The waitress: on affect, method and (re)presentation

This article engages the embodied experiences of the waitress with the question of how to (re)present these in their affective dimensions. In service work, the body needs to be able to combine conflicting capacities; to lure, entice and satisfy on the one hand and to be resilient, fast and astute on the other. If an attention to affect allows a shift from the question of what a phenomenon means or represents, to that of what a phenomenon does, then the ways affect is analyzed and narrated are necessarily bound up with questions of method and (re)presentation. This piece performs the waitress in an analysis of her affective and embodied labor in the process of how she experiences and makes sense of it.