Service With Her Smile

Throughout 2016 we experienced astonishing shifts in political discourse, leading to a rise in desperate hard-left and hard-right politics. These narratives have been enabled by appealing to the ‘average bloke’, a typical scripted archetype within arcane, patriarchal blue collar labour spaces. In collaboration with Lilias Adair, this project investigates those spaces.

As collaborating female creatives, we investigated these narratives through a gendered hierarchy of labour, namely exploring the archetypes within pink-collar (service industries) spheres which elicit emotional labour as a scripted requirement of a job role.

I, the woman, as voice and as body, have been used as intangible cultural postmodern objects through which to critique the pre-scripted and expected gendered performances of feminised pink collar work, in both public (work) and private (domestic) spheres.

Through the elision of Frederick Taylor’s model of efficiency in the workplace and ethnographic research, we draw attention to the intangible repetitive labour performances of the voice and body, using design to re-wire and re-script these roles where they remain dominant but unquestioned as a means to empower, challenge and subvert current societal norms.

We have taken on various roles as designers, waitresses and even air hostesses, actively performing stereotypes to understand the precarity of our political landscape as a hegemonic mode of governance, drawing upon feminist literature interpolated into service industry scripts, and examining how these repetitive scripts exist to saturate ‘the self’ within labour domains, and the personal effect these systems of conduct have on the individual.