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This chapter focuses on the young adult (YA) literature market. Published largely in the 1980s as part of a long history of sentimental literature about illness for women, these books catered to teen girl readers by featuring love stories about teen girls and boys with life-threatening illnesses. The books issued emotional challenges to teen readers through yet more representations of teens as physically imperiled patients who needed to be overcome and rehabilitate. Surveying the work of the best-selling YA authors Lurlene McDaniel and Jean Ferris, this chapter analyzes the affective labor of sadness as a crucial growth-inducing emotion that tragic disability narratives are more likely to convey.

Chapter 4 explores the workers’ perceptions of their work relationships through the tropes of familiality, dependency, and subordination. It argues that there remains a dominance of the paternalist family idiom, though all workers do not subscribe to it. The familial trope is complemented by a construction of dependence, sometimes on part of the employers, sometimes mutual. There is also an overarching experience of subordination, which fuels the aspiration for transgenerational mobility. Even those who profess to be satisfied in their jobs do not wish their children to enter paid domestic work as a livelihood option.

With the national and cultural boundary-crossing of East Asian Pop Culture becoming part of the regular diet of regional media consumers, national and transnational communities of audience/consumers have emerged, ranging from different types of “occasioned” communities to highly organized transnational fan communities that engage with the national politics of different countries as necessary. While all these beyond-the-text activities of communities of consumers are motivated by their affective labor and are engendered by their love of the pop culture, stars and genres, they still unavoidably get appropriated and transformed by the producers into profit, even the sub-fan organizations cannot ultimately escape this fate.

The first chapter explores the foundations of documentary’s anthropological strain in the pseudo-ethnographies of Frances and Robert Flaherty and Osa and Martin Johnson, filmmaking couples working at the intersection of ethnography and nonfiction entertainment in the ’20s and ’30s. Both women worked in the looming shadows of their more famous husbands, and yet each woman played a significant role in their joint careers. Their gendered labor included a kind of emotional translation for films that projected visions of far-flung places in the world to audiences hungry for “authentic” images of the exotic. Thus, these early pioneers--and the complex and compromised legacy of gender and race that their stories animate--are vital episodes in the overarching narrative of women’s documentary filmmaking.

This chapter examines the human relations involved in the creation of shōjo manga. Beginning with the extant history of manga, it focuses on the relationships of editors and artists within the shōjo manga industry, paying attention to gender and generation in particular. The first half of the chapter discusses the gendered division of labor within the industry, where editors are primarily older men and artists are young women. The second half looks at the lives and desires of younger editors, examining the ways that they think about their role in the production of shōjo manga. Thus, the chapter provides a case study of affective labor, arguing that the intersection of gender and generation in the organization of the shōjo manga industry is another instance of the convergence of production and consumption.

This chapter presents the affective labor of subject formation to discuss Roderick Ferguson’s work Aberrations in Black. Ferguson describes the goals of a queer of color critique as “an epistemological intervention…[that] denotes an interest in materiality, but refuses ideologies of transparency and reflection, ideologies that have helped to constitute Marxism, revolutionary nationalism, and liberal pluralism.” Queer of color analyses the “manifold intersections that contradict the idea of the liberal nation-state and capital as sites of resolution, perfection, progress, and confirmation.” The remainder of the chapter examines how the racialized male body has been described as a historic plane of suffering.

This chapter introduces the central argument of the book through a discussion of how the research respondents conceptualised paid-for domestic cleaning in terms of the structure of cleaning work and whether anyone can do cleaning for a living. The chapter proposes that depending on the conditions of work, cleaning can be done as work, that is, using mental and manual skills and effort and performed under decent, democratic work conditions, or as labour, that is, requiring mainly manual labour, accompanied by exertion of ‘natural’ emotional/affective labour and performed in undemocratic conditions. Good paid-for cleaning work is also not simply a replacement of unpaid housework that can be done by anyone; it entails much learning and continued commitment anddoes not come ‘naturally’ to women.

This chapter explores the ways that South Asian migrants to the United States have joined the ranks of Latinos and other working-class migrant workers who are asked to perform affective labor for the urban elite. Focusing on New York's service industry, it considers the relationship between exploitative practices in low-status jobs and the managerial rhetoric of the family. It shows that small-business owners in urban South Asian enclaves in the United States make use of the concept of the family as a managerial ideology that complements the country's dominant cultural narratives about family businesses, immigrant communities, and Asian cultures. In this context, the family functions as a managerial tool that attempts to privatize economic relations and screen them from public view and regulation.

If the activities of Moscow’s faith communities represent new approaches to public service in Russia, they have also inspired new modes of economic activity. In Russia’s neoliberal reality, need, deservingness, and affect have become opportunities for political and economic entrepreneurial investment. Both within their own communities of supporters and beyond in Moscow’s commercial sector, religious groups and religiously affiliated assistance programs compete and cooperate with private businesses and state agencies to promote and capitalize on the simultaneously civic and financial value of compassion. By addressing Russia’s “business” or “economy” of kindness and compassion, this chapter considers the forms of revenue, investment, profit, and surplus that are generated and the social, material, and ethical results produced by these profits and surpluses.

This chapter assesses social workers' diverse approaches to the affective labor that forgiveness work entails. A range of social workers, from pious religious actors to secular anti-death penalty activists, participate in cultivating affective sociolegal spaces, or a lifeworld, for their ethical practices. Through productive social engagements, these agents draw attention to a metaphysical rapture that forbearance affords, both for themselves and for victims' families. Their engagement with a kind of social work that extends directly from the potentialities made possible through Iran's Islamic justice system also serves to underscore a commitment to Islam publicly, whether intentional or not. Social workers' myriad activities also bring attention to and even solidify the rationalization or increased corporatization of otherwise loosely organized local, spiritual, and/or ritual practices.

This chapter focuses on Dhanka women who came of age in the era of service, in which men were frequently employed as government workers. It provides an extended reflection on the emotional and social importance given to love between husbands and wives. Like willingness, respectability is an important disposition and goal for Dhanka women, whose affective labors must be seen as part of the project of collective aspiration. Tracking how three individuals are able to narrate their lives as good women, the ethnographic material highlights the gendered division of social labor emerging from the legal identity of Scheduled Tribes.

This chapter introduces themes of care, kindness, compassion, civic action, social justice, and faith-based assistance within the context of contemporary Russian society. The chapter presents the ethnographic field site of Moscow’s faith-based assistance community and sets the stage for the book’s larger discussion about the ways in which members of this community link their acts of assistance with performances of civic action and possibilities for understanding faith as a form of affective labor that produces future-oriented results. The discussion is contextualized within details about Russia’s contemporary political and economic situation, including the unique position of non-Orthodox Christian communities within the country’s religious and social justice spheres.

Jean Rhys’s second novel, After Leaving Mr Mackenzie, focuses on a woman who is dependent on others for charity and all but excluded from the social contract at an historical moment when the institutional forms of charity and contract were in flux. Situating the novel in the context of literary, feminist, psychoanalytic, and deconstructive accounts of a gendered opposition between charity and contract, this chapter argues that Rhys’s text exposes the psychological work required on the part of both men and women to maintain this opposition. In After Leaving Mr Mackenzie, social and sexual relations are never strictly charitable or strictly contractual, but freighted with meanings that exceed both parties’ intentions. Though framed by widespread economic insecurity and lack, the novel is, paradoxically, about excess and, with Rhys’s other fiction, strategically counters the modern myth that reciprocity between the sexes is bound to fail because women alone are essentially excessive.