“To force musicians to play beautifully or ‘with the soul’ is actually a demand ‘to give their soul’ – testifying to the intensity and intimacy of the musician-patron relationship” (1). It’s clear to me that people have a tenuous grasp on what is a service/performance/skill, and what is a person. We do it constantly: workers’ bodies are expected to be the property of those who pay for their work. This only gets more entrenched and complicated by the premises of affective labor, by the muddling effect of sex (sex workers being typically thought of as “selling their bodies” and, by extension, themselves), by the parasocial relationship that grows out of connecting to someone’s art and, of course, by the extra layers of gender and race.
Layers of performance and the performative
Layers of performance and the performative
Layers of performance and the performative
“To force musicians to play beautifully or ‘with the soul’ is actually a demand ‘to give their soul’ – testifying to the intensity and intimacy of the musician-patron relationship” (1). It’s clear to me that people have a tenuous grasp on what is a service/performance/skill, and what is a person. We do it constantly: workers’ bodies are expected to be the property of those who pay for their work. This only gets more entrenched and complicated by the premises of affective labor, by the muddling effect of sex (sex workers being typically thought of as “selling their bodies” and, by extension, themselves), by the parasocial relationship that grows out of connecting to someone’s art and, of course, by the extra layers of gender and race.