Bored Stiff

Sex and Superfluity in a Time of Crisis

Dados Bibliográficos

ID2428263
AutoresBruce O’neill (0000-0003-2035-8993, autor correspondente)
Ano2015
Volume27
Fascículo2
Páginas387-405
Data de publicação2015-05-01
Peer ReviewedSim
Open AccessNão
TipoARTICLE
PeriódicoPublic Culture (JOURNAL)
Identificadores do periódicoISSN: 0899-2363 • E-ISSN: 1527-8018
EditoraDuke University Press (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1215/08992363-2841916
OpenAlexW2277803453
IdiomaEN
Citações recebidas11
Referências citadas40

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

Boredom · Ethnography · Political science · Politics · Population · Poverty · Sociology · Gender Studies · Homelessness and Social Issues · Housing, Finance, and Neoliberalism · Law · Psychology · Social Psychology