Training Precarious Workers: Internships & Work-Life Imbalance in Today’s Cinema

• In Event: Work/Force: Exploring the Politics of Work, Violence & Terror in Popular Culture

Abstract

Kathi Weeks, feminist theorist and author of The Problem with Work, captures something important about the power wielded by employers and the dissolving border between work and life in the contemporary economy when she writes: “The subjectivities shaped at work do not remain at work but inhabit all the spaces and times of nonwork and vice-versa. Who one becomes at work and in life are mutually constitutive.” Over the last couple of decades, the particulars of this work-life (im)balance have become familiar and normalized in the form of inflated employer expectations about flexibility, availability, affective labor and more. Yet as Weeks and others like Elizabeth Anderson have noted, political theorists have not given enough attention to the power relations characteristic of the workplace. In this paper, I want to use internships as one way into this problem, investigating the politics of internships and the form of subjectivity associated with the intern in order to better grasp the consequences of the rise of this form of (too-often) unpaid labor. The paper will do this by (a) situating the rise of internships in the larger context of a growing post-Fordist precarity, (b) examining the popular features, expectations, and understandings of internships as well as efforts to politicize them in light of theoretical scholarship on work, precarity, and human capital and (c) then comparing representations of interning in mainstream Hollywood films like The Devil Wears Prada (2006), The Intern (2015), and The Internship (2013) with these empirical and theoretical insights. Internships are an important interface between education and economics, and it should prove politically useful for academics as well as students and the broader public to better understand the pressures and forces driving their proliferation.

Author

• Robert E. Watkins, Columbia College Chicago