Editors' Introduction: Materializing Immaterial Labor in Cultural Studies

This introduction frames the six original articles in this issue and the forum on "Corona A(e)ffects: Radical Affectivities of Dissent and Hope" around the concept of immaterial labor. Two full years into a pandemic that has uprooted place-based work for many, and forced even more indoors, away from public spaces, and onto screens, we reflect on the very material effects of present-day immaterial and emotional labor.

Social Integrative Enterprises and the Construction of an Impaired Lumpenproletariat – a Swedish Case Study

This paper accounts for a study of the joint ambitions of the Swedish Public employment office and social enterprises to integrate jobseekers with impairments in the labor market. The number of jobseekers with impairments has increased in western labor markets. The Swedish labor market is a particular case in point. Why? I use critical disability studies in combination with Marxist studies on immaterial labor to develop the following answer: An increasing number of jobseekers are diagnosed as impaired, not because their bodily constitution makes them unfit to handle manual labor, but because their socio-cultural characteristics make them unfit to handle immaterial forms of labor. Furthermore, I show how the diagnosis of these jobseekers as impaired does not lead to that they are also considered disabled. On the contrary, they are considered to have a particular, bio-medically defined fit and ability when it comes to handling simple, manual and low paid forms of work. Hereby, I argue that they are made up as a bio-medically defined “lumpenproletariat”.

Immaterial labor and civil society organizations: an alternative to refugee ways of working and living

This article argues that Civil Society Organizations (CSOs) associated with immaterial labor can be favorable alternatives to refugee ways of working and living. We present and analyze the performance of three CSOs - in the areas of theater, handicraft, and gastronomy - aimed at the social and labor integration of refugees, based on the valorization of their savoir-faire and ethnic background. The cartographic method was adopted for qualitative exploratory research. The production and collection of data took place through interaction with managers, refugees, and products and services of the CSOs. Three axes of analysis were considered: (i) presentation of the mapped territory; (ii) CSOs modes of action - learning/teaching, (co)producing/exposing (oneself); (iii) (re)invent (oneself) by (co)operating in a network. The results indicate that, despite new global forms of subjection, CSOs associated with immaterial labor, forge and sustain a network of social, affective, productive, and emancipatory cooperation. This network protects work from the vampirization of the capital and becomes opportunities for refugees in which work and life are intertwined.

Drag for everyone: Creative industries and the becoming-visible of drag in the 21st century Belgrade

This article analyses relations between the drag community and the creative industries sector in Belgrade over the first two decades of the 21st century. It argues that drag queens and kings, together with the rest of the LGBTIQ+ community, gain visibility through the creative industries, and that they are subjectified through the immaterial labor involved in the processes of market neoliberalization and city gentrification. The visibility of drag appears to depend not exclusively on social liberalization but on complex intersections of material-semiotic flows, the most important of which, in this analysis, appears to be the push toward a neoliberal market economy and the consequent entrepreneurship of the self through precarious creative, affective, and cognitive labor.

The Precariousness of Immaterial Labor: Self-Taylorization in the Brazilian Software Industry

Contrary to theses that present the emergence of immaterial and digital labor as a paradigmatic break with industrial production, analysis of the “agile methodologies” employed in software production suggests that the “new” features of these forms of labor organization in the twenty-first century are configured as adaptations of Taylor-Fordism and Toyotism to a new productive frontier unexplored or explored to a limited extent by capital in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, especially in that the self-Taylorization of labor is one of the bases of software production in Brazil.