Freedom, Control, and the Cultures of Circulation Gigwork

Annie J McClanahan (University of California, Irvine)

“Freedom, Control, and the Cultures of Circulation Gigwork” interrogates the paradoxical way that gigwork has come to be associated both with freedom and slavery, both entrepreneurial independence and dominating control. It explores the history of “independent contractor” status, arguing that informalization has long been perceived as a solution to the problem of mobile workers, from sailors to long-haul truckers. It takes up the link between 21st-century gigwork and the genre of the road narrative, reading novels by Raven Leilani, Priya Guns, and Peter Mendelsund and finding in them a complex and contradictory account of both complicity and solidarity.