please go off re: the Hochschild interview. Beck seems far too willing to grant Hochschild her precious horror at the evolution of the term (and seems to create new distinctions, mostly bad, about whether organizational labor is "just labor" instead of emotional labor), and I *need* someone to be annoyed with
Either you have gravely misunderstood me, or I am gravely misunderstanding you. While I don’t agree with every hard distinction being made by Hochschild in that interview, and I think the “it’s not emotional labor if it doesn’t bother you to do it” line she repeatedly asserts is untenable, I…was never objecting to Hochschild being against the evolution of the term. I am actually in agreement with her. (I also don’t have any idea what “organizational labor” means in this context.)
I have not read Hochschild’s book, so I don’t know how much or in what way she really theorized the concept. I think a lot of that interview is kind of dumb! But I was never mad at her for suggesting that people were using her term wrong. (In fact, if anything, I respect her integrity on the point.) I was and am mad at how other people are using it wrong, not because of any delicacy over her sensibilities but because this phenomenon represents the total triumph of a la carte liberal capitalist feminism. “Whatever makes me feel mildly inconvenienced is gendered oppression; gendered oppression is defined by the fact that it makes me feel inconvenienced rather than by economic or social roles and expectations; also, I have absolutely no concept that my domestic servants are people.” I mean, fuck me.
At this point emotional labor, in the way it’s being used, seems to include and even displace the second shift, reproductive labor, and domestic labor, and I’m not okay with that. Those are useful terms for important concepts.The bedrock of a feminist analysis of patriarchy really cannot be emotional labor. It is a) untrue, b) without structure, c) mistaking the means of oppression’s concealment for the oppression itself. If reproductive and domestic labor were really just types of emotional labor (as it seems people are using the term, based on the examples to which Hochschild is objecting and some things I’ve read myself), then all we would have to do would be to retrain men to be more emotionally intelligent and equitable. I’m not saying this is not something that is needed, or that it is easy. But it is absolutely not a solution. It in no way addresses the economic and personal benefits of being male. PATRIARCHY IS NOT MADE OF OR ABOUT FEELINGS. IT WORKS THROUGH AND SHAPES FEELINGS. The fact that when I dated men I found it exhausting to manage their emotions does not explain the wage gap. But an economic and reproductive understanding of patriarchy does explain why I felt obligated to put in that work in my role as “girlfriend.”
These cooptations always entail missing the forest for the trees. As with empowerment retreats, the problem is not that women don’t feel empowered. It is that they are, literally and materially, disempowered. These uses of emotional labor do the same thing: the problem is not that reproductive and domestic labor are emotionally demanding; it is that their burdens are assigned by gender. As in the jobs like flight attendant that “emotional labor” was coined to describe, the emotion is a dimension of other labor. There is very little labor that is only emotional. In the classical heterosexual nuclear family frame, a wife’s “responsibility” to make sure her husband comes home to a feeling of order, peace, and serenity is entirely predicated on her responsibility to maintain the household, care for the children, and do everything he is not doing so that he can go back to work for eight hours tomorrow. The emotions she is affecting, and her management of his emotions, are entirely tied to the function of reproductive labor she is already performing.
That it may feel taxing or annoying to be the one who remembers to schedule the kid’s after school activity does not make it emotional labor. It remains the labor of reproducing the workforce and the society at large. How one feels about it is simply a dimension by which the whole process is made to seem natural, or by which it can be revealed as not natural–just as a cashier’s smile and tone of voice is simply the lubricant for a transaction in which their employer is making money. The smile is not the constitutive part here! It is worth understanding the smile and understanding that it takes work to produce and maintain, like all other phenomena. It is worth understanding how the smile produces the illusion of happy workers, which in turn smooths over the actual facts of wage labor such that I do not leave the grocery store feeling that I have participated in the oppressive precarity of someone else (though I have). Just so is it worth understanding the projection of the smiling, contented, soothing wife as one that naturalizes her relegation to the domestic sphere and helps make invisible the labor she performs. But to argue that because one’s job entails smiling, wage labor is now a subtype of emotional labor rather than the other way around amounts to willful obfuscation. And by the same token, it is simply wrong to argue that because emotions are tied up in reproductive and domestic labor, the latter are effects of the former. It is exactly the type of obfuscation that goes along with an understanding of feminism that lacks any kind of structural awareness of class, race, etc., and which defines reality by the metric of individuals’ inner feelings. I just made a bet with myself and googled “Sheryl Sandberg emotional labor”; I won the bet. This is not a liberatory frame.
