Ashley Mears

Working for Free in the VIP Relational Work and the Production of Consent

Why do workers participate in their own exploitation? This article moves beyond the situational production of consent that has dominated studies of the labor process and outlines the relational production of labor’s surplus value. Using a case of unpaid women who perform valuable work for VIP nightclubs, I present ethnographic data on the VIP party circuit from New York, the Hamptons, Miami, and Cannes, as well as 84 interviews with party organizers and guests. Party promoters, mostly male brokers, appropriate surplus value from women in four stages: recruitment, mobilization, performance, and control. Relational work between promoters and women, cemented by gifts and strategic intimacies, frames women’s labor as leisure and friendship, and boundary work legitimizes women’s work as distinct from sexual labor. When boundaries, media, and meanings of relationships do not appropriately align, as in relational mismatches, women experience the VIP party less as leisure and more as work, and they are less likely to participate. My findings embed the labor process in a relational infrastructure and hold insights for explaining why people work for free in culture and technology sectors of the post-Fordist economy.

Not just a paper doll : How models manage bodily capital and why they perform emotional labor

Modeling is a challenging occupation because employment is irregular, the physical demands are great, and competition is fierce. Success as a model requires the careful management of bodily capital and the performance of emotional labor. Drawing on participant observations and interviews with models in the Atlanta fashion industry, the authors examine how they do the former and why they do the latter. They manage their bodily capital by subjecting themselves to intense self-regulation. Models perform emotional labor to sell themselves to clients and agents, to create illusions for observers and the camera, and to find dignity in a job that is often degrading and humiliating.

Gender on Display: Peformativity in Fashion Modelling

Gender performativity has had significant influences in cultural studies and sociology, yet empirical cases of the theory remain scarce. While some analysis examines performativity in work, the focus is on organizations and how gender ‘gets done and undone’ within them with little attention paid to bodies outside organizations. Based on two empirical studies of freelancing fashion models, we extend Butler’s gender performativity to analyse the routine bodily practices and gender performances of men and women in fashion, investigating what happens when men and women perform the same work but under different gendered expectations. Fashion modelling presents a case that reproduces heteronormative definitions of femininity while potentially challenging traditional notions of masculinity and work. Observing ‘everyday transgressions’, we evidence how gender performativity, while largely reiterative of normative heterosexuality, may subtly confound the conventions. Observing how models ‘do and undo’ gender extends the analysis of gender at work to non-organizational bodies that tend to be under-represented within the literature.

The Paradoxical Value of Deviant Cases: Toward a Gendered Theory of Display Work

Major shifts in gender, work, and sexuality have led to the rising prominence of display work, the display of sexualized bodily capital for wages. This article develops the concept of display work and examines its implications for the gendered organization of work. Display work is a continuous rather than a categorical variable and can describe a range of jobs from those involving overtly sexualized bodies for sale as bodies to professionalized bodies on display. Within the field of display work, we identify a paradox: among some display workers, women earn significantly more than men, a wage gap that reverses the enduring pattern of gendered wage inequality in the broader labor market. This article flips the typical line of inquiry by comparing earnings and career dynamics among performers in fashion modeling, pornography, and stripping, three cases of display work characterized by clear inverted wage gaps. We argue that in the field of display work, freelance and winner-take-all workplace structures intersect with cultural norms that devalue the sexualized display of male bodies, resulting in men’s lower pay. We conclude with implications for feminist studies of the postindustrial workplace, drawing from key tenets in sociology of sexuality, culture, and gendered organizations.

Ethnography as Precarious Work

Reflecting on a carnal ethnography of the fashion modeling market, I consider the analytic gains from observant participation and experimentation with the sociologists body as a participant in a culture industry. The ambiguities and uncertainties of fashion modeling, as a highly competitive freelance labor form, parallel the risky position of insider ethnographer, in this case as a graduate student “studying up” among guarded cultural elites. These positions opened an analytic lens into sociological concepts of labor exploitation, value, and social hierarchy. However, in occupying an insider role within a stratified field, observant participants face risks in trying to move beyond their own experiences in order to interview informants. My changing position in the field, from subjugated worker to interviewer, highlights how power and inequality operate in the fashion world. First-person narrative illuminates these analytic payoffs of insider ethnography.

Capital without Borders: Wealth Managers and the One PercentCapital without Borders: Wealth Managers and the One Percent, by HarringtonBrooke. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016. 381 pp.

the very late twentieth and twenty-first century. The book convincingly argues that assertions of difference between ‘‘now’’ and ‘‘then’’ cross-border connections don’t hold up under scrutiny. Two, it demonstrates that the study of immigrant transnationalism needs to extend beyond the activities of immigrants themselves to include an examination of the role of the state and civil society. Even though Africa is not totally ignored in the discussion, A Century of Transnationalism engages in a narrow discussion, focusing only on Algeria and France’s unique relationship with its ex-colonies. It would have been nice to see a parallel examination of states’ roles and the impact of colonial relationships on immigrant cross-border connections and transnationalism with a former colony of Britain in Africa. The volume often failed to proffer in-depth discussions of the role race played in sending and receiving states’ actions and immigrant transnationalism. I often wondered as I read through different chapters how the race of immigrants influenced receiving countries’ actions as they pondered where these immigrants fit in their imagined national community while balancing their economic interests. In summary, A Century of Transnationalism introduces a necessary corrective to the existing canon on transnationalism. It gets sociologists to learn what historians and anthropologists already knew, that transnationalism is not unique to immigrants of the late twentieth and twenty-first century. Its unique strength is its multidisciplinary and historical approach to the question of transnationalism. However, I wish the book provided stronger theoretical contributions and new conceptual tools that would have helped set the agenda for future research. Capital without Borders: Wealth Managers and the One Percent, by Brooke Harrington. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016. 381 pp.

29.95 cloth. ISBN: 978067 4743809.

29.95 cloth. ISBN: 978067 4743809.

Beauty Pays: Why Attractive People Are More Successful

In The Tender Cut, Patricia Adler and Peter Adler present the largest, to date, qualitative sociologically-grounded investigation of the lived experience of a non-clinical population of people who self-injure. Drawing on data from over 135 in-depth life history interviews, the authors go beyond the interpersonal and psychological dynamics behind the ‘‘self-injurer’’ to examine the larger world that situates, provokes, and even reinforces the need to engage in self-injury for people who clearly are not a homogeneous population. The social transformation of the practice of self-injury as it has increased in social acceptability and moved beyond the act of an isolated individual to that of a person embedded in a ‘‘real’’ or cyber community (where they note it is still possible for a self-injurer to feel excluded) is documented, as well as the self-presentation of self-injurers on the internet (e.g., the roles different people take in the groups) and the relationships between people who self-injure. The patience, empathy, and understanding of the authors is also evident as they neither demonize the act, nor stigmatize or alienate those who shared their stories; rather they expose in a dignified manner the turmoil, angst, fear, impulsivity, ritual, stress and pain, among other factors, behind the act of self-injury. The strengths of the book are multifold. Adler and Adler present self-injury (broadly defined to include behaviors such as cutting, burning, hair pulling, picking, and bone breaking) as a way some people cope with the challenges, stresses, and difficulties they experience in life. They explain that there is no typical self-injurer or typical start to the injurious career; the only commonality among many self-injurers is the experience of stress. They note the role of social living and personal experiences or exposure in the instigation of the self-injurious career. The authors also take into account how selfinjuring has moved from a psychological ‘‘disorder’’ into a learned social trend— a ‘‘sociological occurrence’’ (p. 3) situated in subcultures and, even at times, resembling a ‘‘fad.’’ It is established, via sampling a ‘‘sociological population’’ of self-injurers that ranged from youths to persons in their mid-fifties, that self-injury is more common among the population than the authors initially anticipated. They noted similarities and differences between the struggles of self-injurers across all ages and described the increased alienation felt by older selfcutters, as the normative attitude suggests these older self-cutters should have ‘‘grown out of it’’ (p. 34). Theoretically, the manuscript adds support to the feminist critique of the medical model’s ‘‘disempowerment of self-injurers,’’ theoretically addresses the gendered context in which self-injury is framed, and expands interactionist and other theoretical views. Although methodologically strong, the authors do not provide an overview of the demographics of their sample. Given that the experiences of people who self-injure appear, on many levels, to parallel those of people who self-harm through other means or use other negative coping behaviors (e.g., alcoholics, drug users, bulimics, anorexics, etc.) and that some interviewees were noted to practice other negative coping behaviors, extended reporting of demographics could assist the reader to substantiate the sample. Moreover, providing additional information on these explicit factors may clarify what aspects of the self-injurer experience result from their injurious career, or if some part of their experience or motivation to continue to self-injure is more appropriately viewed as a consequence of other negative coping mechanisms. The weakest point of the book is the lack of an explicitly embodied analysis of self-injury. The reader is left wondering how the scaring