The Subordination of Labour and Erotic Containment by Alan Sears

• In-person event
• Dunton Tower, Carleton University
• 1125 Colonel By Drive, Ottawa, ON, K1S 5B6

The Department of Sociology and Anthropology and the Feminist Institute of Social Transformation present:

The Subordination of Labour and Erotic Containment by Alan Sears (Toronto Metropolitan University)

The alienation of labour shapes erotic experience in capitalist societies. People are deliberate makers, gaining inherent fulfillment from creatively transforming the world around them to meet their wants and needs. Through this creative labour, people at once generate and satisfy needs, developing hungers and cultivating tastes. There are important erotic dimensions of this labour, as people construct and fulfill desires for human connection and embodied satiation.

In conditions of capitalist alienation, members of the working class are forced to engage in subordinated labour, turning off their creative making in employment and in reproductive labour. Erotic containment is a fundamental feature of these alienated labour regimes in which workers must turn themselves off as transformative world-makers. The alienation of creative making requires regimes the containment erotic life, which is separated from labour and channeled towards a normative system of gendered sexualities.