Labor

In its most common uses, the term “labor” refers to either an organized system of exploitation or a personal source of pleasure. “Slave labor” relies on unfree populations forced into servitude, while a “labor of love” is a gift that an individual freely gives. These two usages are frequently conjoined, conflated, or compared to simply “work.” The orthodoxies that insist on using the word “labor” over “work” are less important than ways in which the word is deployed in these seemingly contradictory ways to explain centuries of media production and their producers.