A thought-provoking and incisive book.
A Detroit-based British journalist examines the gender bias and misogyny underlying what she calls “extractive emotional capitalism.”
Early on, Hackman defines emotional labor as “the primordial training that, before anything else, women and girls should edit the expression of their emotions to accommodate and elevate the emotions of others.” Through research and interviews conducted over seven years, the author explores how such "editing" and "elevation" constitute an invisible yet heavily exploitative form of work. She observes that such labor is tied to the enforcement of traditional gender norms intended to keep women (and men) tied to specific roles. This “enforces a system where supposedly altruistic women serve supposedly emotionally helpless men.” Hackman vividly demonstrates that this system encompasses both the domestic and professional spheres, affecting the lives of women across lines of race and socio-economic class. One area in which it most visibly operates is the service industry, in which a largely female workforce is at the mercy of business owners and executives who often fail to pay servers enough to create an agreeable experience for patrons, who may (or may not) offer the remuneration one restaurant employee called “the difference between economic survival and destitution.” Hackman argues that part of the way the system justifies itself is not only by devaluing women’s work, but—and almost paradoxically—suggesting that emotional labor “is so valuable that it is incalculable, making it sacrilegious for it to be paid.” As she critiques the neoliberalism that has given rise to an economic system built on invisible exploitation, Hackman issues a clarion call to rethink the true relationship between empathy and power. “It’s time to bring emotional labor into the light and to plant the seeds for reckoning and transformation, for a new kind of understanding of what it means to live together, in society,” she writes. “Our joint humanity depends on it.”
A thought-provoking and incisive book.Pub Date: March 28, 2023
ISBN: 978-1-25077-735-5
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: Jan. 10, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2023
A fierce, penetrating, and empowering call for change.
Artist and activist Vaid-Menon demonstrates how the normativity of the gender binary represses creativity and inflicts physical and emotional violence.
The author, whose parents emigrated from India, writes about how enforcement of the gender binary begins before birth and affects people in all stages of life, with people of color being especially vulnerable due to Western conceptions of gender as binary. Gender assignments create a narrative for how a person should behave, what they are allowed to like or wear, and how they express themself. Punishment of nonconformity leads to an inseparable link between gender and shame. Vaid-Menon challenges familiar arguments against gender nonconformity, breaking them down into four categories—dismissal, inconvenience, biology, and the slippery slope (fear of the consequences of acceptance). Headers in bold font create an accessible navigation experience from one analysis to the next. The prose maintains a conversational tone that feels as intimate and vulnerable as talking with a best friend. At the same time, the author's turns of phrase in moments of deep insight ring with precision and poetry. In one reflection, they write, “the most lethal part of the human body is not the fist; it is the eye. What people see and how people see it has everything to do with power.” While this short essay speaks honestly of pain and injustice, it concludes with encouragement and an invitation into a future that celebrates transformation.
A fierce, penetrating, and empowering call for change. (writing prompt) (Nonfiction. 14-adult)Pub Date: June 2, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-593-09465-5
Page Count: 64
Publisher: Penguin Workshop
Review Posted Online: March 14, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2020
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our...
A psychologist and Nobel Prize winner summarizes and synthesizes the recent decades of research on intuition and systematic thinking.
The author of several scholarly texts, Kahneman (Emeritus Psychology and Public Affairs/Princeton Univ.) now offers general readers not just the findings of psychological research but also a better understanding of how research questions arise and how scholars systematically frame and answer them. He begins with the distinction between System 1 and System 2 mental operations, the former referring to quick, automatic thought, the latter to more effortful, overt thinking. We rely heavily, writes, on System 1, resorting to the higher-energy System 2 only when we need or want to. Kahneman continually refers to System 2 as “lazy”: We don’t want to think rigorously about something. The author then explores the nuances of our two-system minds, showing how they perform in various situations. Psychological experiments have repeatedly revealed that our intuitions are generally wrong, that our assessments are based on biases and that our System 1 hates doubt and despises ambiguity. Kahneman largely avoids jargon; when he does use some (“heuristics,” for example), he argues that such terms really ought to join our everyday vocabulary. He reviews many fundamental concepts in psychology and statistics (regression to the mean, the narrative fallacy, the optimistic bias), showing how they relate to his overall concerns about how we think and why we make the decisions that we do. Some of the later chapters (dealing with risk-taking and statistics and probabilities) are denser than others (some readers may resent such demands on System 2!), but the passages that deal with the economic and political implications of the research are gripping.
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our minds.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-374-27563-1
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2011
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