Emotional and Relational Labour in Music from a Feminist Perspective

Musicians, their relationships, and their wellbeing: Creative labour, relational work

“…It also reveals an affective dimension of relational mismatching similar to that seen in Mears (2015), describing a case study musician who was given a large 500 Euro tip which was perceived to be a relational mismatch which "crossed a symbolic boundary into morally contestable realm of sexual exchange" (Alacovska, 2018(Alacovska, : 1577, engendering feelings of distress. Work by Barna (2022) on musicians in Hungary explores the relational and emotional labour of doing relational work, revealing Alacovska's inverse oppositional dynamic to instead be more closely entwined, as social and financial relationships are shown to be meshed and blended together in the lives of the female musicians interviewed. Moral economies of trust, gratitude, support, and care were revealed to co-exist within patriarchal music industry power structures, necessitating women undertaking close relational work to appropriately define and signal the definitions of relationships when engaged in practices of networking given the often sexually burdensome and inappropriate nature of some of these exchanges.…”

“…In this first instance, this study offers a new perspective for theorists adopting an affective prism of analysis towards practices of relational work (Mears, 2015;Stivers & Berman, 2020). Secondly, a small body of literature employs the concept of relational work in the study of musicians and musical labour (Alacovska, 2018;Barna, 2022), towards which the tensions and elucidation of the concept of 'mismatches' in this paper shines new empirical light. Finally, the paper contributes towards an emerging interest in the psychosocial causes of mental ill-health amongst musicians (Gross & Musgrave, 2017Loveday et al, 2022), highlighting here the relational causes of anxiety and depression in musicians' lives.…”