This introduction frames the six original articles in this issue and the forum on “Corona A(e)ffects: Radical Affectivities of Dissent and Hope” around the concept of immaterial labor. Two full years into a pandemic that has uprooted place-based work for many, and forced even more indoors, away from public spaces, and onto screens, we reflect on the very material effects of present-day immaterial and emotional labor.
Keyword: immaterial labor
Doing What You Love in the Age of Mass Debt
This paper examines the relationship between student debt and the changing terrain of work in U.S. culture, while attending to how these shifts mark a specifically gendered, racialized phenomenon. Drawing on the AAUW’s 2017 report on student debt, this paper examines the figure of the fashion intern in order to think about how the gender and racial inequities in student debt collude with what Angela McRobbie terms ‘the feminization of work’ to effect a gendered, racialized form of indebtedness. I assert that the ‘do what you love’ ethos described by Miya Tokumitsu contributes to the proliferation of feminized work in the culture industries, such as fashion, and the perpetuation of racial exclusivity within the industry.