Drawing on methods and approaches from anthropology, media studies, film theory, and cultural studies, the contributors to Media, Erotics, and Transnational Asia examine how mediated eroticism and ...sexuality circulating across Asia and Asian diasporas both reflect and shape the social practices of their producers and consumers. The essays in this volume cover a wide geographic and thematic range, and combine rigorous textual analysis with empirical research into the production, circulation, and consumption of various forms of media. Taken together, the essays offer fresh insights into research on gender, erotics, media, and Asia transnationally conceived.
Contributors. Anne Allison, Tom Boellstorff, Nicole Constable, Heather Dell, Judith Farquhar, Sarah L. Friedman, Martin F. Manalansan IV, Purnima Mankekar, Louisa Schein, Everett Yuehong Zhang.
In the face of the affective publics generated by online media, feminist critics have had to rethink our epistemological assumptions. This becomes particularly urgent when those of us who came of ...academic age during the heyday of postcolonial theory and poststructuralism confront political formations predicated on misinformation, disinformation, and "alternative facts." In this essay, I draw on my larger project on digital affect to reflect on how I have reconfigured my theoretical, epistemological, and political interventions. As an anthropologist who prefers to theorize from the concrete and from a specific location, I turn here to my research on online campaigns against "Love Jihad" in contemporary India; doing so enables me to theorize digital affect from a place that talks back to Euro-American perspectives still dominant in media studies.
The missed period MANKEKAR, PURNIMA; GUPTA, AKHIL
American ethnologist,
11/2019, Letnik:
46, Številka:
4
Journal Article
Recenzirano
ABSTRACT
Business process outsourcing (BPO) industries providing customer service are characterized by three features: the product of labor is affect; affect is central to the labor process; and ...affect constitutes a crucial modality for the workers’ subject formation. This affective labor is distinctive in that workers’ connections to their customers are live, transnational, and interactive. Such BPOs constitute a form of capitalist production in which profits are based on the management and monetization of affect, including brand loyalty and customer satisfaction. Affective labor generates disjunctive temporalities that are coimplicated with those of family life and with routines of schooling, ritual, and religion. These disjunctive temporalities engender modes of embodiment that are crucial to how BPO workers are constituted as specific kinds of laboring subjects.
affective labor
,
temporality
,
business process outsourcing
,
digital capitalism
,
Bengaluru
,
India
In Screening Culture, Viewing Politics Purnima Mankekar presents a cutting-edge ethnography of television-viewing in India. With a focus on the responses of upwardly-mobile, yet lower-to-middle class ...urban women to state-sponsored entertainment serials, Mankekar demonstrates how television in India has profoundly shaped women’s place in the family, community, and nation, and the crucial role it has played in the realignment of class, caste, consumption, religion, and politics.Mankekar examines both “entertainment” narratives and advertisements designed to convey particular ideas about the nation. Organizing her study around the recurring themes in these shows—Indian womanhood, family, community, constructions of historical memory, development, integration, and sometimes violence—Mankekar dissects both the messages televised and her New Delhi subjects’ perceptions of and reactions to these messages. In the process, her ethnographic analysis reveals the texture of these women’s daily lives, social relationships, and everyday practices. Throughout her study, Mankekar remains attentive to the tumultuous historical and political context in the midst of which these programs’ integrationalist messages are transmitted, to the cultural diversity of the viewership, and to her own role as ethnographer. In an enlightening epilogue she describes the effect of satellite television and transnational programming to India in the 1990s.Through its ethnographic and theoretical richness, Screening Culture, Viewing Politics forces a reexamination of the relationship between mass media, social life, and identity and nation formation in non-Western contexts. As such, it represents a major contribution to a number of fields, including media and communication studies, feminist studies, anthropology, South Asian studies, and cultural studies.
In Screening Culture, Viewing Politics Purnima Mankekar presents a cutting- edge ethnography of television-viewing in India. With a focus on the responses of upwardly-mobile, yet lower-to-middle ...class urban women to state-sponsored entertainment serials, Mankekar demonstrates how television in India has profoundly shaped women's place in the family, community, and nation, and the crucial role it has played in the realignment of class, caste, consumption, religion, and politics. Mankekar examines both "entertainment" narratives and advertisements designed to convey particular ideas about the nation. Organizing her study around the recurring themes in these shows—Indian womanhood, family, community, constructions of historical memory, development, integration, and sometimes violence—Mankekar dissects both the messages televised and her New Delhi subjects' perceptions of and reactions to these messages. In the process, her ethnographic analysis reveals the texture of these women's daily lives, social relationships, and everyday practices. Throughout her study, Mankekar remains attentive to the tumultuous historical and political context in the midst of which these programs' integrationalist messages are transmitted, to the cultural diversity of the viewership, and to her own role as ethnographer. In an enlightening epilogue she describes the effect of satellite television and transnational programming to India in the 1990s. Through its ethnographic and theoretical richness, Screening Culture, Viewing Politics forces a reexamination of the relationship between mass media, social life, and identity and nation formation in non-Western contexts. As such, it represents a major contribution to a number of fields, including media and communication studies, feminist studies, anthropology, South Asian studies, and cultural studies.
The missed period MANKEKAR, PURNIMA; GUPTA, AKHIL
American ethnologist,
November 2019, Letnik:
46, Številka:
4
Journal Article
Recenzirano
ABSTRACT
Business process outsourcing (BPO) industries providing customer service are characterized by three features: the product of labor is affect; affect is central to the labor process; and ...affect constitutes a crucial modality for the workers’ subject formation. This affective labor is distinctive in that workers’ connections to their customers are live, transnational, and interactive. Such BPOs constitute a form of capitalist production in which profits are based on the management and monetization of affect, including brand loyalty and customer satisfaction. Affective labor generates disjunctive temporalities that are coimplicated with those of family life and with routines of schooling, ritual, and religion. These disjunctive temporalities engender modes of embodiment that are crucial to how BPO workers are constituted as specific kinds of laboring subjects. affective labor, temporality, business process outsourcing, digital capitalism, Bengaluru, India
Drawing on methods and approaches from anthropology, media studies, film theory, and cultural studies, the contributors to Media, Erotics, and Transnational Asia examine how mediated eroticism and ...sexuality circulating across Asia and Asian diasporas both reflect and shape the social practices of their producers and consumers. The essays in this volume cover a wide geographic and thematic range, and combine rigorous textual analysis with empirical research into the production, circulation, and consumption of various forms of media. Taken together, the essays offer fresh insights into research on gender, erotics, media, and Asia transnationally conceived. Contributors. Anne Allison, Tom Boellstorff, Nicole Constable, Heather Dell, Judith Farquhar, Sarah L. Friedman, Martin F. Manalansan IV, Purnima Mankekar, Louisa Schein, Everett Yuehong Zhang.
The difference between the two companies is that the contracting company is more likely to be based in the Global North, as are its primary customers. ...when customers of a company such as ...Travelocity pick up the phone to chat with a representative and are connected to an agent in India or the Philippines, they are dealing not with someone who works for Travelocity, but with someone who works for another company that has been contracted by Travelocity to work on that process. Traveling across the city to do night work was particularly difficult for young women, who had to deal with the surveillance exercised on them by suspicious neighbors and family members. ...patriarchal discourses of gender and sexual purity constrained their mobility in myriad ways (Patel 2010; Mirchandani 2012; Aneesh 2015; Vora 2015).7 Occasionally, some of our women informants, despite being afraid of going out at night, would use the excuse of going to work as a means to visit pubs after their shift. When she complained to the company that she was dealing with about this infringement of her privacy, the agent almost got fired. ...while the affective labor of BPO agents depended on their ability to communicate affects of care and intimacy and extended beyond linguistic forms of connectivity, the work and world of our informants was filled with moments of misunderstandings and opacity as they confronted customers at a geographical, cultural, and experiential remove from them. The very algorithms that tracked and archived their productivity also provided data that could, potentially, be used for objectively assessing their job performance. ...while there is no question that office politics, favoritism, and personal biases played a role in the assessment of our informants’ labor, they maintained an expectation of meritocracy that contrasted with the environments in which their friends and relatives worked: we met enough managers who had worked their way up despite lacking connections or cultural capital for this expectation of meritocracy to take hold. 7.
Since its beginning in 2000, the Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) industry has grown to employ 700,000 young people in India. These workers spend their nights interacting by phone and online with ...customers in the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia, and elsewhere. In this article, we focus on the affective dimensions of work in this industry. BPOs have led to contradictory outcomes such as upward mobility accompanied by precarity. Our research explores the complex interplay between work, personal aspirations, social futures, and transformations in global capitalism. Our informants’ experiences with affective labor performed at a distance provide us with critical insights into capital, labor, and technology in our rapidly changing world. Movement characterizes the industry and its workers as they communicate across spatial, linguistic, and cultural distance, while simultaneously being emplaced by regimes of racialized labor. We draw on long-term fieldwork to analyze the complexity and density of interactions between imagination, aspiration, technology, and work for upwardly mobile classes in the Global South.
PDF
