Abstract
This study examines how neoliberal regimes of labor and conditions of sociability impact hospitality, belonging, and gathering. Specifically, I examine hotels as temporary, shared spaces that contain mobile and fixed bodies who are impacted by social and economic vulnerabilities. I use the novel Hotel World by Ali Smith to articulate how bodily vulnerability, precarity, and economic exploitation challenge the hotel as a site of hospitality. The novel, told through the perspective of five different hotel guests, reveals how hospitality operates when paired with brief encounters while critiquing the economic and social contracts that one agrees to when entering a hotel. In other words, the hotel acts as a microcosmic realm where guests have the chance to meet and interact with other walks of life but are simultaneously exploited by the hotel organization. First, I apply Judith Butler’s ideas about the body as a precarious and social entity onto the capitalist market to question how bodies are conditioned by capitalism and how sociability defines and maintains labor contracts. Second, I analyze hotel staff, hotel guests, and visitors to the hotel in order to connect these systems of commodification and vulnerability to hospitality. I argue that the possibilities of belonging under conditions of economic competition and social inequality become limited and strained. Finally, I draw attention to moments of gathering in Hotel World and position them as moments of resistance against neoliberalism.
Presenters
Rachael MulvihillStudent, PhD Candidate, Carnegie Mellon University, Pennsylvania, United States
Details
Presentation Type
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Theme
The Arts in Social, Political, and Community Life
KEYWORDS
Hospitality, Belonging, Gathering, Neoliberalism, Sociability, Labor, Exploitation, Literature
