Gemma Hartley

Here's my unpopular opinion: I don't like the way the phrase 'emotional labour' has been changed in the past few years. Here's a great article about it, but I'll summarize: these days you're basically saying that since it's labour done by women, and women are emotional, then it's emotional labour.

I kept thinking that as I was reading this. The book is about emotionality! Where is it!? (That's a movie reference btw, don't act like I'm dumb) You're describing different kinds of labour, for sure, but why is it emotional? Why is EMOTIONAL to do a fucking grocery list? It's mental labour, but not emotional.

I think this book does a good job describing a problem that's facing women, but I don't think it's emotional labour and it makes the entire book very hard to read. I feel like we used to talk about invisible labour and women being the family's project leader, but now all of a sudden we found a buzzword to apply to everything and that means we can't have any meaningful conversations. It's like how "problematic" means nothing anymore, you need to point out what the problem is (someone isn't being 'problematic', they're being 'racist', for example).

It bothers me. By this definition me writing SQL queries at work is emotional labour because it is labour and it makes me fucking emotional. That doesn't track??? Emotional labour is something else, it's the performing emotions at your job because it's expected of people in your profession. And it's fucking EXHAUSTING in case you didn't know.

To quote the article: "Which gets at the main reason the rapidly shifting meaning of “emotional labor” does matter: It diverts attention from the original focus on labor struggle and suggests depoliticized solutions that offer women no real power or lasting independence like “guilt trip your man” and “ask Reply Guys to Venmo you $50.” It also makes bourgeois women the focus of a discussion that was meant to provide a theoretical basis to unite working women (and non-women) — teachers, sex workers, bartenders, flight attendants —in a struggle for better labor conditions."

(I know I've lost this battle. I'm not interested in your deep, well-thougthout arguments about why it's emotional labour to have to do the dishes. I don't care)… (més)

I found this book to be both infuriating and profoundly alienating. I kept wanting to shout, "What is wrong with you?" I know it's not fair to blame individuals for systemic problems but if this is what most heterosexual relationships are like, I don't know why any woman would choose to enter one! (I, too, am in a heterosexual relationship, and that is where the alienation comes in: the experiences the author describes are completely foreign to my partnership. We share chores, we share mental load, and we check in with each other about balance. It's not that hard. From each according to their ability and all.)

The author doesn't do a sufficient job of distinguishing "emotional labor" from "mental load." Also, I would have liked to see more data -- but the book seems to fall into a grey area in between sociological analysis and self-help. I appreciate the former but have little patience for the latter.

The second half of the book, with essays about emotional labor out of the home, was nothing original. Lean In is more thoughtful about the workplace, and any number of feminists on the internet have better written and more insightful analyses about violence against women and rape culture.

I suppose the book could be enlightening to someone who is just encountering these ideas. But it was so, so entirely not for me.… (més)