NATIONAL SWEAT: THE SPECTABLE AND SPECTRE OF AMERICAN LABOR
Panel Chair:
Cynthia Stretch (Southern Connecticut State University)
American culture systematically hides the sweat of productive labor. Simultaneously, it fetishizes the sweat of ersatz labor, of "working out" instead of actually working.
From moral badge of honor in the founding mythos of the republican freeholder to national embarrassment associated with a permanent underclass and immigrant work force, sweat soaks America. Whereas industrial sweat might have been concealed behind the factory gates, in the new economy of the service sector, American culture must go to even greater lengths to hide the sweat of laborers who work in the shadows of our most intimate spaces.
This panel will provide historical and contemporary perspectives on the relationship between American Culture and American Labor by addressing some of the ways in which different types of working, indeed sweating, bodies are variously rendered invisible and hyper-visible. While some work ascends to the level of cultural spectacle, other work haunts American culture like a repressed and too often ignored spectre.
Suggested Topics :
- Historical perspectives on the link between "the dignity of labor" and the body politic
- Analyses of the types of screens and displacements (material, ideological) that elide the sweat of contemporary American workers
- Analyses of American leisure practices (gym-culture and "working out," amateur sports, spas) that seek to sculpt bodies and publicly perform sweating as restorative, healthy recreation
- Discussions of how sweat might productively and politically breech the illusory boundary between the personal and the political.