queeranarchism:fallowhearth:queeranarchism:I feel like there were stepsStep 1: Being forced to perfo
queeranarchism:fallowhearth:queeranarchism:I feel like there were stepsStep 1: Being forced to perform emotions at work is a specific form of labor called emotional labor. Women are most likely to be in professions that require high levels of emotional labor and are expected to perform more of it than their male coworkers. It ranges from cashiers smiling to customers to sex workers making a client feel sexy for an hour, but it is ultimately all about performing emotions. What we call ‘emotional labor’ is that performance. (Step 1 is good)Step 2: Women in families also tend to work a second shift after work, not just in terms of household chores but also in terms of taking care of the emotional needs of their husband and children. Men often do not take care of their children’s emotional needs and friendships between men are so emotionally suppressed that many men put all their emotional needs on their wife. What we call ‘emotional labor’ is all that extra care work. (Step 2 is kinda good in that it makes an important point but it does add a second different meaning to an existing term, potentially obscuring the original meaning of the term). Step 3: When women and other minorities address sexism, racism, etc. they are expected to not only articulate their point well but also to carefully manage the emotions of the people with privilege in the room so that they never make them feel too uncomfortable. Meanwhile the people with privilege have no such responsibility to anticipate and shelter the emotions of the person addressing the injustice. What we call ‘emotional labor’ is all that emotional management. (Step 3 is kinda good in that it makes an important point but it does add yet a third different meaning to an existing term, obscuring the original meaning of the term even further). Step 4: Any time we put energy into caring for others, anticipating their needs, resolving conflicts, nurturing each other, that is emotional labor. We need to balance the amount of emotional labor in relationships precisely because caring for someone without getting something specific in return is a form of exploitation. It’s okay to treat caring for your friends as a chore and to make friends who need support like a burden.(step 4 is bad. This step stems from the fact that a single term meant 3 different very specific things, with created vagueness and confusing around the term. But given the important aspects of step 2 and step 3, I’m not sure if demanding a return to only step 1 is necessarily the answer, ) What’s funny is that the originator of the term already had Step 2 covered, it’s emotion work. It uses the standard work/labour distinction in the sense that all effort is work but effort in exchange for money is labour (roughly). And not every effort is emotional - mental work/labour is also a thing. Much of what people identify in Step 2 isn’t inherently emotional but it is mental. The sociologist who originated the term is Arlie Hochschild.Online posters like to take one sentence from an academic work, disregard everything else, then haltingly reconstruct all the context around that one sentence from scratch. And assume that the totality of that academic field is in that one sentence and nobody has thought of the obvious questions or rejoinders so the online posters need to create that from scratch as well. Nobody simply reads the original work. Or literally any of the work that builds on the original argument. I feel like that is a bit unfair. Arlie Hochschild did also coin The Second Shift, the unpaid work that women do at home after their day at work. When both terms came around in the 1980s, feminists in unions who had read Hochschild’s work talked about emotional labor in the workplace and feminists writing about the family who had also read Hochschild’s work talked about emotional work in the second shift at home. Emotional labor as a paid performance of emotions and emotional work as unpaid emotional care work entered feminist discourse separately through people that read Hochschild. But through a game of telephone, mistranslation and concept creep, the distinction between labor and work got lost over the course of 30-something years. The fact that not all of this conversation was in English and most languages don’t have these two separate words probably didn’t help either. With two such similar words, often translated into one word, and both concepts coming from the same author, it didn’t take any willful ignorance for feminist writers to lose sight of their differences. The third use of emotional labor is more recent but the people who introduced it weren’t ignorant. They had read a lot of the academic literature by the feminists that came before them and they build upon that and intentionally introduced a third concept of emotional work that they felt was important to acknowledge. The fact that by the time that they did this, emotional labor and emotional work had become hopelessly intermingled in feminist writing wasn’t their fault. Step 4… yeah.. there’s a fair amount of just grabbing a concept and running with it in step 4. -- source link