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Abstract
The concept of emotional labour pervades recent popular discourse. However, this discourse tends to emphasize the unpaid work performed in personal and familial relationships. This erases Arlie Russell Hochschild’s distinction between emotion work and emotional labour, the latter of which is a waged ‘management of feeling’ that ‘create[s] a publicly observable facial and bodily display’. This focus on unwaged emotion work identifies a real site of exploitation, but tends to obscure the recent historical tendency of care work to be subsumed increasingly into new forms of low-waged labour. I examine this tendency by turning to Catherine Lacey’s speculative novel The Answers (2017), which follows an indebted young woman, Mary, who takes a contract job in an experiment run by a celebrity seeking love. Alongside ‘girlfriends’ with other intimate roles, Mary is paid to be an ‘Emotional Girlfriend.’ I argue that the novel’s thought experiment of splitting the various roles of a romantic partner into separate, waged jobs not only commodifies affective labour, but also replicates the process of industrial deskilling in its depiction of the real subsumption of affective work into the service sectors. Next, I discuss the role of the experiment’s Research Division, which not only monitors experimental subjects via cameras, sensors, and interviews, but also directly influences their behaviour using ‘internal directives’, or chemical instructions that biologically optimize emotion. I argue that these directives intensify the management of feeling to make working subjects’ emotions more productive for capital. The argument concludes that The Answers updates Hochschild’s theory to account for work that is now often less secure, but fails to address the political questions it raises.
Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 Academics have developed specific concepts for types of work that fall under the umbrella of emotional labour in popular discourse. For instance, Arlene Kaplan Daniels (Citation1987) coined the term ‘invisible work’ to describe ‘women’s work’ that is often not seen as real work. Ellie Anderson (Citation2023) terms emotionally interpretive work ‘hermeneutic labour.’ Marxist feminists including Sylvia Federici, Leopoldina Fortunati, and Mariarosa Dalla Costa and Selma James have long argued for recognition of the value of unpaid domestic work.
2 Amado Padilla (Citation1994: 26) terms this additional work ‘cultural taxation’.
3 Following Hochschild’s work, emotional labour has become a sociological field of study with several areas of inquiry. See Steinberg and Figart (Citation1999) and Wharton (Citation2009).
4 Some Marxist feminists would dispute this claim. For example, Leopoldina Fortunati (Citation1996: 8) argues, ‘the real difference between production and reproduction is not that of value/non-value, but that while production both is and appears as the creation of value, reproduction is the creation of value but appears otherwise’.
5 Hochschild notes this trend with regards to the ‘care sector’ in the afterword to the Twentieth Anniversary edition of The Managed Heart.
6 Many workers, especially women, now perform emotional labour on the job, as well as a disproportionate amount of emotion work in the home. Hochschild (with Anne Machung Citation2003) termed this phenomenon the ‘the second shift’ in a later monograph of that title.
7 For emotional labour and managerial control in the platform-mediated gig economy, see Gandini (Citation2019).
8 For the effects of the pandemic on emotional labourers, see Loustaunau et al. Citation2021.
9 See, for example, Parker and Menasce Horowitz (Citation2022).
10 Many industries remain short-staffed due to employers’ unwillingness to provide better compensation and employees’ unwillingness to work in exploitative jobs exacerbated by the pandemic. This means that work is intensified for those workers who remained in these industries.
11 This trend was evident at the time of the book’s publication. Hochschild (Citation1983: 244) notes that ‘Within these categories are some of the most rapidly growing occupations. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, there will be a 30 percent growth for social workers, 25 percent for preschool teachers, 45 percent for health administrators, 33 percent for sales managers, 79 percent for flight attendants, and 35 percent for food-counter workers. The largest number of new jobs are expected in the retailing sector, especially in department stores and restaurants’.
12 See Smith (Citation2020: 76–81).
13 Subsumption refers to the process through which labour is altered by the social relations of production.
14 See Macintosh Citation2019.
15 Jobs deemed skilled tend to reflect barriers to entry rather than aptitude required. Jobs deemed unskilled tend to be gendered and racialized and are subsequently paid less.
16 Recent novels about college-educated millennials in care or other interactive service work include Halle Butler’s The New Me (2019), Kiley Reid’s Such a Fun Age (2019), and Lila Savage’s Say, Say, Say (2019). Like novels concerned with emotional labour, novels marketed as or understood to be ‘millennial fiction’ tend to be written by women. For the latter, see Sudjic (Citation2019).
17 Hereafter cited as TA.
18 Although a college degree is less able to guarantee career success than in the past, and the investment carries more risk as tuition costs and student loan debt soar, college still positions a graduate for ‘skilled’ jobs that tend to have higher pay and benefits.
19 Aaron Benanav (Citation2020: 49) notes that ‘in the 1980s and early ’90s, some Americans were able to insulate themselves from downward pressure on wages by getting a college degree. However, by the early 2000s […] the college wage premium had stabilized, since the wages of most college-educated workers had begun to stagnate. The median American college-educated worker earned a lower real wage in 2018 than in 2000, even though the total value of outstanding student loans rose dramatically over those years. The reason is that from 2000 on, economic growth rates slowed significantly—and so too rates of job creation—while college degrees became more common: 40 percent of prime-age workers had at least a college degree in 2019. Those degrees offered less protection from deteriorating labor market conditions’. See also McClanahan (Citation2017: 515-17).
20 Mary’s credit card debt stems from a series of international trips that the novel suggests is a form of effacing herself or running away from her problems.
21 The novel, then, is not concerned with uncompensated invisible labour, but inadequate compensation for formal labour.
22 Notably, all are low-waged entry-level interactive service jobs.
23 Compare these requirements, for example, to driving for Uber, which requires only that the driver is of legal age to drive, a year of driving experience, a U.S. driver’s licence, and a qualifying automobile.
24 The Managed Heart’s other case study is of bill collectors, whose affective management is less about cultivating customer contentment than bluntly compelling debtors to pay up.
25 Many flight attendants were also represented by unions, although, notably, the Delta workers Hochschild interviewed were not. As of writing, Delta flight attendants are amidst a union drive. They remain the only non-unionized major airline in the U.S. See Wulfhart (Citation2022).
26 Matheson is also an emotional labourer in both his roles as Kurt’s assistant and as de facto manager of the experiment's subjects.
27 I thank the special issue editors for noting that by separating out the different roles that a contemporary partner may be expected to perform, the experiment, somewhat perversely, provides a fix for the pressures of modern relationships as described by psychoanalyst Esther Perel (Citation2006). That is, if modern relationships demand that the ideal partner perform the roles of friend, lover, counsellor, and so on that were once played by several people, the GX separates them out again in the form of waged labour.
28 The contract suggests the use of contracts in romance fiction, perhaps most notably in E. L. James’s Fifty Shades of Grey (2011). Whereas the contract in the latter features a clause forbidding care in a sexual relationship, The Answers forbids sex between the subject and the care worker.
29 The GX believes that since Mary is oblivious to Kurt’s fame, they will be more likely to form a less mediated, more authentic relationship.
30 I thank the special issue editors for drawing the import of this language to my attention. While Mary does not generally participate in wellness culture, it is well represented in the novel via her only friend, Chandra.
31 The GX protocols are the ‘feeling rules’ Mary is meant to follow. Hochschild (Citation1983: 18) argues that ‘Feeling rules are standards used in emotional conversation to determine what is rightly owed and owing in the currency of emotion’. Feeling rules act as norms in everyday life; management constrains one’s own feeling rules to specific desired reactions via employee manuals and scripts.
32 According to Harry Braverman (Citation1974: 59), ‘Scientific management, so-called, is an attempt to apply the methods of science to the increasingly complex problems of the control of labour in rapidly growing capitalist enterprises. It lacks the characteristics of a true science because its assumptions reflect nothing more than the outlook of the capitalist with regard to the conditions of production. […] It investigates not labour in general, but the adaptation of labour to the needs of capital. It enters the workplace not as the representative of science, but as the representative of management masquerading in the trappings of science’. As Soren Mau (Citation2023: 246) helpfully notes, ‘Capital is not interested in deskilling as such, but only in deskilling as a tool of domination—a point often missed by critics of deskilling’.
33 There is significant debate about deskilling in the literature concerned with the intersection of the labour process and emotional labour. For a brief overview, see Ikeler (Citation2016: 969–70).
34 This shift might be that from which Hochschild terms ‘surface acting’, or playing a role in the sense of Erving Goffman’s (Citation1959) theory of presentation of self as performance, to ‘deep acting’, or spontaneously producing the desired emotion. For an explanation and critique of Goffman, see Hochschild, Appendix A, especially 226-8.
35 The lack of emotional reciprocation is typical in jobs requiring emotional labour. As Wharton (Citation2009: 154) notes, ‘As a job requirement or expectation, caregiving is emotionally demanding and often performed in unequal relationships in which recipients' needs are primary and providers are disadvantaged’.
36 Put into Goffman’s terms (Citation1959: 1922-6), Mary senses an inconsistency between setting and manner in her ‘front’.
37 For a theory of alienation in emotional labour that expands on Hochschild, see Brook (Citation2009).
38 In fact, industrial productivity gains associated with the spectre of automation in the twentieth century were themselves usually obtained through lay-offs and speed-up rather than innovations in plant and machinery. See Resnikoff, Labor’s End (Citation2021).
39 The latter wellness monitoring application played a triggering role in the West Virginia teachers strike in 2018.
40 For example, Smith (Citation2020: 110) notes that ‘In January 2018, Amazon patented two wearable devices to promote the efficiency of its warehouse employees; worn on wristbands, these devices “would use ultrasonic pulses—pitches too high for human ears to detect—to connect with inventory modules on bins to track a worker’s hands. Vibrations would communicate information to the wearer, such as alerting someone when they put something in the wrong bin’”.
41 Wharton (Citation2009: 149–50) notes ‘Studies can be broadly divided into those that use emotional labour as a vehicle to understand the organization, structure, and social relations of particular kinds of service jobs and those focused more directly on emotions and their management at work’.
42 Exceptions exist. For example, sociologist Roger Patulny and his co-authors (Citation2020: 337) examine ‘the connections between emotions, emotion management and precarious work across various occupations’. In her discussion of ‘bad feeling’ at work, Carolyn Veldstra (Citation2020: 13) argues that while not stated outright, Hochschild’s theory anticipates the ‘connection between the rise of emotional labour and the imposition—through both deliberate and indirect means—of conditions of precarity among employees’.