Embodied Labor and Laboring Bodies (Co-sponsored by Organizations, Occupations, and Work Section)

Session Submission Type: Paper Session (90 minute)

Description

This co-sponsored session between the sections on Body and Embodiment and Organizations, Occupations, and Work explores the critical relationship between labor and bodies. Scholars have investigated how paid labor is often embodied, as well as the ways that laboring subjects utilize bodies to perform work. The bodies and appearances of workers—particularly around race, ethnicity, and gender—operate as axes of advantage and disadvantage that constitute sites of inequality within organizations. This session extends current empirical and theoretical work on embodiment and labor by inviting submissions from scholars whose research includes (but is not limited to) topics, such as: aesthetic labor; emotional labor; intimate labor; body work / body workers; beauty work; bodily capital / embodied cultural capital; the social construction of embodied value; intersections of race/ethnicity and laboring bodies; gendered embodiment at work; and bodies and technology. All methodological approaches and research sites are welcome.

Sub Unit

• Sociology of the Body and Embodiment Section / Embodied Labor and Laboring Bodies (Co-sponsored by Organizations, Occupations, and Work Section)

Cosponsor

• Organizations, Occupations, and Work Section

Presider

• David J. Hutson, Pennsylvania State University-Abington

Individual Presentations

• Anger, Laughter, Compassion: The Emotional Labor of Bureaucrats in Gujarat’s Citizen Service Centers - Puja-Arti Patel, University of Warwick

• Blood Veins for Hire: Leveraging the Body as an Income-Generating Tool Amidst Rising Economic Inequality - Analidis Ochoa, University of Michigan-Ann Arbor

• “Showing Willingness”: Business Drinking, Embodied Evaluation, and Gendered Boundary Work in China - Xuanchi Liu, McGill University

• The Making of a Desirable Body: Gendered Labor and Competing Consumer Desires in Lucha Libre - Miguel Chavez, Northwestern University

• The Ponytail Paradox: Uniformed Women and Aesthetic Labor in Male-Dominated Occupations - Caroline Carter, North Carolina State University

Session Organizers

• David J. Hutson, Pennsylvania State University-Abington

• Mariana Craciun, Tulane University