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The idea that people do work on their own bodies and that this work has a social character was the first explication of body work.² That this conceptual development in social theory came so recently is quite surprising. ‘All societies,’ Debra Gimlin states, ‘require that their members do work on their bodies.’³ In this sense, I understand the ‘work’ of body work in terms of the distinction between work and labour as outlined in chapter two. The work that one does on one’s own body is not limited by the prescripts of the category ‘labour’, nor does it have to be subject to the disciplining of the wage. The work that one does on one’s own body is usually considered as work that people undertake in what Hochschild terms the

‘private sphere’. Thus, body work includes the mundane bathing of the body, brushing teeth, applying make-up, removing hair, clipping toenails, etc., that most of us carry out on a regular basis, apparently far from the gaze of the wage-labour relation. Mundane is not a synonym for unimportant; as Chris Shilling states, ‘“body work” reveals not only how society shapes our

1 I think it is fair to regard “people”, “production”, and “society” as synonymous with the three basic categories of Marx’s theory.

2 Shilling The Body and Social Theory 88

3 Debra Gimlin. ‘What is “Body Work”? A Review of the Literature’ Sociology Compass 1:1 (2007). 355.

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bodies, but also how corporeality is itself consequential of social and technical relations.’¹ That is, this aspect of body work can be seen to demonstrate that the forms that body work takes are embedded within history. Thus we might see spectres of Marx, but only apparitions, within Shilling’s theory. Shilling’s invocation of a relation between corporeality and social and technical relations support arguments that western social mores on cleanliness are inextricably linked to the perpetuation of office work and the proliferation of the electric shower and that the everyday character of “tribal” tattoos in Western societies today follows from the invention of the electromagnet.²

According to Shilling, ‘body work...[is] a key means through which first, the emergent capacities of embodied subjects are exercised within society, and second, these capacities are themselves structured partially by social and technical relations.’³ In this sense, the human body is ‘unfinished.’⁴ The body changes and develops as it grows in physiological terms, but also as it is enmeshed within a social structure that provides a variety of external influences which bear upon the forms that the work we do on our body takes, and therefore upon the forms that bodies themselves take. For Shilling, it is this variety of external influences that is important; his work is not concerned with identifying a structure which creates bodies in certain forms but rather focuses on ‘how our bodily experiences and performances form a causally consequential basis for the reproduction or transformation of society.’⁵ Thus, Shilling’s key ontological assumption is that it is our subjective experience of our own body, although in some way a multitudinous and collective one, which determines the character of society. Shilling thus reifies structure in the subjective experiences of bodies; for him, bodies create social and technical structures, not the other way around.

In Bodies at Work Wolkowitz brings these ideas about how people work on their own bodies into what Marx calls the ‘hidden abode of production’, that is, the place where labour happens, and shows how some kinds of labour require that workers work on their own bodies.⁶ Wolkowitz focuses this concern specifically upon the processes by which workers make their own bodies by investigating the extent to which ‘organisations attempt to “redefine

1 Chris Shilling. The Body and Social Theory 3^rd edition (London: SAGE, 2012). 123.

2 Electromagnets enable the oscillation of modern tattoo-guns which render the receiving of tattoos relatively painless in comparison to, for example, the bone and tortoiseshell hammering methods of the Maori. John A.

Rush. Spiritual Tattoo: A cultural history of tattooing, piercing, scarification, branding, and implants.

(Berkeley, CA: North Atlantic Books, 2005). 93.

3 Shilling The Body and Social Theory, 3^rd ed. 104. Emphasis in original.

4 Shilling The Body and Social Theory, 3^rd ed. 138

5 Shilling The Body and Social Theory, 3^rd ed. 104. Emphasis in original.

6 Marx Capital, vol. I 172

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and manipulate the body’s time, space and movements.”’¹ From these points, I argue that Wolkowitz’s consideration of the inter-relations between body work practices is more comprehensive than those of other body work theorists and that she explicitly ties together the work that one does on one’s own body to the marks made on the body by work, to emotion work, and to the work that people do on their own bodies. Wolkowitz goes further, following Hochschild’s prioritisation of the ontological consequences of work upon the worker, and asks to what extent we see a commodification of embodied capacities. To do this, she builds upon Linda McDowell’s claim that in service work ‘the labour-power and embodied performance of workers is part of the product’, while also acknowledging that McDowell underplays the more general historical character of the processes by which embodied labour-power is transferred to the object of labour at the heart of this claim.² Wolkowitz further states that ‘this scarcely does justice to Marx’s understanding of the incorporation of workers’ living labour in commodities’³ and, in doing so, she argues within the longstanding tradition of the sociology of work that begins with C. Wright Mills, and identifies these forms of service work as proceeding from ‘the instrumentalisation of “private capacities.”’⁴ As such, she argues that service work proceeds from workers’ capacity to do work on their own bodies.

Wolkowitz thereby suggests the argument that workers must work on their own bodies in such a way as to make their bodies ready for wage-labour. The mode by which Wolkowitz is able to draw this conclusion is to make a distinction between labour in industrial production and labour in service work. The deployment of embodied capacities in work is illuminated as a phenomenon that is attendant to changes in production; the practice of service work presents the deployment of embodied capacities more visibly and extensively than industrial labour does because of the personal interaction that is at the centre of this form of production. I argue, however, that there is a strong implication in Wolkowitz’s work that the commodification of embodied capacities is considered merely as a phenomenon in the first instance and not in a way that integrates the consideration of labour-power itself as a commodity.⁵ There is no analysis of “labour-power” itself as a commodification of the body therefore this idea pertains within the subjective experiences that accompany the customer-worker-boss triad of service work, as opposed to a more grounded notion of the body as commodity in accordance with the relations that proceed from the wage-labour exchange. As discussed in the previous chapter, the history of capital is a history of the burgeoning

1 Hancock and Tyler cf. Wolkowitz Bodies at Work 74

2 Cf. Wolkowitz Bodies at Work 70

3 Wolkowitz Bodies at Work 70

4 Wolkowitz Bodies at Work 76

5 Chapter VI of Marx’s Capital, vol. I is devoted to making this definition of labour-power as a commodity.

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domination of the body by means of its commodification as labour-power. As a result of the primacy of the phenomenon over the embeddedness of these phenomena within historical tendencies of capitalist production, I argue that Wolkowitz foregoes an examination of body work in terms of its relation to the continuous elements of the political economic apparatuses of capital.