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This paper explores how workers try to manage their emotions under conditions that doom them to fail. The workers in question—floor instructors at a sheltered workshop for people with developmental disabilities—were expected to infuse clients with positive feelings about work and to help transform them into committed workers. But structural conditions—boring, poorly paid assembly work and long gaps between contract jobs—forced them to obtain clients' compliance through coercive and confrontational emotion management techniques that contradicted their ideological beliefs. The floor instructors sought to peacefully increase their control over clients through “preventive emotion management” but most often they experienced a loss of control, leading some of them to experience “burnout.” This paper defines burnout as “occupational emotional deviance” that workers experience when they cannot manage their own and other's emotions according to organizational expectations.

PERHAPS IT HAS ALWAYS BEEN DIFFICULTto teach about sexism. The vilification and trivialization of feminism in the mass media is long-standing, shifting over time only in rhetorical content (Aronson 2003;Bordo 1993;Hall and Rodriguez 2003;Kilbourne 1999;Morris 2002). In the last several years, we have heard students inside and outside our classrooms use violent terms like "male-basher" and "Feminazi," without irony, to describe feminists. 1 The three of us have taught courses on inequality in three universities (one research-oriented, two teaching-oriented) for many years. 2 During that time we have noticed students' patterned resistance to the idea that sexism persists and is a pervasive feature of U.S. society.Colleagues who teach conventional courses mistakenly believe that our classes are filled with progressive, left-leaning feminists who make our jobs easy. Our classes on gender inequality are largely peopled with women, and one might expect them to be open to feminist concerns. Yet most of our students-women and meninitially resist the idea that women suffer systematic inequalities because of their sex category and that men are correspondingly MAKING SEXISM VISIBLE: BIRDCAGES, MARTIANS, AND PREGNANT MEN*This paper offers six strategies for dealing with students' resistance to learning about the oppression of women: making the familiar strange, substituting race for sex, distinguishing between intentions and consequences, imagining men in women's bodies, exposing students' claims of equal gender oppression as false parallels, and analyzing some of women's desires as instances of false power. These teaching strategies, along with Marilyn Frye's (1983) metaphor of oppression as a birdcage consisting of systematically related wires, provide a framework for pre-empting or responding to students' resistance.