It's worth taking a look at how we got here.
Sociologist Arlie Hochschild coined the term in 1983, specifically describing it as emotional performance required by a worker for a job. This alienates the worker from their own feelings. The expected emotion can be care, joy, etc. but it can also be harshness or simply the expectation to not show your real emotions in the workplace.
Sociologist Arlie Hochschild also coined the term 'the second shift' in 1989. describing how in families where a man and a woman both have a job, the woman is often still expected to do all the child raising and house cleaning, meaning she is carrying a double workload.
Already in 1983 (before coining the term 'second shift' but already developing the concept), Hochschild herself connected the two ideas, writing: "In a typical nuclear family unit, it is thought that women become responsible for much of the emotional labor by default, meaning they are responsible for shaping and managing the family’s feelings."
So we have the person who coined the term, immediately after coining the term, also using emotional labor to describe unpaid household work! This is part of the term since its inception!
Around 2015 the term gained a lot of popularity and began to be more broadly applied. Some things that are, according to Hochschild, NOT emotional labor include:
Doing physical chores around the house
Doing mental chores like remembering birthdays
Hochschild: "if we talk about all the unpaid labor women do in the home as “emotional labor,” we’re insinuating that any kind of labor that falls most often to a woman is “emotional.” Like chores are just labor. Writing Christmas cards is just labor."
Also not emotional labour:
Expressing genuine emotions that you feel
Doing things that make other people feel better
Hochschild emphasizes that doing things to positively impact other people's emotions isn't 'emotional labor'. Managing and suppressing your own emotions is. That's where the alienation that is central to emotional labor comes in: it's alienation from your own feelings.
It's also essential that there must be an expectation on the person to do this. Hiding your real feelings by choice isn't emotional labor.
As with emotional labor in the workplace, non-caring emotions and suppression of emotions typically expected of men are included. So when a wife expects her husband to suppress his pain and not cry in front of the children, that is an example of emotional labor.
So to summarize, emotional labor according to Hochschild doesn't have to always be paid labor, but it does always involve:
The management of your own emotions
Alienation from your real emotions, as a result of being forced to perform other emotions.
Pressure/expectation, there are negative consequences if you don't do the performance.
There is a system, (the workplace, genderroles, etc) shaping these expectations, putting specific expectations on categories of people.
Finally, Hochschild never said that emotional labor shouldn't exist or that it doesn't have a function. In the workplace and out of it, emotional labor can achieve important things.
The nurse that uplifts the patient and the parent that comfort their child might both be hiding their real feelings and that itself is not bad. The problem is the pressure to do this labor when you dont want to, the lack of acknowledgement of this labour and óf its potential for alienation, and the division of this labour according to gendered expectations.
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