i'm an introvert whose job (teaching race & gender to 200-300 mostly nonmajor undergrads, 2x/yr) has required learning and experimenting a lot with cosplaying extraversion. it's been hard to do, but i think i'm pretty good at it now. i'm a switch. there are costs to that, tho (1)
switch isn't simply a metaphor here. kink has actually taught me a lot in how i think about navigating my way into playing a role at work that feels at meaningful tension with my sense of self, and to be open to the possibility that there might also be pleasure there (2)
there's much more to say about how to read labor through kink and vice versa, but for the moment i also think that kink offers some useful concepts to make sense of what happens when work—especially work under the sign of service—demands all sorts of contortions of the self. (3)
moreover, it can offer some vocabularies that, if rescaled and collectivized can also aid us in describing what work does to us when it involves navigating different modalities of expression. to show the gaps and sutures in what the workplace demands to be seamless (4)
take, for instance, the concept of sub drop—the idea that play demands of subs the kind of psychic transit and exertion whose spillover effects obtain in the wake of a scene, and often look like slowness or depression. (5)
or take the demand or expectation for aftercare—the idea that the scene's goodness consists not only in what one experiences during the main event of play but in how that relation unfolds in the wake of play, undoing simple or transactional ways of imagining exchange (6)
i often struggle with reading and writing after lecturing—for days, sometimes. and the struggle, if pathologized, can only read as failure to work. read through the lens of kink—this reads as the logical and entirely expected continuation of the selves demanded in work (7)
this kink vocabulary i'm citing has not always existed. it is itself the outcome of struggle and theorization by queer and feminized people to insist on taking up space in sex practices often coded as self-negating or selfless (8)
a similar imaginary operates in the workplace around work coded as "service" labor. maybe experimenting with some different vocabularies, and loosening the presumed exclusion of sexuality from work might offer some useful strategies for thinking about how to theorize work. (9)
and in theorizing, to think about how to make our expectations around work not only more consensual but also less extractive, to make better sense of our own struggles in the workplace, and to better equip us to leverage the workplace toward different ends. (fin)
