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Bored Stiff: Sex and Superfluity in a Time of Crisis

Bored Stiff: Sex and Superfluity in a Time of Crisis This essay reflects upon the intimate entanglement of superfluity and boredom in postcommunist Bucharest, Romania, where the politics of social exclusion unfolds through the inability to participate in consumer practices and chronic underconsumption leaves the city’s most excluded population—the homeless—bored day in and day out. In response, men discarded from work and home by a brutally competitive economy head into the bowels of the city’s transit hubs, where they organize a market for sexual favors. This essay takes this consumer-based response to deepening poverty as an opportunity to explore the subjective and affective dimensions of radical exclusion in a prolonged moment of neoliberal instability. It asks, ultimately, what kind of danger does boredom, and the inclination to manage that boredom through consumer practices, pose? This is a historical and ethnographic question that provides insight into the stiffening of class boundaries in Bucharest, but also in other similarly positioned cities in Eastern Europe and the global South. affect consumption financial crisis homelessness postsocialism http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png Public Culture Duke University Press

Bored Stiff: Sex and Superfluity in a Time of Crisis

O’Neill, Bruce
Public Culture , Volume 27 (2 76) – May 1, 2015
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References (42)

Publisher
Duke University Press
Copyright
Copyright © Duke Univ Press
ISSN
0899-2363
eISSN
1527-8018
DOI
10.1215/08992363-2841916
Publisher site
See Article on Publisher Site

Abstract

This essay reflects upon the intimate entanglement of superfluity and boredom in postcommunist Bucharest, Romania, where the politics of social exclusion unfolds through the inability to participate in consumer practices and chronic underconsumption leaves the city’s most excluded population—the homeless—bored day in and day out. In response, men discarded from work and home by a brutally competitive economy head into the bowels of the city’s transit hubs, where they organize a market for sexual favors. This essay takes this consumer-based response to deepening poverty as an opportunity to explore the subjective and affective dimensions of radical exclusion in a prolonged moment of neoliberal instability. It asks, ultimately, what kind of danger does boredom, and the inclination to manage that boredom through consumer practices, pose? This is a historical and ethnographic question that provides insight into the stiffening of class boundaries in Bucharest, but also in other similarly positioned cities in Eastern Europe and the global South. affect consumption financial crisis homelessness postsocialism

Journal

Public Culture – Duke University Press

Published: May 1, 2015

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