“…In the post-fordist transformations of capitalism, emphasis is placed on creativity as valueproducing labor: including soft skills such as reputation, visibility, and networking, which are capitalized and valued as essential assets to secure and maintain jobs. This work has been termed variously as 'free' (Terranova, 2000), 'reputational' (Zafirau, 2008), 'relational' (Baym, 2015). 14.…”
Section: Conclusion: Men In the Spoiled Garden Of Playmentioning
This article examines the work of affective labor in remediating experiences of inhibition and insecurity among heterosexual men in 'seduction communities': communities of men who train each other in embodying seductive masculinity to pick up women. Considering how men in seduction communities construct and enact symbolic boundaries in their performances of seduction, this paper will seek to answer the following question: what do seduction communities reveal about the vulnerabilities and frailties of masculinity in the US today? Based on original ethnographic fieldwork carried out in New York City, I examine the ways in which men experience states of cognitive absorption, affective license, and also of disability and abjection in fashioning themselves as objects of female desire through rituals of shared affective labor among men. I argue that men experience culturally based ambivalences around norms of self-help -including ideas of freedom, dependency, and addiction -in ways that complicate heteronormative masculine identities. I furthermore assert that self-fashioning through seduction training invokes ideas of work and play in order to differentiate contradictory ethics of persuasion and self-expression, and that these ideas in turn instantiate different technologies of embodiment that reproduce inequalities between men along lines of race and class.
ARTICLE HISTORY
“…In the post-fordist transformations of capitalism, emphasis is placed on creativity as valueproducing labor: including soft skills such as reputation, visibility, and networking, which are capitalized and valued as essential assets to secure and maintain jobs. This work has been termed variously as 'free' (Terranova, 2000), 'reputational' (Zafirau, 2008), 'relational' (Baym, 2015). 14.…”
Section: Conclusion: Men In the Spoiled Garden Of Playmentioning
This article examines the work of affective labor in remediating experiences of inhibition and insecurity among heterosexual men in 'seduction communities': communities of men who train each other in embodying seductive masculinity to pick up women. Considering how men in seduction communities construct and enact symbolic boundaries in their performances of seduction, this paper will seek to answer the following question: what do seduction communities reveal about the vulnerabilities and frailties of masculinity in the US today? Based on original ethnographic fieldwork carried out in New York City, I examine the ways in which men experience states of cognitive absorption, affective license, and also of disability and abjection in fashioning themselves as objects of female desire through rituals of shared affective labor among men. I argue that men experience culturally based ambivalences around norms of self-help -including ideas of freedom, dependency, and addiction -in ways that complicate heteronormative masculine identities. I furthermore assert that self-fashioning through seduction training invokes ideas of work and play in order to differentiate contradictory ethics of persuasion and self-expression, and that these ideas in turn instantiate different technologies of embodiment that reproduce inequalities between men along lines of race and class.
ARTICLE HISTORY
“…The extent to which social relationships increasingly develop and are maintained online may be experienced generally by social media users, but it is acutely experienced by artists, musicians and performers, who rely on these connections and interactions to make a living. In her research on the interpersonal connections between musicians and fans, Baym () uses the term relational labor to discuss these changing dynamics, where relational laborrequires a willingness and ability to present and sell yourself as something of value rather than brazenly self‐promoting. This responsibility for being pleasing, reaching out, connecting with others, and providing a space for audience members to connect with another, falls on the musicians.…”
Recently, Brooklyn has seen an explosion of drag culture, with dozens of performers taking the stage in any given week. Social media plays a vital role for members of this community, simultaneously allowing self-promotion and community solidarity. Drawing on focus group interviews, we analyze the communication practices of Brooklyn's drag performers, examining both the advantages and drawbacks of social media platforms. Using conceptual frameworks of faceted identity and relational labor, our discussion focuses on affordances and constraints of multifaceted identity in online contexts and theories of seamful design. We contend that by analyzing online communication practices of drag performers, it becomes possible to identify gaps between embedded ideologies of mainstream social media technologies and the localized values of outsider communities.Keywords: Online vs. Offline, Sexuality, Community. doi:10.1111/jcc4.12125
IntroductionIn the fall of 2014, a particular group of Facebook users leveraged media attention, political protests and threats of boycotting as part of a demand for technological parity. Their complaints were heartfelt, but not new: Facebook's policies reflected particular assumptions of identity and communication that privileged some users over others, driving people who fall outside this scope to come up with hacks, tricks and workarounds to meet their needs. What made this particular set of demands more newsworthy was that Facebook had angered a highly visible set of performers whose accusations were easily sensationalized: drag queens. In keeping with its policy that users create profiles that correspond to their legal identities, Facebook had closed the accounts of a number of drag performers, provoking outrage, protests, and eventually an apology (see Change.org, 2014;Seals, 2014;Tracer, 2014). On October 2, 2014, Facebook announced their intention to overhaul a policy requiring people to use their "real" names, meaning a name verified by state-issued ID, such as a driver's license. At stake in this debate are the politics of platforms (Gillespie, 2010), the gaps between the uses originally imagined for a given technology and the uses imagined by actual users.In this paper, we address these gaps by examining the social media practices of Brooklyn's drag community, focusing on the role of online technologies in the lives of drag performers, both as individual artists and as a queer community. Drawing on focus group interviews conducted in the year prior to Facebook's policy reversal, our analysis offers an examination of what happens when intended use of a given technology runs up against unpredicted users, uses and workarounds. These divides between rules versus workarounds, intended design and actual use, are central to understanding how social media platforms facilitate, hinder, and complicate identity work and interpersonal communication. By looking at the practices and frustrations of a specific countercultural community -drag queens -our analysis contributes to online communication re...
“…As Stampy's YouTube home page notes, 'I upload a bunch of different games, including a new Minecraft video every single day.' Averaging between 20-30 minutes per episode, Stampy's Minecraft output alone is, as Ashton (2015) notes, an object lesson in 'relational labour' and the management of audience (Baym 2015), while the publication/subscription model of YouTube lends a ritualism as each new episode appears in the subscriber's timeline with diurnal regularity.…”
Section: Stampylongnose and The Rise Of The Celebrity Videogame Playermentioning
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