“What ‘The Hustle’ Looks Like on Etsy in 2015”
“The word “hustle,” at the turn of the century, solidly evoked drug dealers, pimps and other entrepreneurs operating in the dregs of capitalism, working the jobless, hyper-policed streets of the New Jim Crow a decade before Michelle Alexander coined the term. Hustling was a funhouse mirror version of the American dream. It meant making money any way you could, no excuses. It meant the primacy of capital over the dictats of the law.
Now, a quick search for “hustle” on Etsy yields thousands of results that tell of a connotative shift in this loaded word. There are framed prints, coffee mugs, tank tops, water bottles, pencils and keychains… The posters, mugs, pencils and keychains are consolation prizes for an economy in which people have to cobble together a living of freelance work, side gigs, and, if they’re lucky, jobs with stagnant wages and decreased bargaining power. Beneath their odd-fitting associative ties to a different sociopolitical sector and decade, these pretty objects exist to soothe workers — specifically, female workers — into accepting this new reality as cute, fun, and, most of all, a self-empowering personal choice."’
The author pairs her words really well with images of hustle-gear. And it’s making me thing about our other slang, like “crushing it” and how they turn work into sort of personal lifestyle activities, make it something we own as an expression of who we are. Which makes me think about how everything is making us understand our labor as an expression of who we are.
Related: “Fall In Love with Your Job, Get Ripped Off by Your Boss”; #GiveYourMoneytoWomen
