The ‘Concept Creep’ of Emotional Labor
The term “emotional labor” used to be more narrowly defined than it is today. Sociologist Arlie Hochschild invented the term to describe a shadow dimension of paid work in the post-Fordist, pink-collar service industry. In her study of flight attendants in 1983, she went to Delta’s trainings and was struck by the emphasis placed on smiling. Not just skin-deep smiling; deeply felt, warm smiles were a core job expectation. This is emotional labor, for Hochschild: “to induce or suppress feeling in order to sustain the outward countenance that produces the proper state of mind in others.” The job obliges the attendant, not only to smile outwardly, but to work up some warmth behind it, so that her conviviality will more effectively radiate to her passengers.
In the last decade, the term’s reach has expanded past the pink-collar service industry to all sorts of jobs: university professors (especially women and racialized people, and during the pandemic—a clause which applies to many other items on this list too), pilots, call center agents, bosses, migrant domestic workers, grocery cashiers confronted with belligerently maskless customers, anybody who needs to make sure people feel heard, anybody who needs to project confidence or competence, any up-and-comer who’s ever worked the room at a professional event, gig economy workers who hustle for those five stars, etc. And it’s not all positive emotions: bill collectors have to work up ruthlessness or shamelessness rather than cheer and conviviality.
The habitat of this term in feminist discourse has expanded even farther, moving off the clock entirely to girlfriends and housewives (especially cis women in heteronormative relationships with cis men), women relating to men in any capacity, women smiling (on command or out of habitual conformity to gendered expectations), women in professional environments (like philosophy conferences), activists, advocates, friends, being antiracist, being Black in a world of anti-Black racism, feminist killjoys, parenting (especially mothering, and especially during the pandemic), and gender (and not just your own: your gender may be sustained by someone else’s emotional labor). Some of these uses are very intersectionally aware; many less so.
The variety of uses demonstrate that the term strikes many feminists as powerfully capturing something about injustice; not just economic, but also social injustice, for which we don’t otherwise have language.
Should we be worried that this stretches the term too far? Hochschild herself sounded the alarm about “concept creep.” She calls emotional toil off the clock “emotion work” rather than emotional labor, which allows us to distinguish between what is happening in the economic realm and social realms.
So far feminists have tried to discipline emotional labor into a manageable scope by restricting our discussion to emotional toil we do on the job, or else off. Restricting either way fails to capture the intersectional way that gender and race are deployed to divide emotional labor across the paid-unpaid distinction. Divisions of labor start with how we define what counts as work, and gender and race are part of how we divide the toil on both sides of that line. For example, while Hochschild wants to restrict emotional labor to paid work, Louwanda Evans’ study of Black flight attendants and pilots argues that the emotional labor of Black professionalism extends far off the clock. The work of disarming racialized fear, disgust, and suspicion is demanded of Black people in order to be received as professional, respectable, and non-threatening in white spaces, whether they’re on the clock or off. The demand for this emotional labor comes from racialized expectations, which are not exhausted by job expectations. Central to what the expanding usage of the concept of emotional labor is trying to grasp is how affective injustice stretches across the economic and the social, using the pivot between them to generate exploitative affective economies.
What exactly is the problem this concept aims to critique? Hochschild thinks that the problem with emotional labor is that capitalism has encroached into affective life, making it seem that emotion work off the clock is just. For the germinal popular feminist expansions of the term, emotional labor is unpaid work, and the problem is the lack of compensation, making it seem that emotional labor on the clock is just. Many accounts imply that emotional labor is bad, full stop: we should call a general strike! (Or at least a smile strike.) But surely emotional labor is a necessary aspect of ethical life: people whose affective lives are lived purely spontaneously would not be able to build character or caring relationships, or cultivate social norms amongst themselves.
Ameliorating Emotional Labor: What Do We Want It To Be?
In situations of conceptual growing pains like these, philosophy’s conceptual crafts can come in handy. Feminist philosophers have developed an approach called offering an “ameliorative definition.” To ameliorate a concept is to build a better version of it. Instead of disciplining the term to a pre-existing set of definitional constraints, we take seriously that a new usage of a term that emerges from some critical tradition (feminist or otherwise) might have something important to say, and we develop new theoretical scaffolding to enable the term to serve the critical tradition’s purposes.
So instead of asking what emotional labor is, we should ask: what do we want it to be? Enabling the intersectional feminist work to which the expanding use of the term aims requires both (1) broadening the concept through a theory of affective economies, and (2) deepening the concept through a theory of affective injustice.
First, we need to broaden the concept of emotional labor: (1) Expand its scope to address a uniquely affective dimension of human activity that subtends both the social and the economic (both the unpaid and the paid, not just one or the other). I call this dimension affective economies.
By affective economies, I mean transindividual circulation that produces and amplifies affective force and orients affective sense (á la Ahmed), but I also mean systems of feeling rules that function as divisions of labor (á la Hochschild). Hochschild gives us the idea of affective economies as social systems that create demands for certain kinds of emotion work, expectations about who will supply it, and practices of training distinct emotional competencies in distinct social classes: they are systems for determining who owes what emotion work to whom, and when, how much, etc. Ahmed gives us the idea that what affective economies produce is affect. They are not just about affect; rather, the very substance of what circulates in them and gets produced or amplified by them is affective sense and force. Only when we consider an instance of emotional labor in the context of the affective economies that demand and supply it will the normative issues come into focus, and the question of affective injustice can be properly posed.
Second, we need to deepen the concept of emotional labor:(2) Get critical purchase on the affective dimension of human activity by building a normative framework for understanding and evaluating affective injustice. Just as injustice can take epistemic forms, it can also take affective forms.
This requirement involves not only identifying where emotional labor goes wrong—its unique risks of exploitation, etc.—but also cultivating our dreams of what affective justice would feel like and exploring the role of emotion work in activism and in forms of resistance to affective injustice. Working these two components together allows us to ask: which sorts of affective economies are just, and which are unjust? Which affective economies are toxic and should be starved, and which should we feed and grow?
What Is So Compelling About the Term to Feminists, Anyway?
When I first encountered Hochschild’s study, I was amazed to find out that the entire service industry seems to be banking on the reality of transindividual, energetically charged affect circulation! The flight attendant’s job is to manage other’s affects by way of managing her own. Since the flight attendant has to drum up the right sort of circulation between her affective surfaces and depths in order to generate the affective force that will effectively broadcast to others, emotional labor involves two interlocking circuits of affect circulation: both intrasubjective and intersubjective. Philosophers are often suspicious that all this affect theory talk about affect as transindividual and energetically forceful is so much magical thinking—not rigorously grounded in fact or in theory. Meanwhile, a whole industry is literally banking on affect circulating in this transindividual, forceful way.
The expansion of the term suggests this sort of affect circulation may extend far past the service industry. Perhaps emotional work is coextensive with affective life. Much of my own affective life involves actively winding up or down these interlocking circulations, managing my own affects, hoping to move others in the right ways by swallowing my pride, working on my confidence, or using my anger.
This active work flies in the face of the popular naïve view of affective life, in which feelings just are what they are: spontaneous, involuntary upsurges of affective force. One can control display, but not feeling. We feel what we feel. We can’t help it. And we shouldn’t be judged for it.
If emotional work is possible, then this naïve view of how affective life operates is mistaken. No doubt affective life is full of spontaneous upsurges, but any adult person who has been successfully habituated to some particular social context is managing their affective surfaces and depths in relation to either their own aspirations for their character and relationships, or in relation to “feeling rules” (social norms about appropriate affect), or both. I am not always spontaneously patient with my friends, but I go to some effort to be so, adopting a patient countenance and directing my energies toward winding down my agitation, hoping to broadcast to my friend genuine interest and warm support. Over time, my spontaneous feelings may migrate to suit my aspirations. Or I might suppress my anger, sensing that given my gender and race, it will tend to move people in the wrong ways. For better or worse, over time, I may become someone who rarely feels anger to begin with.
The promise of the concept of emotional labor is its power to name a site of affective varieties of injustice, as well as affective agencies for transformative resistance and world-building. In her discussion of white rage and fear of losing privilege, Brittany Cooper writes: “To be Black is to grow up in a world where white feelings can become dangerous weapons. If you’re Black, white fear is frequently lethal…. Frankly, I resent others who allow their feelings to roam around unmanaged, demanding everybody’s attention.” Anti-Blackness often manifests in the world as a surge of racializing affect: white fear, white rage, anti-Black horror or phobic disgust. Though these feelings may indeed arise unbidden in an individual who lives in an affective economy of anti-Black racism, it does not follow that they are unmanageable. White people need to start paying attention to the toxic emotional labor we’re creating for others and start working to cultivate anti-racist affective economies.
Intersectional feminists should resist naïve theories of affect and emotion that (a) refuse to admit that they can have transindividual force, and (b) refuse to admit that they can be managed. Those apparently innocent theoretical positions moonlight as ideologies that sustain unjust affective economies and obscure the reality of affective injustice.
“White fear,” Cooper writes, “is the cultural refuse of white supremacy. Strewn about and never properly disposed of, it becomes an environmental hazard for those of us who must live in the neighborhoods (metaphoric and otherwise) where white folks choose to dump all their shit.” The affective economy of white supremacy is one in which white people are not subject to the same feeling rules as racialized people are, in a way that creates a racialized division of emotional labor. When this affective economy produces a crop of white fear (fear of loss of privilege, of Black folks’ bodies, etc.), Cooper points out that as a Black woman, this leaves her with a burden of emotional work that she can refuse only at her peril: “if you are Black and hope to live to adulthood, micromanaging your feelings is necessary for survival.” The toxicity of white fear to Black people functions as a demand for them to engage in affectively exhausting toil with respect to it: (a) be attuned to racializing affects, even though they are toxic, terrifying, insulting, and wounding; (b) disarm them, if possible—perhaps by broadcasting polite, non-threatening respectability, though that approach has its costs; and all the while (c) swallow one’s own fear, as well as one’s rage at the injustice of this situation—even when that amounts to an indigestible, toxic surplus.
The injustice here is not simply distributive. It’s not just that Black people are doing more than their share of emotional work. Yes, white people should chip in on the work of toxic affect waste disposal. But the underlying problem is that this affective economy produces toxic affects to begin with. In some affective economies, there are goods being produced that some people get to benefit from while others don’t, and redistribution of the goods and labor is the remedy. The problem with this affective economy is that it produces things that aren’t good: domination, exploitation, and violence. That won’t be remedied by redistribution alone. We will need to cultivate alternative affective economies. And that will require some emotional work.
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Shiloh Whitney
Shiloh Whitney is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at Fordham University. Her research lies at the intersection of Feminist Philosophy, Critical Phenomenology, and Philosophy of Emotions. Her work can be found in Hypatia, Southern Journal of Philosophy, among many other journals, as well as in 50 Concepts for a Critical Phenomenology and Thinking the US South: Contemporary Philosophy from Southern Perspectives.
