Emotional Labour Pains: Rebirth of the Good Girl

Westacott, Marguerite; Green, Claire; Elsom, Sandra

doi:10.1007/978-3-030-75859-2_7

Cited by 3 publications

(1 citation statement)

References 19 publications

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“…(2019) divided the tasks mothers perform into different areas to quantify the sheer number and breadth of expectations—creating routines, maintaining order in the home, child adjustment etc. The authors, like others who write about motherhood and emotional labor, did so to push for more shared responsibilities within couple relationships in the home (Robertson et al., 2019; Westacott et al., 2021). These works hypothesized that gender inequality is responsible for inequitable distribution of the essential tasks of childrearing and social reproduction.…”

Section: Discussion and Conclusion: Neoliberal Times: Collectivizing ...mentioning

confidence: 99%

My mum is on strike! Social reproduction and the (emotional) labor of ‘mothering work’ in neoliberal Britain

English

Brown

2023

Gender Work & Organization

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This article will explore the ways mothers and carers use the term ‘emotional labor’ to describe the exhaustion and burnout associated with socially reproductive tasks, rather than the performance of affective labor in the workplace. Scholars of social reproduction theory claim that emotion is key to understanding the specificities of gendered alienation, yet it remains under‐theorised. This article seeks to understand how the emotional lives of carers have been transformed by neoliberal processes that have intensified labor both within and beyond the home. Drawing on interviews with participants from the 2019 ‘My Mum is on Strike’ stay and play event, alongside ethnographic insights from online mothering blogs, sometimes referred to as the ‘mamasphere’ (Wilson et al., 2017), this article seeks to contextualize the experiences of carers who narrate their reproductive labor as emotional ‘work’. Given the conditions of neoliberal rationality and the marketization of society, where every ‘field of activity… and entity (whether public or private, whether person, business, or state) is understood as a market and governed as a firm’ (Brown, 2015), emotional labor and the associated gendered expectations may begin to ‘feel like’ work, and we argue that this is felt in a specific way by those carrying out mothering labor, warranting further academic investigation.

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Section: Discussion and Conclusion: Neoliberal Times: Collectivizing ...mentioning

confidence: 99%

My mum is on strike! Social reproduction and the (emotional) labor of ‘mothering work’ in neoliberal Britain

English

Brown

2023

Gender Work & Organization

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The Iceberg in the Room: A Causal Layered Analysis of Self with the Futures Sense of Yearning

Westacott

2024

World Futures Review

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This Futures focussed paper shares my creative response to a reflexive ricochet of being researcher, to unexpectedly becoming the researched and back again. I am currently using phenomenologically art-led and heuristic research methods to explore the implications of the Futures Senses in tertiary career education. The field of career theory is holistic and multidisciplinary. It draws from psychological, sociological and cultural fields to contextualise human action across the lifespan. Therefore, I work with people in transition and anticipation. This paper emerged from my immersion in the Futures Sense of Yearning and the moment I recognised the futures sense of Yearning in myself. This unexpected epiphany initiated a reflexive response as spectator of, and traveller on, my own transitional and anticipatory experience which was hovering in the spaces between the inner and outer self. Using a Jungian spontaneous drawing technique I set to give voice to what Jung noted as the ‘… two worlds: the world of the external perception and the world of the perception of the unconscious…’. This process revealed latent embodied knowing that surfaced through dialogue with the artwork. The layered emergent data of the artwork is analysed using a Causal Layered Analysis (CLA). The CLA invites diverse and layered perspectives of the subject of inquiry by examining it from the perspectives of litany, systems, worldviews and metaphor. Inayatullah uses an iceberg analogy, to illustrate the layers of an inquiry that are simultaneously exposed and discrete; known, unknown and ‘re-known’. Thus, a CLA of self is used, to reveal the ‘iceburg in the room’, with intention to explicate the meaning of the personal, as it relates to the collective.

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Writing Through Tears: Women, Grief and Hope in the Academy

Badenhorst,

McLeod,

Boachie

et al. 2024

JCACS

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Grief shatters the body, at once collapsing inwards while simultaneously tearing apart. Is there room for grief in the neoliberal academic body? Is there space for small everyday losses as well as large life-changing losses? What do we do when our workspaces silence our grief? As academics, we are subject to a competitive, pressurized working culture resulting in increasing stress, anxiety, exhaustion. We have also experienced a devastating global pandemic. Yet, grief and loss are not emotions we readily acknowledge in our workspaces. Inspired by Shelton and Sieben (2020), we focus on this very topic and emotion, which has affected us in different ways. We bring grief (deep sorrow from death or loss) centre-stage as a way of speaking-back, stepping away from the competition and the success narratives. We use Hendry et al.’s (2018) notion of narrative as being which shifts methodology from a mode of production to a way of being in the world. Our narratives show that loss, even while experienced individually, is felt communally. Grief matters and in writing about grief, we resist neoliberal knowledge, an act which gives us hope.

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Emotional Labour Pains: Rebirth of the Good Girl

Cited by 3 publications

References 19 publications

My mum is on strike! Social reproduction and the (emotional) labor of ‘mothering work’ in neoliberal Britain

My mum is on strike! Social reproduction and the (emotional) labor of ‘mothering work’ in neoliberal Britain

The Iceberg in the Room: A Causal Layered Analysis of Self with the Futures Sense of Yearning

Writing Through Tears: Women, Grief and Hope in the Academy

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