To live and to labour, or to live as labour, is to negotiate the extended processes of reproducing ourselves and others. Codes and semiotics dictate our every interaction down to style, tone, and gesture. However, the labour of ‘self-maintenance’ occupies the interstices of both service and affective labour, requiring us to be accomplished at procuring and proffering semiotics, working in complicity with a larger set of hierarchies concerning how we perform and for whom.

This issue examines proposed alternatives that manifest a melancholic dissatisfaction and take pains, and pleasure, to disturb predetermined identities, systems, orders.