"'Women are just better at this stuff': is emotional labor feminism's next frontier?"

"“Your next story is on emotional labor as the next feminist frontier?” She repeats back at me. “But that is so sociology 101! I have been teaching undergraduate students about that for years.”

I take a sip of my beer and mumble, apologetic.

In all fairness, Lena’s friendly dismissal makes a strong point. The concept has been around for over 30 years; it was first introduced by Arlie Hochschild, an academic who formally coined the concept in her 1983 book The Managed Heart.

But only recently has it slowly started to re-emerge in online debates and pop culture. Jess Zimmerman, who wrote about emotional labor for The Toast, says she was floored by the amount of feedback she received – hundreds and hundreds of women commented in fervent agreement, thanking her for finally giving them a vocabulary for what they experienced...

In a work context, emotional labor refers to the expectation that a worker should manipulate either her actual feelings or the appearance of her feelings in order to satisfy the perceived requirements of her job. Emotional labor also covers the requirement that a worker should modulate her feelings in order to influence the positive experience of a client or a colleague...

“The way I think of emotional labor goes as follows: there are certain jobs where it’s a requirement, where there is no training provided, and where there’s a positive bias towards certain people – women – doing it. It’s also the kind of work that is denigrated by society at large.”...

The same is valid for smaller details of everyday life. “He is looking for stuff. Have you seen my nail filer? He goes to the closet and says he cannot see it. It’s there. ‘Where do we keep the kitchen towels?’ He asks me time and time again. After the third or the fourth time, that shit needs to be learned.”

She continues: “It suggests to me that there is a detachment to home that I do not have the luxury of having. Because if I did, then our everyday life would be a nightmare. So I take on that role. That’s not my authentic self, but I have no choice,” she says."

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/nov/08/women-gender-roles-sexism-emotional-labor-feminism?CMP=share_btn_fb