Abstract
The present chapter scrutinizes the role of affective labor and identity, and how promises for sexual and racial liberation are mobilized at Visibly Hot, a Brazilian fashion enterprise that promises a young and “sexy” lifestyle to its sales employees. Their slogan “be different” is, on the one hand, inserted in global diversity discourse and, on the other hand, an entrepreneurial tool of (self)government, molding specific offers of self-authenticity with relation to “black race” or “young lesbian.” While the salesclerks’ outstanding self-identifications with the brand have become immediate resources for sales, they equally reveal the precarity of both neoliberal profit orientation as well as the brand’s unfulfilled promises of securing the right to be different.
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Wasser, N. (2016). Regulating Sexy Subjects: The Case of Brazilian Fashion Retail and Its Affective Workforce. In: Hofmann, S., Moreno, A. (eds) Intimate Economies. Palgrave Studies in Globalization and Embodiment. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-56036-0_3
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