it doesn’t sit well with me that “emotional labor” in it’s original context was Arlie Hochschild talking very specifically about how taxing face to face service industry jobs are for people (namely women) with this very nuanced context and is now used in everything from “i had to explain something to someone on twitter” or heavily in contexts of romantic relationships. not all emotional management and exchange is labor! to insert the idea of “labor” excessively into interpersonal relationships creates a system of “i performed ____ and now you OWE me for exerting ____” and it’s not healthy or what the term is for.
I sort of agree. But I also find that bringing emotional labor into the literal work done to combat any system of domination while being victim to that domination WHILE not being compensated for it is work and emotional work. Explaining yourself on twitter is not exempt from this conversation…
The term emotional labor is also used in the context of upaid female labor in the family under capitalism and there it has a powerful specific function.
The nuclear family that has been in invented during the industrial revolution and gets endorsed ever since idealizes the household in which there is a provider (who provides paid labor and gets money) and a nurturer, who does all the unpaid labor in the home and therefore allows the provider to rest, eat a meal he didn’t have to cook, etc. These roles are heavily gendered and the provider is pressured to be all the workplace demands: competitive, hard, etc while the nurterer is pressured to be soft, caring, selfless, etc.
All this benefits the boss and that’s the whole point. The boss has to pay mechanics and builders to restore all his buildings and machines, but he can push his workers as hard as he wants and someone else will provide for their entire restauration process for free. That’s an incredible amount of free work.
In this context the unpaid emotional labor the nurturer does also consist of restoring the provider emotionally so he van cope with the everyday stress and the harsh competition and soulless conditions of the work place.
This use of emotional labor was never intended in this context to say that the provider owes the nurturer something. The two roles already have an exchange of labor in place whether you facture in emotional labor or not. Describing emotional labor in this context is meant to expose that existing exchange to emphasize that there is even more work the boss is not paying for.
This whole anti-capitalist approach to unpaid physical and emotional labor does not offer individual solutions. Having more men doing emotional labour, or having more two-provider households, or breaking open the nuclear family, or building communities and queering the roles of nurturers and providers does not change this arrangement. In all these situations the boss STILL gets all this restorative work being done for free.
He will until collective action forces him to pay for it, or much better: until we abolish bosses.
QueerAnarchism 