Somatic Labour, Structural Harm, and the Body as Evidence: An Extended Literature Review Section
Why I Needed More Than I Already Had
I want to be honest about why this section exists. When I finished the foundational literature review, the one tracing Nash (2004), Brown (2010, 2012), van der Kolk (2014), Haraway (1988), and the others who gave VPAS its bones, I felt something unresolved in my chest. The intellectual genealogy was there. The methodology was grounded. But there was a dimension of what I had lived through in nineteen years of contract academic faculty work at Thompson Rivers University that none of those frameworks, taken alone, could fully name. What I had experienced was something more specific: the invisible, uncompensated, daily work of managing my body’s responses to a chronically threatening institutional environment while performing enthusiasm, care, and collegial warmth as conditions of continued employment. I needed language for that. I found it in the scholarship this section reviews.
This section is, in itself, an act of SPN methodology: I am telling you what I needed, why I needed it, and what I found. The theoretical content is real and rigorously sourced, but the path to it was personal before it was scholarly. That is the VPAS order: V before P, embodied experience before structural analysis. I am following that order here even in the literature review itself, because the literature review is also a research document, and its shape should model the methodology it describes. All sources have been verified for publication year, author, title, and publisher accuracy as of March 2026. References follow standard scholarly citation format throughout.
Somatic Labour: Finding a Name for What My Body Had Been Doing
The term I have come to use for what I experienced across nineteen contract years is somatic labour. I define it as the invisible, uncompensated, and structurally produced work of managing the body’s physiological responses to chronically threatening institutional environments. It is labour in the full economic sense: it consumes time, energy, and physical capacity; it is performed in the service of institutional functioning; and it is extracted without acknowledgement or compensation from the workers who perform it. I arrived at this term by triangulating three bodies of scholarship that each named part of what I had been carrying.
The first was Hochschild (1983). In The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling, Hochschild named what she called emotional labour: the work of managing one’s emotional expressions in the service of organizational goals. Her research focused on flight attendants and bill collectors, and she identified two strategies workers use: surface acting, changing one’s outward expression without altering one’s inner state, and deep acting, attempting to genuinely induce the required emotional state from the inside. I read Hochschild and felt the precise architecture of what I had been doing for two decades. Every email to a department chair I disagreed with, every performance of enthusiasm at a professional development day designed for tenure-track faculty, every moment of visible warmth in a hallway conversation with a colleague who had no idea my contract expired in three months: surface acting and deep acting, repeated thousands of times, in service of an institution that kept no record of that labour and carried none of its cost. Hochschild’s framework gave me the first piece of the language I needed, and it is directly formative of the P component of VPAS, which requires the structural analysis that moves personal experience from “I am exhausted” to “this exhaustion was extracted.”
The second tradition was the affective labour scholarship developed by Hardt and Negri (2000) in Empire and extended in Multitude (2004). Hardt and Negri define affective labour as labour that produces or modifies social relationships, affects, and subjectivities rather than discrete material commodities. Reading this, I understood something I had been unable to name before: the specific thing I produced in every classroom, every office hour, every email written with care, was a relational and affective environment. Students felt seen. They felt intellectually challenged and personally supported. That relational environment was the output of my labour, and it accrued entirely to the institution. The institutional reputation for strong teaching in the humanities, the student retention that followed from feeling genuinely taught rather than processed: those benefits were institutional. The costs, the fraying of my own relational capacity, the erosion of the energy I might have directed toward my own scholarship, were mine alone. Lazzarato (1996) names this economy of immaterial labour with precision that I find both clarifying and enraging, which is exactly the response the P component is designed to produce: structural analysis that refuses to allow the personal cost to remain individualized and invisible.
The third tradition was Levine (1997). In Waking the Tiger: Healing Trauma, Levine argued before van der Kolk’s work reached wide public circulation that traumatic experience produces specific physiological responses that persist in the body as chronic holding patterns: muscular tension, altered breathing, disrupted digestive function, nervous system dysregulation. Levine added something I found crucial: the body’s responses to threat are adaptive. Their persistence reflects the body’s accuracy as a recording instrument. The body that tightened every September when the new contract had arrived late, and that learned to brace for the institutional silence that sometimes stretched weeks past the teaching start date, was functioning exactly correctly. It was recording the conditions it inhabited. The A component of VPAS is built on this premise: what the body does is evidence, and the scholar’s obligation is to document that evidence rather than dismiss it as merely personal or merely emotional.
How This Scholarship Shapes What VPAS Does
I want to be specific about how the scholarship in this section changed the framework I was building, because the contribution is concrete rather than general.
Hochschild (1983) and Hardt and Negri (2004) gave the P component its structural precision. Before I had read them carefully, I knew the P component needed to connect personal experience to structural conditions. But “structural conditions” was doing too much work as a phrase: it was simultaneously too broad and too abstract. What Hochschild and Hardt and Negri gave me was specificity. The structural condition I was naming was the institutional appropriation of affective and relational labour without acknowledgement, compensation, or reciprocity. That is a precise claim, and it is the kind of precise claim the P component requires if it is to function as structural analysis rather than as frustrated complaint. I owe these theorists the difference between those two things.
Levine (1997), alongside van der Kolk (2014) and Porges (2011), gave the A component its epistemological confidence. I had always included the A component in VPAS because I believed bodily action was evidence, but I had a nagging awareness that this belief required defence. What if a doctoral committee member, trained in positivist methodology, asked me to justify treating my own body’s actions as research data? Levine, van der Kolk, and Porges together constitute that justification. Levine establishes that physiological responses to structural conditions are adaptive and accurate. Van der Kolk establishes that they are measurable and lasting. Porges establishes that they are theorisable within a map of nervous system states that any scholar can read. My body’s actions during thirty days at the Sea of Cortez, including the compulsive productivity of the first week, the insomnia of Days 8 through 11, the first afternoon I sat still without checking my phone on Day 16, and the reach for colour on Day 27, are the argument. This section of the literature review is what makes that claim defensible in a doctoral context.
The critical wellness scholarship reviewed below, particularly Lorey (2015), Cvetkovich (2012), and Han (2015), gave the P component something I had been circling without quite catching: a framework for critiquing institutional wellness discourse that manages the symptoms of structural harm while making the structural conditions that produced it more stable and less visible. I had been calling this malperformative care in my thinking, and finding the scholarly language for it in Austin’s (1962) performativity theory and Butler’s (1993) extensions changed the quality of the structural analysis I was capable of. The P component can now name precisely why an Employee Assistance Programme that offers contract faculty counselling for occupational distress is structurally insufficient: it performs care without producing the structural change that genuine care would require. That is a theoretical claim grounded in verified scholarship, and VPAS required it.
Finally, the phenomenology of attention scholarship, Kaplan and Kaplan (1989), Zajonc (2009), and Hart (2004), gave me the theoretical language for something that was happening in the A component that I had been describing only photographically. When I stopped photographing in black and white on Day 27 and reached, without conscious decision, for colour, I knew something had shifted. I knew it was evidence. What I lacked was the scholarly vocabulary to explain what kind of knowing that was, and why the absence of conscious decision was the most significant part. Zajonc’s (2009) concept of delicate empiricism, knowing that remains present to the phenomenon before rushing to categorize or interpret, names exactly the epistemological quality of that moment. The A component is, at its best, an act of delicate empiricism: documenting what the body did before the analytical mind has processed what it means. This section grounds that claim in a verifiable scholarly tradition.
Ahmed and the Feeling of Being Out of Step
I came to Ahmed (2004) through recognition rather than through affect theory. Reading The Cultural Politics of Emotion, I encountered her concept of the “affect alien”: the person whose feelings fail to align with the dominant affective scripts of their environment. Ahmed argues that happiness is socially directed, oriented toward institutionally approved objects, and that those who feel grief, rage, or exhaustion where they are expected to feel gratitude or enthusiasm are treated as misaligned, difficult, or ungrateful. I had felt misaligned, difficult, and ungrateful for years without having a theoretical frame for why those labels were structural rather than personal. Ahmed gave me that frame. The contract faculty member who cannot sustain performed enthusiasm for an institutional culture that has never acknowledged her labour is an affect alien in Ahmed’s sense. The V component of VPAS creates the scholarly space in which the affect alien can document her experience with rigour and without apology, and the P component establishes that her misalignment is a structural effect rather than a personal failure.
Ahmed (2012), in On Being Included, extended this analysis into institutional diversity discourse, examining the affective demands placed on racialized and marginalized scholars by institutions that claim commitment to inclusion while maintaining the structural conditions that produce exclusion. I hold this extension with care, because my own positionality as a white settler academic means that the intersectional dimensions of what Ahmed describes in this text exceed my own experience. I include it here because the VPAS Framework must be legible and usable beyond my own positionality, and Ahmed’s (2012) analysis identifies dimensions of structural harm that the P component must be capable of naming even where they diverge from my own.
Berlant’s (2011) concept of cruel optimism arrived in my reading life at the right moment. Berlant defines it as the condition in which something one desires is also an obstacle to one’s flourishing. I had spent years attached to the possibility of a permanent position at an institution that was structurally committed to the contingency of my employment. That attachment was real, and it was instrumentalized: it kept me available, compliant, and willing to absorb costs that a worker without that attachment would have refused. The P component of VPAS requires the scholar to identify the structural conditions that produced their experience, and Berlant insists that those conditions include the internal attachments that the institution cultivates and exploits. I find this the most uncomfortable theoretical claim in the framework, because it requires me to analyse my own hope as a site of structural vulnerability. I include it because the scholarship that makes us uncomfortable with our own collusions is often the scholarship that matters most.
Naming Malperformative Care
There is a thing that happens in institutions that I have been trying to name accurately for years. It looks like care. It has the structural features of care: employee assistance programmes, counselling referrals, mental health days, wellness committees, mindfulness workshops offered in the late afternoon when contract faculty have already taught three sections and answered sixty emails. It has the language of care: resilience, self-care, boundary-setting, work-life balance. What it does, functionally, is manage the symptoms of structural harm in ways that make the structural conditions that produce those symptoms more stable and less visible. I call this malperformative care, and finding the scholarly vocabulary to ground that term changed the quality of the P component’s structural analysis.
The term draws on Austin’s (1962) concept of performative speech acts and Butler’s (1993) extension of performativity in Bodies That Matter. A malperformative act is one that goes through the formal motions of a practice while systematically failing to produce the substantive outcomes that practice is designed to achieve. Lorey’s (2015) analysis of governmental precarisation provided the political economy framing: Lorey argues that wellness discourse functions as a technology of precarisation by individualizing the response to structural harm, making the structural conditions that produce the harm more stable and less contestable. Reading Lorey alongside Austin and Butler gave me the theoretical architecture for a claim I had been making experientially for years.
Cvetkovich (2012), in Depression: A Public Feeling, offered something unexpected: permission to understand the Third Shore blog as a depression archive. Cvetkovich develops this concept to name collections of cultural and personal documents that testify to the structural conditions that produce collective emotional suffering. She insists that depression in academic and activist contexts is a political condition with political causes, and that treating it as individual pathology requiring individual treatment is itself a political act. The Third Shore project is a depression archive in Cvetkovich’s sense: it is a structured scholarly record of what structural harm costs the body that inhabits it, and what recovery requires. The VPAS Framework is the structure that makes that record rigorous rather than merely confessional.
Han (2015), in The Burnout Society, named something I recognized in my own first week at Loreto. Han argues that contemporary neoliberal societies produce burnout through the imperative of achievement: the worker internalizes productivity norms so thoroughly that exploitation becomes self-exploitation. I arrived at the Sea of Cortez with a research plan, a content calendar, and a daily writing quota. I was on unpaid leave, sitting on a beach in Baja California, and I was performing productivity for an audience of one. Han’s analysis explains why: the achievement imperative persists even when the institutional context disappears, because it has been internalized as self. The VPAS Framework’s A component documents this: the first entries from Loreto are characterized by a quality of strained industry that the later entries have moved past, and that difference is evidence. Han gives me the theoretical language for what that evidence means.
Metzl and Hansen (2014), in their Social Science and Medicine article, introduced structural competency: the capacity to recognize that health outcomes are produced by structural conditions rather than individual behaviour or biology alone. Their argument is that structural competency requires practitioners to shift analysis from lifestyle choices to structural determinants. I have found this framework clarifying for the P component in a specific way: structural competency is the epistemological orientation the P component enacts. Every time a VPAS entry moves from “I was exhausted” to “I was exhausted because the institution extracted nineteen years of affective and somatic labour without acknowledgement or compensation,” it is performing structural competency. This is a clinical and policy framework I am applying to scholarly self-analysis, and the translation is legitimate because the structural conditions that produce harm in health contexts and the structural conditions that produce harm in academic labour contexts are, in many cases, the same conditions.
Attention, Restoration, and What the Sea Was Actually Doing
I spent a long time in the early entries from Loreto trying to be productive. I photographed on schedule. I wrote on schedule. I held to the research plan with a rigidity that, reading those entries now, I recognize as a nervous system still operating in threat-activation. What I was unable to do, for nearly two weeks, was simply be present to the environment without converting presence into output. The shift, when it came, was a change in the quality of my attention that preceded any conscious choice.
Kaplan and Kaplan (1989) developed Attention Restoration Theory in The Experience of Nature: A Psychological Perspective, and reading it I found the theoretical framework for what the Sea of Cortez was doing to my nervous system across thirty days. Their theory identifies four properties of restorative environments: being away, a change of context that interrupts habitual attentional demands; extent, an environment rich enough to occupy the mind without effort; fascination, stimuli that capture attention involuntarily; and compatibility, an environment that matches one’s current needs and inclinations. The Sea of Cortez offered all four, and Kaplan and Kaplan’s research provides the evidence that these properties are reliably associated with the recovery of directed attentional capacity. The A component documents this recovery: the entries from Days 14 through 30 have a different quality of attention in them, a slower rhythm, a longer gaze, a willingness to describe rather than immediately analyse. That difference is data. Kaplan and Kaplan’s framework is what allows me to claim it as such.
Zajonc (2009), in Meditation as Contemplative Inquiry: When Knowing Becomes Love, gave me the phrase I have returned to most often in thinking about what the A component is actually doing at its best: delicate empiricism. He draws the concept from Goethe’s scientific method, which required the scientist to remain present to the phenomenon without rushing to categorize, explain, or reduce it. This is precisely what the A component asks the scholar to do: document what the body did before the analytical mind has processed what it means. The reach for the colour photograph on Day 27 was delicate empiricism before I had words for it. My body knew something my analytical mind had yet to organize into an argument. The A component is the methodological instrument that preserves that prior knowing as evidence, and Zajonc is the theoretical source that establishes why that preservation is epistemologically significant rather than merely charming.
Hart (2004), in “Opening the Contemplative Mind in the Classroom,” published in the Journal of Transformative Education, documents what he calls contemplative knowing: a mode of knowing that integrates intuition, imagination, and felt sense alongside analytical reasoning, and that produces forms of insight that analytic knowing alone is unable to generate. Hart was writing about pedagogy, but the implications for VPAS are direct. The framework’s sequence, V before A before P before S, is a contemplative sequence: it begins in felt experience, documents embodied action, and only then moves to structural analysis and theoretical engagement. The S component grounds the V and A components in a scholarly conversation that extends their reach, without displacing them. Hart’s work confirms that this sequence is epistemologically coherent.
The Blog as Counter-Archive
There is something I want to say directly about why the Third Shore blog exists as a public document rather than as a private research journal. I want to say it in the language this section of the literature review has been building, because I think the theoretical framing changes what the claim means.
Thompson Rivers University maintains an official archive of institutional life. That archive contains enrolment numbers, completion rates, course evaluation scores, budget allocations, and strategic plan documents. It contains no record of what it cost the bodies of contract faculty members to produce those numbers across decades of structural insecurity. It contains no record of the somatic labour, the emotional and affective extraction, the physiological holding patterns that nineteen years of precarious employment produced in the people who delivered the institution’s teaching. That record is absent from the official archive, because its presence would require the institution to acknowledge costs it has invested in making invisible.
Stoler (2002), in Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Race and the Intimate in Colonial Rule, theorized the colonial archive as a technology of governance that structures what can be known, who can know it, and whose experience is rendered legible as evidence. I am working at a much smaller institutional scale than Stoler, but her framework applies: the institutional archive is a technology of governance, and what it excludes is a political choice. The Third Shore blog, and the VPAS Framework that structures it, produces a counter-archive: a record of the experience that the official archive omits. The V component archives somatic and emotional evidence. The P component archives structural analysis that connects that evidence to systemic conditions. The A component archives embodied action as primary research data. The S component archives theoretical engagement that makes the record scholarly rather than merely testimonial. Every VPAS entry is an archival act, and the archive it is building is the one the institution has chosen to leave unmade.
Derrida (1996), in Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, argues that the drive to archive is always also a drive to destroy competing records: the official archive actively forecloses other records as much as it preserves; forms of preservation. Reading this in the context of my own institutional experience, I understood something about the specific form of harm that precarious academic labour inflicts: it is designed to be forgotten. Contract faculty leave. Their labour disappears into the institution’s outcomes without a paper trail that connects the outcome to the worker who produced it. The Third Shore project is my refusal of that forgetting. The VPAS Framework is the methodological structure that makes that refusal scholarly rather than merely sentimental, rigorous rather than merely angry.
Table 6: The Scholarship This Section Adds to VPAS
The following table maps the additional scholarly sources reviewed in this section to the VPAS components they most directly inform. It follows the format established in the foundational literature review and is numbered Table 6 accordingly.
| Scholar(s) | Key Work | VPAS Component(s) | What It Gave the Framework |
|---|---|---|---|
| Hochschild (1983) | The Managed Heart | P, V | Named emotional labour as structural extraction; gave P the precision to distinguish personal exhaustion from institutional appropriation |
| Hardt and Negri (2004) | Multitude | P | Affective labour theory; relational outputs of teaching accrue to institutions; costs borne exclusively by workers |
| Levine (1997) | Waking the Tiger | A | Body’s responses are adaptive and accurate; somatic holding patterns are reliable evidence; grounds A component’s epistemological confidence |
| Ahmed (2004) | The Cultural Politics of Emotion | V, P | Affect aliens; V creates space for misaligned feeling; P names misalignment as structural effect rather than personal failure |
| Ahmed (2012) | On Being Included | P | Compound affective demands on marginalized scholars; intersectional dimensions the P component must name |
| Berlant (2011) | Cruel Optimism | P | Internal attachments as sites of structural exploitation; P must analyse hope as well as harm |
| Cvetkovich (2012) | Depression: A Public Feeling | V, P | Third Shore as depression archive; V and P as archival functions producing a structured scholarly record |
| Han (2015) | The Burnout Society | P, A | Achievement imperative; self-exploitation; A documents its costs across Loreto entries; P names its structural source |
| Metzl and Hansen (2014) | Structural Competency | P | P as structural competency in practice; shift from “I was exhausted” to naming the institutional extraction that produced it |
| Kaplan and Kaplan (1989) | The Experience of Nature | A | Attention Restoration Theory; A documents attentional recovery across 30 days; Sea of Cortez as restorative environment with all four ART properties |
| Zajonc (2009) | Meditation as Contemplative Inquiry | A, V | Delicate empiricism; A preserves the body’s prior knowing before analytical processing; Day 27 colour shift as primary evidence |
| Hart (2004) | Opening the Contemplative Mind | A, S | VPAS sequence as epistemologically coherent contemplative structure; contemplative knowing as legitimate scholarly mode |
| Stoler (2002) | Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power | All | Counter-archive theory; each VPAS entry as a record the official institutional archive has chosen to leave unmade |
| Derrida (1996) | Archive Fever | All | Official archives foreclose competing records; Third Shore as methodological refusal of institutional forgetting |
Three Gaps I Cannot Yet Fill
I want to close this section by naming three places where the scholarship runs out before the questions do, because an honest literature review acknowledges the limits of what the literature can currently provide.
The first is the intersection of somatic labour and disability. The scholarship on emotional labour (Hochschild, 1983) and affective labour (Hardt & Negri, 2004) has been substantially developed within feminist, labour, and cultural studies, but its intersection with disability studies and the specific somatic experiences of disabled academic workers remains underdeveloped. Price (2011), in Mad at School: Rhetorics of Mental Disability and Academic Life, provides one entry point, documenting how academic institutional norms are built around assumptions of neurotypical and able-bodied functioning that systematically exclude and harm disabled scholars. The VPAS Framework’s A component, with its emphasis on what the body actually did, requires future development that is accountable to the diversity of bodily experience across disability, chronic illness, and neurodivergence. This is a gap I hold with seriousness rather than with reassuring gestures toward future work.
The second gap is methodological: the relationship between the daily A component documentation the VPAS Framework produces and the longer-term patterns of somatic evidence it accumulates is underspecified. Van der Kolk (2014) and Levine (1997) both address the long-term patterning of somatic responses, but the protocols for connecting individual daily entries to longitudinal somatic analysis have yet to be developed for a framework like VPAS. The thirty sequential days of the Third Shore project may offer a starting point for that development, but the work remains ahead.
The third gap is about reach. Ahmed (2004), Berlant (2011), and Han (2015) have all found readers well beyond their academic disciplines, because the experiences they theorize are widespread and the language they offer is clarifying rather than merely specialized. The application of these frameworks to Canadian post-secondary labour conditions has so far been largely confined to academic audiences. The VPAS Framework’s blog form is an attempt to close that gap: to produce scholarship that travels between the doctoral committee and the contract faculty member reading on their phone between classes, and that is legible and useful to both. Whether that attempt succeeds is an empirical question I am still living inside.
Additional References
Ahmed, S. (2004). The cultural politics of emotion. Edinburgh University Press.
Ahmed, S. (2012). On being included: Racism and diversity in institutional life. Duke University Press.
Ahmed, S. (2014). Willful subjects. Duke University Press.
Austin, J. L. (1962). How to do things with words. Oxford University Press.
Butler, J. (1993). Bodies that matter: On the discursive limits of “sex.” Routledge.
Cvetkovich, A. (2012). Depression: A public feeling. Duke University Press.
Derrida, J. (1996). Archive fever: A Freudian impression (E. Prenowitz, Trans.). University of Chicago Press. (Original work published 1995)
Han, B.-C. (2015). The burnout society (E. Butler, Trans.). Stanford University Press. (Original work published 2010)
Hardt, M., & Negri, A. (2000). Empire. Harvard University Press.
Hardt, M., & Negri, A. (2004). Multitude: War and democracy in the age of empire. Penguin Press.
Hart, T. (2004). Opening the contemplative mind in the classroom. Journal of Transformative Education, 2(1), 28-46. https://doi.org/10.1177/1541344603259311
Hochschild, A. R. (1983). The managed heart: Commercialization of human feeling. University of California Press.
Kaplan, R., & Kaplan, S. (1989). The experience of nature: A psychological perspective. Cambridge University Press.
Lazzarato, M. (1996). Immaterial labour. In P. Virno & M. Hardt (Eds.), Radical thought in Italy: A potential politics (pp. 133-147). University of Minnesota Press.
Levine, P. A. (1997). Waking the tiger: Healing trauma. North Atlantic Books.
Maslach, C. (1982). Burnout: The cost of caring. Prentice-Hall.
Massumi, B. (2002). Parables for the virtual: Movement, affect, sensation. Duke University Press.
Metzl, J. M., & Hansen, H. (2014). Structural competency: Theorizing a new medical engagement with stigma and inequality. Social Science and Medicine, 103, 126-133. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.socscimed.2013.06.032
Price, M. (2011). Mad at school: Rhetorics of mental disability and academic life. University of Michigan Press.
Sedgwick, E. K. (2003). Touching feeling: Affect, pedagogy, performativity. Duke University Press.
Stoler, A. L. (2002). Carnal knowledge and imperial power: Race and the intimate in colonial rule. University of California Press.
Zajonc, A. (2009). Meditation as contemplative inquiry: When knowing becomes love. Lindisfarne Books.
