Market Desires: Andrea Fraser and the Staging of Transactional Intimacy.

This thesis investigates Performance Art as a critical diagnostic site where the traditional boundaries between labor, life, and the body collapse, utilizing Andrea Fraser’s 2003 work Untitled as its primary analytical lens. The research investigates the hypothesis that contemporary capitalism is inherently feminized, arguing that women’s historically assigned emotional and affective labor has become the generalized model for work in the post-Fordist era. Within this framework, the artist functions as the paradigmatic figure of this feminized economy, where the body and relational affect operate as critical mechanisms for the extraction of both symbolic and economic capital. Methodologically, the study adopts a "bottom-up" approach, treating art as an active, generative medium that enacts theory rather than a passive object for external explanation. The investigation begins by situating Fraser within a genealogy of feminist Institutional Critique ( such as Mierle Laderman Ukeles, Martha Rosler, and Adrian Piper) to trace the evolution of labor, embodiment, and positionality in art. The core of the research provides a rigorous deconstruction of Untitled, examining how the work materializes the "transactional reality" of the artist as a service provider while exposing the tensions between intimacy, the wage, and the market. Furthermore, the thesis interrogates how ideological frameworks such as monogamy and cisheteronormativity function as regulatory mechanisms that sustain capitalist value production. Ultimately, this study contributes a "positioned" Institutional Critique that reveals the deep structural interdependence between social, economic, and affective regimes in the production of contemporary art and social norms.