4 - It’s a Dirty Job …
Performing Abject Labour in Soho
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 December 2019
Summary
As a consequence of the meanings attached to the setting and sector, and to the landscaping of the spaces within and around Soho’s sex shops, a high level of discretion as well as presumed intimacy characterizes the sales-service relationship. As discussed in Chapter 3, encounters with customers are neither a direct sexual exchange nor a simple sexual aestheticization of the service interaction. Sitting somewhere between the two extremes of sex work and sexualized labour, retail sales work in a Soho sex shop is a kind of abject labour, in an abject work place. As will be discussed here, it is experienced and perceived as both compelling and unsettling by those who perform it.
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- Information
- Soho at WorkPleasure and Place in Contemporary London, pp. 117 - 154Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2019