Reeling: Violence, Exploitation and Artistic Labour in Lola Lafon’s <i>Chavirer</i> (2020)

Lola Lafon’s Chavirer (2020) depicts gender-based violence in the arts. This article examines Chavirer’s representation of artistic labor, beginning with a case of abuse and developing a wide-ranging critique of how inequity, exclusion, and exploitation shape artistic labor. The article then discusses how Chavirer adapts aesthetic form to bring artistic labor into the frame of the novel. Finally, the article situates the novel within current debates about artistic autonomy and heteronomy, outlining how the novel intervenes in debates about the specificity of the aesthetic and its response to conditions of artistic labor.