Affect Theory: Digitality, Affect, Labour

Abstract

This chapter reviews a range of scholarship working at the intersection of theories of digitality, affect, and labour published in 2022 under the following headings: 1. Introduction; 2. Work (Daniel Nehring and Kristina Brunila, Affective Capitalism in Academia: Revealing Public Secrets; Anna Deumert, ‘Wash Your Hands! Domestic Labor and the Affective Economy of Racial Capitalism’; Carlo Perrotta, Neil Selwyn, and Carrie Ewin, ‘Artificial Intelligence and the Affective Labour of Understanding: The Intimate Moderation of a Language Model’); 3. Play (Aleena Chia, ‘The Artist and the Automaton in Digital Game Production’; Stephanie Jennings, ‘Only You Can Save the World (of Videogames): Authoritarian Agencies in the Heroism of Videogame Design, Play, and Culture’; Paolo Ruffino, ‘There Is No Cure: Paratexts as Remediations of Agency in Red Dead Redemption 2’); 4. Queer Affects (Jacob Gaboury, ‘Queer Affects at the Origins of Computation’; Bo Ruberg, ‘After Agency: The Queer Posthumanism of Video Games That Cannot Be Played’; Charnell Peters, ‘Asexuality, Affect Aliens, and Digital Affect Cultures: Relationality with the Happy Objects of Sexual and Romantic Relationships’); 5. Conclusion.