Gratuitous hospitality: the body as job site and emotional labor in the service and hospitality industry

United States service and hospitality workers in front-of-house roles at bars and restaurants are subject to oppressive and exploitative wage practices, specifically tipped labor with a lower than minimum hourly wage supplemented by tip credits. These practices influence workers to perform for their income, as the customer provides the majority of their pay, not the employer. Due to this established power dynamic, the exchange of goods and services (i.e. preparing and serving food and beverages) is not the only labor that a worker must perform to earn an income. The customer may decide how much to tip based on their perception and judgment of the worker themself. Bodies, presentation, identity politics, and precarity complicate these exchanges. In a combined written and visual thesis, I explore these problems through performance, text, design, and installation, using autoethnography as a central method. Bringing art history and practice together with intersectional gender studies and labor histories, I also trace a critical genealogy of the complex legacy of tipped work in the United States. “Gratuitous Hospitality” defamiliarizes normalized labor practices and lays out the expressive and intimate interactions through which identities, most specifically race and gender, have historically influenced the lives and incomes of service and hospitality workers.