Mirchandani, Kiran. “Challenging racial silences in studies of emotion work: contributions from anti-racist feminist theory” June 2003.
one-sentence summary: studies of emotional work or emotional labour have ignored the aspects of gender, race, and class and consequently, the results obtained are too narrow in describing the actual character of emotional work, and emotional labour may be inherently too narrow of a term because aspects overlap.
Further, (ok, I couldn’t do just one sentence) because quantitative analysis may be difficult to impossible to undertake because of overlapping categories, it may be better to “focus on qualitative differences in the language used to described this work” (6).
1: emotion work: “the often visible dimensions of the relational work which people do as part of caring for their families or performing their paid jobs” (1).
2: emotion work: (1) “management of self-feeling; (2) “the work of making others feel a certain way;” and (3) “the effort involved in giving definition to one’s work”
2: emotion labour: “emotion work done for wage” and “‘the act of trying to change in degree or quality an emotion or feeling’” (Hochschild 1979: 561)
2: Quotes James (1989) who says “emotional labour is a social process which is involved in dealing with other people’s feelings. Examples include being available for thers, interpreting their needs and providing a personal response” (2).
3: Quotes Hochschild who sees “emotion work is unwaged work done in the private sphere, while emotion labor is work in the public sphere done for a wage” (3). Refers to others who disagree.
5: Refers to Freedman who says, “individuals do not hold fixed race, gender and class identifies (sic), nor do they confront static social divisions…In relation to white people, Leslie Marmon Silko and Paula Gunn Allen are women of colour, Native Americans and partially while. In relation to women of colour, they are Native American. In relation to Native Americans, theya re members of the Laguna Pueblo. In relation to each other, they are individual women who characterize the Laguna Pueblo culture in startlingly different ways” (Friedman 1996: 125)