The Missed Period: Disjunctive Temporalities, Embodiment, and the Work of Capital

This chapter examines how the bodies of business process outsourcing (BPO) agents are coproduced with regimes of affective labor. Because agents in Bengaluru had to work at night, they suffered from acute sleep deprivation and the disruption of their circadian rhythms. The disjunctive temporalities of BPOs bring about a collision of business cycles, circadian rhythms, night work, and ovulation cycles on the one hand, and the rhythms of family life, community, ritual, and festivals on the other. The logic of capital is vulnerable to disruption when agents have to prioritize the temporalities and relationalities of the body and sociality. These discrepant temporalities enable futurities that are predicated on relationality, on the entanglement of bodies with each other and with the more-than-human. Changing technologies, institutional cultures, national rivalries, and government policies all have implications for the future of working bodies and for futurity as agentive potentiality.