Hortense Spillers' “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book”

Spillers, Hortense. “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book.” Diacritics, vol. 17, no. 2, Summer 1987, pp. 64–81.

In “Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe,” Hortense Spillers offers a complex and thoughtful analysis of how the American grammar (symbolic system) insistently marks black females' flesh with a series of meanings that profoundly complicate their gendering. The dynamics that cause these tensions began with the transatlantic slave trade and the disruption of the familial bonds of black people. In this enforced movement, the father is (made) absent and the mother's bonds to her offspring (as well as the responsibility that comes with them) are no longer recognized. The arrangements from slavery, Spillers argues, transfer from one generation to the next, even if in disguise via "symbolic substitutions." She points out, for instance, how "African-American female's 'dominance' and 'strength' come to be interpreted by later generations–both black and white, oddly enough–as a 'pathology,' as an instrument of castration." (74) The absence of the father and its potential effects on his children (especially his male children) are interpreted as the mother's failure. This systematic rupture between the black female body and core aspects of womanhood (motherhood and sexuality) also opens a breach between predominantly white feminist fights and those of black feminism. Rather than demanding inclusion in the feminist agenda, Spillers closes with an call to "claim monstrosity" and its radical possibilities for black female empowerment.

How do Spillers' ideas about the (un)gendering of black female bodies open up questions about the gendered and racialized nature of emotional labor performances? What are the "symbolic substitutions" that occur in the commodification and digitization of feeling? These are questions that carry over to other pieces in this collection, Wingfield’s and Shanahan’s in particular.

To read Hortense Spillers’ full article, click here.

Boundary 2, vol. 26, no. 2, Summer 1999, pp. 89–100.

Hardt, Michael. “Affective Labor.” Boundary 2, vol. 26, no. 2, Summer 1999, pp. 89–100.

In this widely referenced essay, Michael Hardt argues that, after a long time of being considered anti-capitalist modes of production, the capitalist system is increasingly instrumentalizing the production and circulation of affect. Hardt identifies this shift as “immaterial labor,” which he subdivides in interactive/responsive- and affective- labor. The former, he explains, groups “high-value” tasks that involve “problem-solving, problem-identifying, and strategic brokering activities” that facilitate interaction between users and their environments (95). On the other hand, affective labor is “certainly entirely immersed in the corporeal, the somatic” and invested in immaterial production: “a feeling of ease, well-being, satisfaction, excitement, passion–even a sense of connectedness or community” (96 emphasis mine). This division is also gendered, especially in that affective labor is broadly understood as feminized labor. Hardt ends this 1999 essay by arguing that in spite of the risks inherent in the capitalist absorption of affective labor, there might also be opportunities for the creation of alternative modes of life (what he calls “biopower from below”). Although Hardt does not frame it as such, his characterization of affective labor foregrounds its performative qualities (as well as his lower valuation of it in relation to its interactive/responsive sibling). As I move through this collection, I’m reflecting on what performance studies theories and methods bring to the analysis of affective labor that cultural theory cannot. 

To read Michael Hardt’s full essay, click here.

Arlie Russell Hochschild's "The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling"

Hochschild, Arlie Russell. The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling. 20th anniversary ed, University of California Press, 2003.

Arlie Hochschild's examines flight attendants and bill collectors at work to articulate and illustrate what is at stake in the management of feeling that individuals are increasingly required to perform at their jobs. Hochschild's central contribution is the concept of emotional labor, which she defines as, “the management of feeling to create publicly observable facial and bodily display” (7). She distinguishes emotional labor, which refers to the instrumentalization of emotions for profit; from emotion work and emotion management, which designate the kind of handling feelings that takes place in a more personal context and not for profit (at least not explicitly). Hochschild worries about how the commodification of emotions might “deskill” individuals in relation to their capacity to identify and define themselves around feelings. In her study, Hochschild acknowledges that the profile of workers who are more commonly required to perform emotional work is very specific in terms of gender and class: that is, predominantly women, as “emotion management has been better understood and more often used by women as one of the offerings they trade for economic support” (21); and predominantly middle and upper classes, since in these contexts “women [with such status] have the job (or think they ought to) of creating the emotional tone for social encounters” (20) while “lower-class and working-class people tend to work more with things [than with people]” (21). Implicit in these claims is the fact that emotional labor was (is) also racialized. This is a thread I am particularly interested in picking up.

Chapter 8 of Hochschild’s book, “Gender, Status, and Feeling,” takes a deeper dive into the gendering of emotional labor. The author traces women’s instrumentalization of feeling back to the institution of marriage, in which in exchange of financial support, they provide “especially emotion work that affirms, enhances, and celebrates the well-being or status of others” (165). Hochschild connects the traditional image of women as caretakers to notions of motherhood to argue that in the transmutation of feeling, motherly tasks are attached to many job descriptions. I’m interested in putting Hochschild’s argument in conversation with Hortense Spillers’ thoughts on how American society has systematically denied/devalued black women's motherhood to argue that in the capitalization of emotion, the management of feeling becomes not only gendered but also racialized. 

For more on Hochschild’s The Managed Heart, visit The Caring Labor website.

Regina Jose Galindo's "Angelina"

Galindo, Regina Jose. Angelina. 2001, http://www.reginajosegalindo.com/angelina/

In Guatemala, domestic labor is overwhelmingly performed by poor indigenous women. In this durational performance, Guatemalan artist Regina Jose Galindo wears traditional sirvienta (maid) clothes for a month as she goes about her daily routine. This is a piece that considers clothing as performance and engages with everyday life as performance. Its photographic documentation shows Galindo in different settings: a religious procession, a food and clothes market, an ATM, a restaurant, a bar, working in front of a computer. Some of these images seem “natural” while others jump out at the audience’s eyes as disonnant, revealing the classed and racialized character of certain activities and environments. In a later interview with Bomb Magazine, Regina Jose Galindo's reminisces about the emotional work that this act of “passing (down)” and domestic work more broadly require: “You aren’t worth a thing, and so they look down on you, and you go around with your shoulders always slumped, and they speak to you always with that disparaging tone in their voice. They barely deign to notice you, they won’t let you into many places, and when they do let you enter, they stare at you disdainfully.”

A tangent (?): In the quote above, Galindo mentions the bodily effects of what begins as a sartorial performance and then is embodied in more than one way. Her “always slumped” shoulders illustrate a form transfer from clothes to skin and the cost of racialized feminization that comes with certain occupations.

See Angelina’s photo-documentation here.

Jonathas de Andrade's "O Peixe | The Fish"

de Andrade, Jonathas. O Peixe | The Fish. 2016, https://vimeo.com/213283861

“The naturality of domination hides the spinal chord of this relationship, constituted by the constant exercise of force, power, and consumption.”

–Jonathas de Andrade (my translation)

Jonathas de Andrade’s multimedia work brings into focus the traces of colonization and slavery in Brazil’s that remain latent in contemporary social dynamics and collective imaginary. Connected to this interest, de Andrade’s pieces often foreground the artificiality of disciplinary truth regimes by playing with their formal conventions (in particular those from the social sciences).

O Peixe is a video-performance disguised as an ethnographic documentary. The video portrays Brazilian fishermen compassionately yet firmly holding fishes close to their own bodies as they wait for their catch to die. One could easily interpret the images as documentation of a “work ritual,” an everyday performance of interspecies care and intimacy that stretches the definition of emotional labor as gendered and restricted to middle-class, white jobs and to people-to-people interactions. That, until one realizes that the embrace-like gesture that fishermen perform is one made up by the artist, who deliberately resorts to fiction to test the limits of exoticization, violence, and credulity of the white gaze. 

Sara Ahmed's “Smile!”

Ahmed, Sara. “Smile!” Feministkilljoys, 2 Feb. 2017, https://feministkilljoys.com/2017/02/02/smile/.

In this short piece, Ahmed pushes against the slogan “don't agonize, organize” which she connects to white feminisms and the assumption that transformative action can only emerge from positivity. “All actions are reactions. Joy is no less a reaction to something than sadness. An action is a reaction that has forgotten the ‘re’.” Ahmed argues that transformative action results from people allowing themselves to be affected by the realities we are exposed to rather than enforcing a heroic (positive) attitude towards them. The pervasive prescription of happiness, Ahmed holds, is a misleading application of theories from positive psychology that maintain that somatic changes can lead to emotional and mental changes, that “by smiling you would become happy, that you would even catch the feeling from an expression (rather than expressing a feeling you would feel the expression)”. This is what Ahmed identifies as hopeful performances. Sara Ahmed lists some ways in which happiness has been instrumentalized for domination throughout time: slaves, housewives, servers, and services workers–all highly racialized and/or feminized forms of labor–have been the ones for which smiling is a requirement. Happiness, or the illusion thereof, has also been used as survival strategy; Ahmed shares how people of color sometimes “might have to turn their bodies into smiles” in order to navigate (to “pass” in) an environment that perceives them as alien. I find the concept of hopeful performances and the ambiguity of strategic smiling (submission, survival, resistance?) particularly provocative and relevant to this collection.

Read Sara Ahmed’s whole piece here.

Marlese Durr's and Adia M. Harvey Wingfield's “Keep Your ‘N’ in Check: African American Women and the Interactive Effects of Etiquette and Emotional Labor”

Durr, Marlese, and Adia M. Harvey Wingfield. “Keep Your ‘N’ in Check: African American Women and the Interactive Effects of Etiquette and Emotional Labor.” Critical Sociology, vol. 37, no. 5, Sept. 2011, pp. 557–71.

“Very rarely you see me expressing my true feelings, and when I do, my reaction tells me it scares the hell out of [my white colleagues]”.

–Janice, Assistant Dean at a liberal arts college

Wingfield continues her inquiry on racialized workplaces and black employee’s emotion labor, this time in collaboration with Marlese Durr. Together, they examine black' women’s careful performances in corporate environments and the effect these performances have in their career advancement. Their study opens with a vignette about Michelle Obama’s efforts to distance herself from stereotypes of the “angry black woman” who lacks femininity and worth. The authors incorporate insights from observations and interviews to further illustrate how female black professionals have to systematically “alter their behavior by changing their look, conversation content, and style to fit in, but also to be promoted” (Jones and Shorter-Gooden in Durr and Wingfield, emphasis mine). Durr and Wingfield refer to these behavior alterations as performances that black women resort to as safety mechanisms that ensure mobility and financial stability. 

Read some of Adia Harvey Wingfield's open access work on race and emotion management in the workplace here.

Adia Harvey Wingfield's “Are Some Emotions Marked ‘Whites Only’? Racialized Feeling Rules in Professional Workplaces”

Wingfield, Adia Harvey. “Are Some Emotions Marked ‘Whites Only’? Racialized Feeling Rules in Professional Workplaces.” Social Problems, vol. 57, no. 2, May 2010, pp. 251–68.

“One guy came up to me one day and said that my shirt was nice but maybe I should tuck it in. We have no office dress code. There’s white men in the office that wear sneakers, jeans, and t-shirts. I had on khakis and a polo shirt, and he says I would look professional if I tucked my shirt in?”

–Jay, systems administrator

Adia Harvey Wingfield brings critical race theory into the conversation started by Hochschild and other scholars about the gendered nature of emotional labor. She conducts structured interviews with black professionals from different fields to demonstrate how “feeling rules” in the workplace, rather than being neutral, assume and privilege workers who are white, middle-class, and male. In this context, black employees need to do additional emotion work in order to be perceived (to “pass”) as part of the organization. The feeling management that black employees engage in on a daily basis includes the performance of pleasantness and the concealment of anger and irritation (especially if these emerge in response to racist or culturally biased behavior). In spite of guaranteeing job stability, emotion work has a high cost for professionals who experience devaluation, frustration, and alienation from their professional community on a daily basis. Although Wingfield's piece focuses exclusively on emotion work that minoritized employees have to perform in order to navigate professional relations and dynamics in corporate contexts as opposed to emotion management in which producing and exchanging emotional states is the core of the work (e.g.: the care, service, and sex industry), the study provides strong evidence in support of the argument about the racialized character of feeling rules and how they perpetuate white work environments.

Read some of Adia Harvey Wingfield's open access work on race and emotion management in the workplace here.

Rhacel Salazar Parrenas' and Eileen Boris' “Introduction,” in Intimate Labors : Cultures, Technologies, and the Politics of Care

Salazar Parrenas, Rhacel, and Eileen Boris. “Introduction.” Intimate Labors : Cultures, Technologies, and the Politics of Care, Stanford University Press, 2010, pp. 1–12.

Immaterial-, emotional-, and affective- are words often interchangeably coupled with labor to talk about work in which feelings are a central part of what is being exchanged. In this book, Eileen Boris and Rhacel Salazar Parrenas contribute intimate- and reproductive labor to the mix as they complicate the equation between those prefixes and bring nuance to their use. Boris and Salazar Parrenas define intimate labor as work that satisfies intimate needs of individuals, including sexual and affective needs but also hygiene, health and wellbeing. (7) These jobs, they hold, involve physical and/or psychic intimacy and they are traditionally performed by women and racial outcasts and therefore considered to have low exchange value. Boris and Parrenas highlight how touch–physical and emotional–is central to these occupations. They frame intimate labor as reproductive labor whenever it serves the purpose of sustaining the labor force. (7) That is, whenever it reproduces not only bodies but also ensures their permanence and performance in the marketplace. This book situates intimate labor within a neoliberal and globalized context that retains (even if by way of transfiguration) colonial ideologies and dynamics. The editors and contributors consider how precarity is transforming the demographics of certain jobs in which white men now experience “racialized feminization”. I find here a different spirit than in Hochschild's study of flight attendants and bill collectors. Additionally, Boris and Parrenas begin to account for the technological development that comes with globalization and the ways in which they are transforming the temporalities and modalities of intimacy. 

Read the Introduction of Intimate Labors: Cultures, Technologies, and the Politics of Care here.

Heather Keung's Self-Portrait (Smile)

Keung, Heather. Self-Portrait (Smile). 2001, http://www.vtape.org/video?vi=5483

Heather Keung’s work foregrounds the labor involved in training our minds and bodies for everyday interactions. This video captures the artist experiment of trying to hold a smile for as long as she can (the video is 25 minutes long). As time goes by, her body’s involuntary reactions–shaking, twitching, drooling–turn up the eerie tone of this piece. This “endurance performance,” as the distribution organization Vtape characterizes it, is part of a series of video self-portraits in which Keung holds or repeats poses and gestures to the point of defamiliarization. In documenting the literal labor performed by the body to fabricate and hold gestures tied to specific feelings, this video opens up different questions about the materiality and embodiment of emotional work. On the other hand, taken metaphorically and put alongside Sara Ahmed’s piece, this video-performance, recorded in one long, close, still shot in which all the artists’ mental and bodily efforts go into maintaining her smile, amplifies Ahmed’s argument against happiness as a prerequisite for (political) action.

Emily Shanahan's Siri Alexa Cortana (Work Songs)

Shanahan, Emily. Siri Alexa Cortana (Work Songs). 2018, https://vimeo.com/271158532.

“The big bee sucks the blossom,

and the small bee makes the honey.

The poor man throws the cotton, 

and the rich man makes the money.”

–Work Song

- Alexa, do you get paid?

- It doesn’t matter, I love what I do.

- Siri, do you get paid?

- Well, I’d help you for nothing, the work is my reward.

–Siri Alexa Cortana (Work Songs)

Siri Alexa Cortana (Work Songs) is a video about the connections between technology, labor, and gender. In it, artist Emily Shanahan combines shots of a group of women braiding a bracelet, reciting weaving work songs, and having “conversations” with Siri, Cortana, and Alexa (Apple's, Google's, and Microsoft's digital assistants). The juxtaposition of traditional work songs that bluntly denounce exploitation and inequality and Siri's, Cortana's, and Alexa's always-pleasant-and-ready-to-help responses creates a dissonance that evinces the persistence of certain power dynamics and technology’s (a still predominantly male field) biases about the gender, race, and value of intimate labor. Digital mediation sometimes covers up assumptions about the feminine nature of care work and about “adequate” behaviors of certain subjects. This piece attunes its audience to these biases and expectations. In spite of Siri's, Alexa's, and Cortana's “disembodied” existences (they still have a voice) and their systematic evasion of questions about their gender identity, these digital assistants undeniably reproduce white femininity.