cannibality:

taylor-ruth:

it doesn’t sit well with me that “emotional labor” in it’s original context was Arlie Hochschild talking very specifically about how taxing face to face service industry jobs are for people (namely women) with this very nuanced context and is now used in everything from “i had to explain something to someone on twitter” or heavily in contexts of romantic relationships. not all emotional management and exchange is labor! to insert the idea of “labor” excessively into interpersonal relationships creates a system of “i performed ____ and now you OWE me for exerting ____” and it’s not healthy or what the term is for.

The way that the term ‘emotional labour’ is used by radlibs actually achieves the exact opposite of what it was originally intended to achieve. Hochschild was trying to critique the way that capitalism requires us to treat such personal things as emotional responses and inteprersonal relationships as commodities to be bought and sold. I see so many people seizing on the idea of emotional labour exactly so that they can monetise talking to each other, explaining things, or just being nice. 

Someone on Facebook once apologised to me and said they wouldn’t feel like they had properly atoned until I would accept their money. That’s… deeply disturbing. That’s exactly how capitalism wants us to understand our relationships - that they’re composed of a serious of transactions, that those transactions are mediated by flows of money, and that the only way for a relationship to be healthy is if it’s appropriately lubricated by cash. If a world where we have to pay one-another for anyone to be nice is truly the pinnacle of the identitarian politics these weird online affinity groups hold, I think that’s all the more reason to look towards different organisational forms. 

(via cannibality)