The quietest, most docile worker could, behind her apron or her uniform, be sharpening a blade. —Mia Alvar, “The Miracle Worker”1 On July 19th, 1994, Sarah Balabagan, a fourteen-year-old overseas…
Issues
American Graphic Design in the 1990s: Deindustrialization and the Death of the Author
This essay offers an account of one profession’s attempt to come to terms with the meaning of work in a context of economic and technological flux. Bound from the beginning…
The Politics of Language Writing and the Subject of History
Timothy Kreiner
TV and Tipworkification
Contemporary TV demonstrates a conspicuous interest in two related kinds of employment: tipwork (waiting tables, bartending, making espressos) and the more recent form of work termed “gigwork” (temporary, project-based freelance…
The Effective Turn: Affect, Gender, and the Wages of the Labor Film
No observer of contemporary American economic life can overlook the fact that real wages have remained almost unchanged for over forty years.1 Stagnant wages seemingly scandalize liberal platitudes of progress….
Character, Genre, Labor: The Office Novel after Deindustrialization
“Minor characters,” writes Alex Woloch, “are the proletariat of the novel.”1 Defined entirely by the functional role they play — gardener, maid, or mechanic — they are never treated to…
Introduction: The Spirit of Capital in an Age of Deindustrialization
Max Weber’s The Protestant Ethic famously seeks out what he terms a “spirit of capitalism” in the development of “duty in a calling.” For Weber, the peculiarly unfulfilling experience of…