EMOTIONAL LABOR

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.