모빌리티 노동의 정동－도시 모빌리티와 1970~80년대 ‘버스 안내양’의 정동－

Abstract

This paper aims to examine the affect from urban mobility in the 1970s and 1980s, focusing on the female bus attendants. I review some articles, labor memoirs, poems, and novels related to the female bus attendants at the time. So with this, I conceptualize the labor of bus attendants as the ‘mobility affect.’ They show the new social structure at the time of reorganization around urban mobility, and at the same time, they need attention in that they symbolize the affect atmosphere of the industrialization era when a large number of people experienced becoming laborers. The female bus attendant was the body that was unexpectedly monitored and searched while in an intense working environment, and had no space to occupy rightfully. In that sense, they were the beings filling the insufficient holes in the urban circulation infrastructure, and at the same time they symbolized one hole in themselves. They had to deal with irregular conflicts with bus drivers and supervisors as well as unspecified passengers, and internalize the pressure of governance of themselves imposed by the cultural discourse. This reality illustrates the politics of the affect that their bodies had to go through. Since the labor of bus attendant was performed for the operation of urban mobility, it was labor placed outside of urban mobility. And it was a kind of shadow labor because it was labor to protect other people’s ‘time.’ This is because their mobility was out-of-time mobility, which was only superficially moving in the immobility state. Therefore, they were the weakest figures that operate mobility outside the time infrastructure, a hole that reveals that mobility is the dispositif, and the mobility affect figures that form itself by bumping into the mobility and temporality of others. Some labor poems written by poet Choi Myung-ja from the female bus attendant, and Hong Sung-won’s novel Shaking Land illustrated this point well. The affect is, above all, the forces of encounter and the flux. In this regard, the texts related to urban mobility in the 1970s and 1980s reviewed in this paper could show the disturbances of social mobility as well as physical mobility well. The female bus attendants were the affect aliens. They were excluded from laborers as labor subjects in that the figure of industrial laborers, called the driving force of economic development, was a strong male worker, and from citizens with singular rights in that they had no choice but to get a job while disguising their status. Nor could they become cultured female students, beloved housewives, or intellectual writers. This is because the female bus attendant was in the form of a ‘becoming’ that established herself through the fact that it was impossible to establish herself. They were always thrown in the meantime.