live and what work they do. Aspects of these changes have
been studied separately by many different academic experts however up
till now a cohesive overarching analytical framework has been lacking.
Drawing on a major, high-profile COST Action (European Cooperation
in Science and Technology) Dynamics of Virtual Work, this series will
bring together leading international experts from a wide range of disci-
plines including political economy, labour sociology, economic geogra-
phy, communications studies, technology, gender studies, social
psychology, organisation studies, industrial relations and development
studies to explore the transformation of work and labour in the Internet
Age. The series will allow researchers to speak across disciplinary bound-
aries, national borders, theoretical and political vocabularies, and differ-
ent languages to understand and make sense of contemporary
transformations in work and social life more broadly. The book series will
build on and extend this, offering a new, important and intellectually
exciting intervention into debates about work and labour, social theory,
digital culture, gender, class, globalisation and economic, social and
political change.
Bodies of Work
The Labour of Sex in the Digital Age
Rebecca Saunders
University of Huddersfield
Huddersfield, UK
This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG.
The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland
Acknowledgements
Grandad, you’d fucking hate this book, but it wouldn’t have been possible
without you.
Daniel, Sara, Luke and Emily, thank you. For your massive hearts
and brains.
v
Contents
1 Introduction 1
3 Sexual Datafication 57
vii
viii Contents
8 Interventionist Pornography251
Bibliography291
Index323
1
Introduction
The body […] appeared not only as a beast inert to the stimuli of work, but
also as the container of labor-power, a means of production, the primary
work-machine […] the violence of the ruling class […] aimed at a radical
transformation of the person, intended to eradicate in the proletariat any
form of behavior not conducive to the imposition of a stricter work-
discipline […] Nakedness was penalized, as were many other ‘unproduc-
tive’ forms of sexuality and sociality. (2004, pp. 136–7)
vocation and labelled “women’s labor”’ (2004, p. 75), so sex work consti-
tuted an unwanted assertion of the value of women’s work in general and
the work of sex in particular. As a result, the sexual, working woman is
constructed as profoundly immoral, as irreparably destroying female vir-
tue and as violently punishable. Sex work defied the capitalist require-
ment that women’s labour not be commodified in the public market and
that their sexual bodies specifically be something without exchange value
that naturally belonged to the state and to husbands: ‘a communal good
anyone could […] use at will’ (Federici 2004, 97). Putting sex to work
therefore explicitly troubled the capitalist utility of the female sexual
body as necessarily private, reproductive and marital and fundamentally
uncommodifiable. Like pornography, sex work is therefore also histori-
cally opposed to the capitalist utility of the (female) sexual body. Where
pornography requires a performative form of sex work, it is also con-
nected to this historical opposition of public, non-procreative sexual
work to capitalist productivity.
Bodies of Work historicises pornography not as a consummate example
of capitalist functioning but as opposed to capitalism’s productive
demands of the sexual body on the level of both representation and pro-
duction. The dehistoricised understanding of pornography and porn per-
formance as a symbol of the worst excesses of exploitative and patriarchal
capitalism—anti-pornography theorist D.A. Clarke describes sex work,
for example, as ‘the very paradigm of exploited labour’ because ‘buying
and selling human beings is wrong’ (2004, pp. 155–6) and Jessica Spector
asserts that ‘the market is not a neutral mechanism of exchange: there are
some goods whose sale transforms or destroys their initial meaning’
(2006, p. 401)—is itself rooted in the capitalist regulation of the female
sexual body as necessarily preserved from economisation. Federici dem-
onstrates that the assertion of sex work as inherently damaging to wom-
en’s entire being and social status is a consequence of capitalist oppression:
the assertion of women’s sexual activity as inherently unproductive was
enforced in order that it be productive for capitalism.
By understanding pornography’s historical opposition to the capi-
talist regulation of sex, Bodies of Work can uncover the ways in which
crucial aspects of the anti-productive sexual body such as excess,
obscenity, the carnivalesque and sexual radicalism have become
1 Introduction 11
Heti johonkin kaupunkiin tai kylään tultua nuo juuttaat usein ensi
työkseen marssivat kirkkoon, tervasivat pyhäinkuvat, silpoivat
alttarikoristeet miekoillaan permannolle ja varastivat hopearistit,
kynttiläjalat, jopa — kauheata sanoakin — pyhät ehtoollisastiat.
Sellainen menettely kerrassaan hirmustutti de Lussania. Kirkkojen
häväistys ja niiden kalleuksien ryöstö oli hänestä kuolemansynti,
eikä hän koskaan sallinut mitään sellaista, jos vain voi estää sen.
Valloitettuaan kaupungin, jossa oli rikkaita luostareja ja kirkkoja,
kielsi hän jyrkästi ryöstämästä niitä ja tyytyi vain vastaanottamaan
kelpo korvaussumman, jonka munkit ja papit olivat velkapäät
myöntämään hänen hurskaasta menettelystään.
Hän tiesi yhtä hyvin kuin kapteeni itse, etteivät tämän miehet sallisi
päällikkönsä jäädä aarteineen kaupunkiin elämään kaikessa
mukavuudessa, sillä aikaa kuin heidän itsensä pitäisi ilman johtajaa
jatkaa säännötöntä uraansa kaikenlaisten vaarojen ja vastusten
alaisina, ehkäpä tappion ja kuolemankin uhkaamina. Jos hän
ilmoittaisi eroavansa miehistään, niin nämä todennäköisesti
surmaisivat hänet. Mikään rauhallinen ero joukon ja sen päällikön
välillä ei siis voinut tulla kysymykseen, eikä rouva sellaista tahtonut
esittääkään.
XXI luku.