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- Title
Sharing suits and letters: redressing late‐capitalist precarity in South Korea.
- Authors
Fedorenko, Olga
- Abstract
The contemporary sharing economy comprises a variety of technology‐mediated user‐to‐user transactions and reveals both the extremes of the late‐capitalist regime of accumulation and possible paths to supersede it. To critically explore the idea of the sharing economy, this article examines how it has been mobilized by a non‐profit startup in neoliberalized South Korea. Open Closet cheaply rents donated suits to precarious job‐seekers for interviews, while requesting that donors and renters write each other letters with their 'suit stories'. The article tracks how sharing at Open Closet is realized via circulations of suits, letters, and 'warm hearts', and how its meanings and obligations are interpreted via the historical relations of mutual responsibility within local collectivities of belonging. The article thus illuminates new imaginaries for livelihoods, subjecthoods, and solidarities that emerge when the contemporary sharing economy ambiguates capitalist and non‐capitalist relations, becoming a site for experimentation with affectivity and mutuality among strangers.
- Subjects
SOUTH Korea; SOCIAL sciences; SHARING economy; SOCIOLOGY; ANTHROPOLOGY
- Publication
Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 2024, Vol 30, Issue 2, p436
- ISSN
1359-0987
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.1111/1467-9655.14061