The marketplace of feelings

Because I am a huge snob and have a chip on my shoulder about vague use (and misuse) of jargon in activist spaces/social justice discourse, I lobbied one of my book clubs to read Arlie Russell Hochschild’s The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling, the book that coined the term “emotional labor.” What is “emotional labor” specifically? How does it differ from terms like “emotion work” or “feelings management” that have not become omnipresent buzzwords? What does the book have to say about emotional labor in the workplace, the realm that the term was coined to talk about?

Despite my pettiness of motivation, I did end up quite genuinely enjoying the book–it was fairly slow going to read, but that’s because I kept stopping to think about things, not because it was particularly difficult. As someone who is not naturally inclined toward fantastic social skills and therefore has a long history of reading advice columns and human sciences textbooks and other stuff that tries to put messy human things in nerd-friendly terms, I have strong opinions at this point about what is woolly vague talking about feelings and what is useful explanatory talking about feelings, and this is pretty squarely the latter. Hochschild walks us through the basics of feelings management in private life, drawing on and critiquing a wealth of earlier social scientists, and then explores what happens–and how it happens–when “feelings rules” are moved into the corporate realm, and someone’s feelings become a product. Her main case study here is Delta flight attendants in the early ‘80s, in part because Delta was consistently one of the highest ranked airlines for customer service, and in part because it was nonunion. (Not-so-fun fact: Delta’s flight attendants are STILL non-union! But they are attempting to unionize: deltaafa.org.) She also does some surveys of college students and, in one particularly interesting chapter, examines the work lives of bill collectors, for whom the particular emotions demanded are far different than those demanded of flight attendants–bill collectors are encouraged to be suspicious, impatient, and angry, so that they can be properly aggressive and disdainful of their debtors.

I’m definitely looking forward to talking about the book although I am somewhat less looking forward to having to draw up some really good meaty questions (I will try, though). One thing I don’t really want to do is summarize the book because I think one of my main takeaways here is oh, everyone on the left (or “left”) who wants to complain about emotional labor really, really should take the time to sit down and read the whole thing; it’ll absolutely give you multiple tools for thinking specifically and concretely about how and why you’re so exhausted and miserable in a way that repeating a phrase you’ve seen on social media ad nauseum absolutely won’t. What is the role of emotion vs. the role of surface behavior in the various aspects of your life? How are the people around you reflecting and enforcing “feelings rules,” and why? Why do some forms of “people telling you what to feel” piss you off so badly, and why do some of them not, and why do people keep trying to tell you your own feelings anyway? When is emotion management “authentic” and when is it not, and why are we so obsessed with “authenticity” anyway? What does putting your feelings at the service of your employer do to your mental health? While reading this book I did a lot of thinking about emotion rules and expectations in social justice spaces, where people are very explicitly trying to challenge and rewrite them to be something less oppressive–and not everyone has quite the same ideas about what that means. For example, I have heard some writers of color despair at the sort of “eat your vegetables” tone in which their books are sometimes recommended to white people–they’d rather people read their books for all the normal reasons one wants to read a book, not because it’s a moral obligation to Read More Authors Of Color, or even because the thing you do actually want to do is Diversify Your Reading.

One thing that really comes through is the continuous expansion of corporations out of their lane, so to speak, to try and continually capture marketing-that-doesn’t-feel-like-marketing, ramping up expectations in their quest to always exceed expectations, generally destroying everything they touch like a fart in search of fresh air. Once it has become expected for service staff to always smile, customers know that they’re supposed to smile, so they become expected to smile extra warmly and sincerely, to surpass the customer-service smile and achieve some other kind of less commercial-seeming smile in the commercial transactions they conduct. It’s enough to make you want to demand openly grumpy flight attendants just to reset things. (On second thought, this line of reaction seems to be what’s driving the “vulnerability porn” phenomenon on various influencer-laden platforms, where audiences now want to be reassured that our influences are just as fucked up and miserable as we are, for authenticity.) Anyway, while the takeaway of the book is certainly not “emotional labor is bad,” which many people seem to think it is, and it is even more certainly not “feelings management is bad,” which many people who think “emotional labor” is just a fancy term for “feelings management” also seem to think it is, one takeaway certainly is that the profit motive is a fucked-up thing to have running our emotional lives, and unfortunately the inevitable capitalist growth imperative does not show any more signs of stopping its inexorable takeover in this realm than it does it any other.

Anyway I am SUPER excited for this discussion! I love to talk about feelings but only in a ruthlessly academic way! No touchy feely stuff, only analysis! Anyway, this is why I have a job where I sit at home and fuck around with documents instead of doing anything client-facing.