Acknowledging the Effect of “Affect” in Healthcare: Empirical Investigation of Emotional Labor Practices of Physicians During the COVID-19 Pandemic

Author(s):  
Sarah Jane Blithe ◽  
Anna Wiederhold Wolfe ◽  
Breanna Mohr

Wrapped in moral judgments about sexual conduct and shrouded in titillating intrigue, legal prostitutes in Nevada’s brothels frequently face oppression and unfair labor practices while managing stigma and isolation associated with their occupational identities. Rooted in organizational communication and feminist theories, this book engages with stories of women living and working in these “hidden” organizations to interrogate issues related to labor rights, stigma, secrecy, privacy, and discrimination in the current legal brothel system. Widespread beliefs about the immorality of selling sexual services have influenced the history and laws of legal brothel prostitution. Moral judgments about legal prostitutes are so pervasive that many women struggle to engage in their communities, conduct business, maintain personal relationships, and transition out of the industry. At the same time, legal brothels operate like other kinds of legal entities, and individuals must contend with balancing work and nonwork commitments, organizational cultures, and managerial relationships. Although legal prostitutes are independent contractors, they often live in their workplaces and must adhere to scheduling requirements, mundane job tasks, and emotional labor, like employees in other organizational settings. Ethnographic observations in the brothels and interviews with current and ex-brothel workers, brothel owners, madams, local police, lobbyists, and others provide a broad data set for analysis. The book includes a photo-elicitation project, featuring images captured by legal prostitutes about their lives in the brothels. Thorough archival research fills in gaps left from inconsistencies, illegal practices, and laws about brothel prostitution. In addition, the third author works as a legal prostitute, providing a deep (and deeply personal) autoethnographic insider look at the industry. As such, this book serves as both an updated resource about the laws and policies which guide legal prostitution in Nevada, and an intimate look at life and decision-making for women performing sex work.


2018 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 186-199 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rahsaan Mahadeo

Independently, the study of whiteness and the study of time are important interventions in sociology. A solid foundation for any empirical investigation of the relationship between whiteness and the racialized temporalities of racialized youth, however, has yet to be set. Drawing on data from 30 in-person interviews and ethnographic methods, the author explores how racialized youth interpret time in relation to whiteness and the experiences of white youth. The data for this research are based on more than one year of fieldwork at Run-a-Way, a multiservice center for youth. Results show that racialized youth view white youth as having more time to take advantage of educational and employment opportunities. As a result of the perceived temporal advantage held by their white counterparts, racialized youth expressed feelings of temporal inequality and disparate life chances. Forced to work twice as hard to be half as good, youth saw their time horizons as compressed. The author shows how racialized youth lose time through physical, psychic, and emotional labor required to process racialization and racism and illustrates the various structural mechanisms that steal their time. Despite the temporal inequalities between them and their white counterparts, youth at Run-a-Way discovered ways to invert the terms of temporality to ensure that their culture was always most relevant and “up to date.” Although whiteness is linked to modernity and that which is future oriented, racialized youth viewed their white counterparts as behind time, lame, or just plain “wack” (uncool).


2017 ◽  
Vol 44 (6) ◽  
pp. 637-660 ◽  
Author(s):  
Shiloh Whitney

My aim in this paper is to introduce a theory of affective labor as byproductive, a concept I develop through analysis of the phenomenology of various affective labor practices in dialog with feminist scholarship, both on gendered and racialized labor, and on affect and emotion. I motivate my theory in the context of literature on affective and emotional labor in philosophy and the social sciences, engaging the post-Marxist literature on affective and immaterial labor and emphasizing feminist critiques. I argue that affective labor is not only the work of producing affects for others to consume or the reproductive work that rejuvenates and sustains labor power and social life, but also the work of metabolizing waste affects and affective byproducts. Thus, byproductive labor is a neologism I develop to bring into view an affective economy and indeed a political economy of affects to the side of the distinction between productive and reproductive labor in its paid and unpaid variants. I make three central claims: (1) affective labor invariably creates byproducts in the embodied subjectivity of the worker; (2) the unique kind of affective expenditure I call “byproductive” (metabolizing affective surplus, containing affective waste, and producing depleted affective agency) is a defining feature of affective labor not circumscribed by the productive–reproductive distinction; and (3) the marginalized forms of subjectivity and depleted agency constituted through the intersections of this labor with hierarchies of gender, race, and migrant status or global class are themselves byproducts of affective labor. Thus, theorizing affective labor as byproductive captures the uniqueness of affective labor and the forms of exploitation unique to it, but also explains the interaction of affective labor with forms of power that operate through subjection and marginalization.


1979 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
pp. 82-86
Author(s):  
Karen Friedel ◽  
Jo-Ida Hansen ◽  
Thomas J. Hummel ◽  
Warren F. Shaffer

Crisis ◽  
2012 ◽  
Vol 33 (2) ◽  
pp. 106-112 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christopher M. Bloom ◽  
Shareen Holly ◽  
Adam M. P. Miller

Background: Historically, the field of self-injury has distinguished between the behaviors exhibited among individuals with a developmental disability (self-injurious behaviors; SIB) and those present within a normative population (nonsuicidal self-injury; NSSI),which typically result as a response to perceived stress. More recently, however, conclusions about NSSI have been drawn from lines of animal research aimed at examining the neurobiological mechanisms of SIB. Despite some functional similarity between SIB and NSSI, no empirical investigation has provided precedent for the application of SIB-targeted animal research as justification for pharmacological interventions in populations demonstrating NSSI. Aims: The present study examined this question directly, by simulating an animal model of SIB in rodents injected with pemoline and systematically manipulating stress conditions in order to monitor rates of self-injury. Methods: Sham controls and experimental animals injected with pemoline (200 mg/kg) were assigned to either a low stress (discriminated positive reinforcement) or high stress (discriminated avoidance) group and compared on the dependent measures of self-inflicted injury prevalence and severity. Results: The manipulation of stress conditions did not impact the rate of self-injury demonstrated by the rats. The results do not support a model of stress-induced SIB in rodents. Conclusions: Current findings provide evidence for caution in the development of pharmacotherapies of NSSI in human populations based on CNS stimulant models. Theoretical implications are discussed with respect to antecedent factors such as preinjury arousal level and environmental stress.


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