Emotional labor is a useful idea, but far too narrowly and politically defined. Almost everybody has to do emotional labor to be effective.
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My understanding is that it's more about the amount of work, like how women are expected to help one another more than men are.
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Or the thoroughness of marginalized self-monitoring: Just outburst flips a woman's "unstable bit" or a black person's "angry bit."
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But this wouldn't be the first time I've underestimated how uselessly broad a redefinition of an otherwise useful word has been touted.
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Yes, there's an element of that, and activists would be heard more of if they made those careful qualifications
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male exec who has to restrain himself from lashing out on twitter, or snapping at employees in a meeting is emotionally labor
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Yes. Still a question of how much labor: Said exec can get away with such behavior more often than not. Frequency effect factors in.
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There's also magnitude. Constant smiling versus getting slaughtered in press and trolled massively on twitter, not able to resp
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(And apologies for crosstalk. This client's slow to mention replies.)
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'Emotional labor' opens door to all sorts of other identity-derping arguments like 'cognitive labor' and 'aspie labor' etc etc
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Kind of like how the "radical transparency/coherency" of Scrum actually empowers micromanagers more than developers?

