Introduction

My interest in emotional labor began a long time ago. While conducting field research with female factory workers in Myanmar, I noticed that the hardest part of their work was not always physical exhaustion. It was the silence behind the constant emotional restraint. Later, when studying American social movements and workplace inequalities in Barnard in summer, I began to see that emotional expectations are everywhere, especially for women and low-wage workers. However, they are rarely acknowledged as “real” labor.

This realization brought me to this project: I want to understand how emotional labor operates across different kinds of work, not just in visible service roles, but also in other overlooked spaces. Through my project, I hope to explore how corporations package emotion as part of productivity and professionalism and what that does to workers’ self-worth. Also, I hope this project pushes me out of my comfort zone. I want to produce work that makes invisible labor visible. Ultimately, I hope to leave this project with a deeper understanding of how emotion, power, and dignity intersect in everyday work—and how we might imagine fairer ways of recognizing emotional effort.