ABSTRACT
Introduction To speak of a single work or labour identity would be as grievous an error as the essentializing universalisms espoused by early theorists of gender and race. Just as W.E.B. Du Bois’s notion of the veil and Simone de Beauvoir’s (1949) maxim ‘one is not born a woman but becomes one’ overlooked the diversity of experience of their respective Othered peoples, forcing a false amalgamation of experience, so too should we be careful to not speak of any universal experience of work. Theorists of labour have increasingly identifi ed that one individual’s work is another’s leisure, and vice versa; lines in contemporary times have blurred further, as especially noteworthy with reference to professional athletes (though arguably debates surrounding pleasure and work have been intimately intertwined since the beginning of ‘professions’ in the case of sex workers). This chapter will attempt to defend a multifaceted approach to work identities, as the mechanisms of certain trends such as globalization are reasonably identifi able, but vitally, their phenomenological impacts are quite diverse. The variegated social, aesthetic and even physiological experiences of work will be a primary overarching theme of the following exposition. Of course, this is signifi cantly due to the preliminary problem of describing exactly what ‘work’ is; as André Gorz (1999: 3) notes, ‘[w]hy do we say that a woman “works” when she takes care of children in a nursery school and “does not work” when she stays at home to take care or her own children?’ For many thinkers, the inherently subjective and socially constructed nature of the topic is what makes the study of work so intriguing.
