Abstract

What goods are produced by affective labor? And at what cost—are there uniquely affective costs to this sort of production? If we assume that, like any variety of labor, affective labor has the potential for exploitation, we should ask what risks of exploitation are unique to it. Are these dangers of paid, commodified affective labor only? How should we understand the political economy organized around the production and circulation of affects and the racialization and gendering of affective labor?In this article, I suggest that in order to understand the risks of exploitation indigenous to affective labor, we must consider the way in which the production of affects functions according to a logic of transmission...