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Affective Labour

(Dis) assembling Distance and Difference

By: James M. Thomas, Jennifer G. Correa

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eBook | 11 December 2015 | Edition Number 1

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Grade
13 - 17

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Affective Labour explores four distinct landscapes in order to demonstrate how collective feelings are organized by social actors in order to both reproduce and contest hegemony. Utilizing a variety of methods, including participant observation, in-depth interviews across field sites, and content analysis of mass media, Correa and Thomas demonstrate the centrality of affective labor in enabling and constraining prevailing norms and practices of race, citizenship, class, gender, and sexuality across multiple spatial contexts: the U.S.- Mexico border, urban nightlife districts, American college campuses, and emergent social movements against the police state.

The book demonstrates how the power of affective labour might be harnessed for progressively oriented world-building projects, including what the authors term an ‘affective labour from below.’ By tying an analysis of affective labour into movements for social justice, the authors aim to produce a critical theory of the world that can be practically applied.

Industry Reviews

In this theoretically groundbreaking yet remarkably accessible book, Thomas and Correa establish a strong case for why affect should matter to scholars of race and racism, as well as to activists working for social justice. Affective Labour describes the painstaking work of identification, the crafting of difference, and the production of social distance, in effect asking how forms of violence and exclusion become imaginable or unimaginable. The book takes the reader on an intellectual journey from a college-town bar scene to the US-Mexico border, through the contemporary diversity regimes of predominantly white institutions. The authors then bring the lessons from these case studies to bear on the emergent affective politics of Black Lives Matter and similar radical democratic social movements. In spite of the grimly neoliberal landscapes of difference and inequality it explores, Affective Labour remains optimistic in its evocation of coming into being and the potential for an affect of liberation in progressive politics. ?