Taking care of oneself and others: The emotion work of women suffering from a rare skin disease

In this article, we analyze the emotion work of women suffering from pemphigus, a rare skin disease. We suggest that this approach sheds new light on the upheavals caused by illness and more generally on the experience of illness itself. Our study draws on a series of 27 interviews with pemphigus patients whose average age was 57. We show that serious and chronic illness does not radically alter the feeling rules in place with close friends and family, despite the uncertainty and emotional upheaval confronting patients. The emotion work they carry out should be understood in light of roles and places established prior to the onset of the disease. Emotion work is embedded in the broader history of relationships with family and friends and prior episodes of illness help create particular configurations and expectations.

Managerial Challenges of Emotional Labor Disruption: The COVID-19 Crisis in Mexico

The purpose of this article is to contribute to the knowledge of managing emotional labor during a crisis. The COVID-19 pandemic has been a disrupting event, particularly affecting frontline healthcare workers and their supervisors who faced pressures to manage emotions during their interactions with patients. Emotional labor has been studied in emergencies; however, the case of Mexico offers insights into an understudied context and a long and singular crisis. Drawing from multi-level storytelling interviews with medical managers, physicians, and nurses in hospitals in different states of Mexico, this article argues that COVID-19 blurred relationships between performance and outcomes of emotional labor. As the organizational goal focused mainly on saving lives, some workers intensified and performed emotional labor innovatively, but others deviated from feeling rules. Managers’ role became crucial for employees to abide by affective requirements facing disruption.

Prosecutors’ Habituation of Emotion Management in Swedish Courts

The article examines the professional emotion management underlying prosecutors’ work in court. Building on interviews and observations of forty-one prosecutors at five offices in Sweden, and drawing on sociological theories of emotion habituation, we analyze the emotion management necessary to perform frontstage (in court) professionalism as a prosecutor. We divide our analysis into three key dimensions of habituation: the feeling rules of confidence and mastering anxiety associated with an independent performance; the feeling rules of emotional distance and a balanced display associated with performing the objective party; and the playful and strategic improvisation of feeling rules associated with relaxed emotional presence. The routinization of feeling rules and the gradual backgrounding of related emotion management leads to habituation. Our findings enhance understanding of emotion management skills as part of tacit knowledge conveyed in the legal professions where emotion-talk and emotional reflexivity are little acknowledged. The article also contributes to the largely US-dominated previous research by adding a civil law perspective on prosecutorial emotion management.

EXPRESS: Between Consumption, Accumulation, and Precarity: The Psychic and Affective Practices of the Female Neoliberal Spiritual Subject

Why do gig workers perceive work practices as aspirational in spite of their precarity? Selling beauty products through their networks appeals to many women as a convenient way to earn an income. Drawing on interviews and observations with women distributors of beauty products in a network marketing company, this article shows how aspirational messaging that appears spiritual is used to encourage these women to think and feel that they are in charge of their own destiny while making it difficult for those women to articulate the precarious conditions that are associated with such work. Practices that encourage those women to think in specific ways include internalising the right spiritual dispositions, developing as an entrepreneurial spiritual subject and selling the self. Women are also encouraged to feel in specific ways by monitoring how they feel about themselves and others. The article shows how ‘thinking rules’ and ‘feeling rules’ are used to construct an ideal female neoliberal spiritual subject in new forms of organising who is selling and consuming beauty products while aspirational-spiritual messaging makes it difficult to articulate precarity.

Managing More than Poverty When Living With Addiction: Parents’ Emotion and Identity Work

In this article, I qualitatively explore the emotion and identity work of parents living with addiction to drugs or alcohol and accessing social assistance, specifically Ontario Works, in Toronto, Canada. Through narrative and discourse analysis of in-depth interviews, I show how parents (re-) produce or (re-) negotiate their identities as mothers and fathers in relation to feeling rules constituted in three broader, cultural discourses about family relations, addiction, and poverty: welfare dependency; intensive mothering; and families as a safe haven. I argue that this emotion and identity work is necessitated by how these feeling rules collude or clash with parents master status of addict entrenched in their relationships with social assistance policy and caseworkers and perceived by others too. I conclude with a consideration of the social policy and justice implications of my findings, including the need to overturn the stigmatization of addiction and poverty.

Intersectionality as a new feeling rule for young feminists: Race and feminist relations in France and Switzerland

Black feminist theory and theorizations by feminists of colour have identified and explored emotions linked to race and racism in feminist movements, especially in the US context. Building on this literature, this article explores the changes in feminist emotional dynamics linked to race which have been brought up by the relatively recent adoption of intersectionality in feminist movements’ discourses in two European countries, France and Switzerland, which are both often described as ‘colour-blind’ contexts. Drawing on Hochschild’s concept of feeling rules, we argue that intersectionality has changed the ways feminists are legitimately expected to feel about race and racism within feminist movements in both contexts. As feeling rules vary according to the members’ positions within the movement, we contend that these changes in emotional dynamics contribute to redefine feminists’ relations and feminist membership along racial lines. Based on interviews with young feminist activists in France and Switzerland during mobilization processes characterized by a prominent use of intersectionality, we observe how intersectionality discourses bring about new feeling rules in relation to race and racism. These feeling rules differ for white and non-white feminists: while intersectionality has led young white feminists to self-education and self-critique, racialized feminists often expressed mixed feelings about intersectionality and its use, in particular by white feminists. Importantly, these changes in feeling rules have allowed racialized feminists to renegotiate their relations with white feminists and their emotional content, as well as their position within the movement.

Emotions in Aotearoa New Zealand: Reflexive emotionalisation in a colonised context

Reflexive emotionalisation means increased thinking about and acting on emotional experiences in response to major changes to social life, such as those accompanying colonisation. This article explains and develops this novel concept, assessing its usefulness through an exploratory assessment of reflexive emotionalisation in the formation of Aotearoa New Zealand as a colonised settler state. It is argued that as cultures met and sought to coexist, emotions were vital. Focusing on reflexive emotionalisation in Aotearoa reveals how differences in feeling rules were navigated, sometimes in violent ways, as power shifted towards the colonisers. Feelings of belonging are important in that ongoing process of reflexive emotionalisation, the elucidation of which provides a new understanding of social change and settler state formation that avoids casting colonised peoples as passive objects of ‘progress’ brought by colonisers.