Transitions—The Work of Subjectivity

Abstract

Sexual work and the sexual in work—This is the focus of the volume working sexually (sexuell arbeiten), which impressively addresses the connections between sexuality, gender, and wage labor. The volume sketches the work on subjectivity as a new technology of power that both submits to and incites the reconfiguration of socially designated places. It does so by using, for example, the photographs and diaries of the Victorian-era domestic servant Hannah Cullwick, an analysis of a new type of hotel in today’s Berlin, or interviews with Bulgarian-born female computer specialists in Munich and Sofia. The precise observations and the highly theoretically conducted studies are complemented by conversations with researchers about other areas of work. Each approach shares a focus on those singular practices in which a precariousness of forms of thoughts and discourses takes place and is perpetuated: Sexual work.