Rented body: freelancer worker in a flexible economy

Abstract

The body is historically traversed by subjectivation processes that are different each time. Currently, it has developed according to the imperatives of neoliberal rationality, which is a specific configuration of capitalism that comes from flexibility with high performance and productivity. In this scenario, the subject tends to think capitalist values as natural and indispensable for your life. An example of this is the professional called freelancer, who works without any guarantee of employment relationship and receives per day or per hour worked. Captured by the values disseminated by neoliberal rationality, this professional becomes the personification of the “intermediary of oneself”, placing oneself as someone flexible and who seeks to improve performance. This article aimed to understand how the body of the freelance worker is connected to this neoliberal rationality, strengthening it. Adopting a qualitative, descriptive, and field methodology semi structured scripts were combined with three freelance workers. The data present how demands fall on the worker's body so that they develop new features and utilities compatible with such values. Using communication technologies, the worker is called upon to put on stage their social and affective relationships in order to expand production. At the end of the study, it was possible to verify that the freelancer became a kind of model for contemporary work as it connects itself to neoliberal rationality, reproducing and reinforcing its assumptions.