Episode 71 - Emotional Labor Transcript

Ellie: 0:12

Hello and welcome to Overthink.

David: 0:14

The podcast where two philosophy professors talk about exciting topics of relevance to you and us.

Ellie: 0:22

I'm your co-host, Dr. Ellie Anderson.

David: 0:24

And I am Dr. David Peña-Guzmán.

Ellie: 0:27

And today we are going to be talking about something that I feel like has become a very hot topic in recent years. And that is emotional labor. I think the rise in discourse around this topic has coincided with the most recent versions of the feminist movement because so many women have come to see that even in societies that are purportedly equal on the question of gender, where we have equal voting rights, equal career opportunities in theory, et cetera, there's a huge asymmetry in romantic and sexual relationships in the capabilities and levels of emotional work that women do versus men.

David: 1:01

Emotional labor is a kind of work that it's very difficult to identify because so much of it is invisible, not just to third parties, but also to second parties. So the person that does a lot of emotional work will be aware of that work, but not the recipient, and definitely not any observer of that interaction. And so it's this sort of thing that you don't see unless you're the producer because even the recipient is not really aware of it, of course, until the recipient doesn't get it anymore, and then they become clearly aware of what had been there in the first place.

Ellie: 1:37

Or you see it, but you don't recognize it as the product of labor, which is something I wanna talk about a lot in the episode today because as we will discuss later, I have recently published an article on the sexist expectations of many intimate relationships. And a lot of this research began as, as a l, as a lot more philosophical research does than I think people admit out of personal experiences. And especially, you know, coming from the tradition of phenomenology, David, I think we are quite open to the idea that personal experience can lead to philosophical insights. And when I was dating in my twenties, I just started to notice a number of trends that culminated a few years ago in an experience that I think is indicative of some of the themes we're gonna talk about today. And I wanna begin today's episode by telling a story.

David: 2:27

Ooh. Make it a good one. Otherwise, I don't want to hear it.

Ellie: 2:30

Well, it's, it's a true story. It's from my personal life, so you can see if you think it's, it's good or not. A few years ago I was newly dating someone that I was absolutely infatuated with. He was a gorgeous, successful, and very chic screenwriter.

David: 2:46

Oh my god Ellie.

Ellie: 2:49

Who is also unbelievably smart. Like our conversations sizzled and being around him, I know this sounds so cliche, it was like a drug, like I just felt high on life and so inspired when we were talking.

David: 3:03

I love how when you get excited, you emphasize the first syllable of a word like infatuated, the conversation sizzled.

Ellie: 3:12

Sizzled.

David: 3:13

It was a very, uh, hot right off the stove top kind of dynamic.

Ellie: 3:19

The intellectual chemistry was incredible.

David: 3:21

Okay. Okay.

Ellie: 3:21

I was falling hard for him, but meanwhile, I never knew how he felt. He didn't really compliment me, and there was never even an inkling of whether he wanted to deepen the relationship or just keep casually dating. This went on for months during which hanging out, yeah, like maybe once a week. And you know me, David, like I'm not, I, I don't, I don't necessarily have the same desired trajectory for relationships as like other people, especially other straight women, namely like, I'm not interested in exclusivity. So I wasn't hoping that this would eventually lead to like an exclusive, monogamous relationship, but I was really hoping that it would move from a somewhat casual dating situation to more of a commitment.

David: 4:02

I see. Well, typical woman wanting it to go somewhere.

Ellie: 4:08

I know, right? Who am I to desire that there be some movement in any possible direction? But you know, naturally, kind of following up on what you said, I think this, the stereotype of women like wanting things to move in a certain direction. I really didn't wanna initiate the conversation because I was afraid of scaring him away. This like classic straight woman's fear, which unfortunately tends to be often grounded in reality. So when I tell you this man gave me nothing, like no indication of where things were going, I would like analyze the text messages status, but it would just be like a once a week text message. Like, when are you free this week? And then very last minute specifying the date and time, you know.

David: 4:54

But, but it was a sizzling, nothing. An infatuating nothingness.

Ellie: 4:59

When we were actually together, it was electric. It was just that I didn't get a lot outside of that, right? And even when we were together, I didn't understand like what the desire was. So I naturally started thinking about this a lot, like wondering about it, like I said, kind of analyzing the text messages, journaling about it a lot. Overthink listeners know that I will occasionally share a former journal entry. So here goes. This is the bulk of the story. This is actually an excerpt from my journal from the time. You ready?

David: 5:29

Let's do it. And just for the record, I love that you keep your records as an archive for our episodes. Yes.

Ellie: 5:37

Soon, soon the podcast will just be like my reading my journal. Okay. So feeling dysphoric this morning after an exciting date with X went south when I expressed my feeling of loneliness and desire for him to communicate his feelings for me and sense of where this is going. He criticized my timing at the end of the date, but I just felt so empty inside and asking him if he feels connected to me seemed like the only obvious way to try and reconnect. Instead, the disconnection deepened and we ended up annoyed with each other. He answered by saying, he sometimes feels connected to me, looking at me and thinking we get it, and other times doesn't. No elaboration, though I asked when that didn't make me feel better. I tried carefully crafting words in a variety of ways that I realize in retrospect we're all in attempt to have a DTR or define the relationship conversation without making it clear that that was what I was trying to have. I just felt this sense of total uncertainty about where he stands or rather even where I stand with him, and I wanted some clarity. Granted, perhaps I didn't express my desires clearly, but his responses were so bad that I felt even worse. He just kinda insulted me and made me feel like my asking him was pushing him in unfair ways. I said. I guess I wanna know what the landscape of your life looks like and where you see me fitting into it. What I'm so confused, was his response. I guess I'm curious where you see this going and how you feel about me. All you ever say is, I enjoy spending time with you. I just don't know what that means because I enjoy spending time with a lot of people, but each in unique ways. I'm trying to get a sense of what you specifically like about me. His response was, no exaggeration as follows. About where he sees this going he literally only said, I don't know, in response to what he likes about me, literally all he said was, I like hanging out with you. And I like you. David, this is an extraordinarily successful writer.

David: 7:30

Writer, writer.

Ellie: 7:32

This man is a writer.

David: 7:33

He's got a way with words.

Ellie: 7:35

Just, just not in emotional conversations. It was just like, do not compute. And when I did express dissatisfaction at the vagueness of those answers, this is now back to my journal. He accused me of pushing him to answer differently because I wasn't satisfied with his answers. I called him out on playing dumb and on making me feel like I was asking for too much, for something unreasonable and unfair, when in fact I was asking for very little, literally asked, where do you see me fitting into your life? The emotional opacity of men, I'm tempted to say, is a social justice issue for how much time that was, in caps, for how much time do we spend interpreting men's cues, mere crumbs, hints, clues often when they get our clear, well-articulated expressions of our feelings with friends, in thoughts, in journals. We work out our feelings and try to work out theirs, and then we deliver the fruits of our labor on a silver platter. But even when we do so and ask for response, we're considered pushy by asking anything at all. I am asking too much.

David: 8:32

OMG DTR.

Ellie: 8:37

You ready for what happened after this journal entry?

David: 8:38

Yes. And so I wanna know first what happens afterwards, but also as you are talking about this, I would like to know whether it ended or whether it continued for a while after this conversation.

Ellie: 8:50

Those are the same answers, like what happened next is also the question of whether it continued. Okay, so mind you, this man, as we've said, professional, very successful writer. 37 years old, like not, I'm not talking like 20 year old fuck boy, was 37 years old, had never been to therapy. Following week after I read this journal entry, he takes me out for a beautiful romantic dinner at a very chic candle lit restaurant. We order amazing branzino, little gem salad. Those are detailed in my journal as well. And then while I am eating this tasty, expensive fish, which he did pay for, he dumps me out of nowhere.

David: 9:30

Oh my God.

Ellie: 9:31

Saying he just wants more. There's something missing. And I'm like, can you elaborate? And he's just like, no.

David: 9:37

Oh my god, Ellie, that sounds horrifying. Dumped at a glamorous restaurant by a guy who wants more than what he couldn't describe.

Ellie: 9:46

Right? And so, so I'm like, hey, what do you want? And then a few days later he's like, I actually want nothing. Um, bye. And then, okay, this is the final coda to the story. A few months later, a friend sends me an Instagram story from a local LA influencer. And it's a story of her sobbing about how her boyfriend dumped her summarily. And he could never say how he really felt, and she wanted to be his everything, but he just could not open up. Same guy.

David: 10:16

Same guy. Oh my God. I want now I want to know who it is and we can tag them on our social media.

Ellie: 10:22

Oh, I saw him at a party at a few weeks ago and it was actually a totally pleasant, but yeah, she ended up, by the way, writing a song about him that I still get in my head sometimes, which is like extremely creepy. It was about his emotional unavailability.

David: 10:35

Oh my God. are we not playing that song in our episode? Why am I just learning about this now?

Ellie: 10:40

I need a veil of anonymity.

David: 10:43

Do you? I don't know. I feel like I would be petty enough to be like, oops, did I just say the name I, oh, sorry. That was not supposed to be part of the discussion, but kudos to you for not doing that. But I see why you wanted to begin with this story because it seems like you were doing all the heavy lifting, and at the end he's just like, oops, no work has been done on your end to motivate me to stay. And I also don't want to do any work on my end to want to make this relationship not die from inertia, essentially.

Ellie: 11:14

Yeah and anytime you even mention a glimmer of an emotional need, you are being pushy.

David: 11:21

It's like you're spraying Agent Orange in the room. Today we are talking about emotional labor.

Ellie: 11:30

While originally limited to workplace interactions, to what extent does this concept apply to romantic and other kinds of relationships?

David: 11:38

Our very own co-host, Ellie Anderson, has done work on this topic. How does her research on hermeneutic labor shift our perspective on the issue of gender in emotional work?

Ellie: 11:48

And how do we distinguish emotional labor from other kinds of care, such as emotional support? For starters, we need to get really clear on the concept of emotional labor as it was originally conceived. The term emerges first in the work of sociologist Arlie Hochschild, especially her 1983 book, The Managed Heart. And the interesting thing about emotional labor here is that it's not about gendered labor in the household or other relationships. So the story I just told wouldn't count for Hochschild as a form of emotional labor because emotional labor is about jobs.

David: 12:24

Yeah. I mean, for her it really is a feature of the workplace. For instance, she has this really famous example of flight attendants as representatives of what she calls emotional labor. When we think of jobs, we usually think, I think of physical and cognitive labor. The flight attendant has to do a lot of things, right? They have to do physical things like push the cart, serve the drinks to people, do the safety demonstration for all the passengers.

Ellie: 12:52

Which we like mercilessly ignore. Terrible.

David: 12:55

Yes, and you know, also a lot of cognitive work that is associated with like reading the announcements, so on and so forth. But a really key aspect of being a flight attendant is also this additional nebulous and yet essential form of labor, which is the labor of being calm and friendly and keeping everyone on the plane in a good mood. Flight attendants have to project essentially an error of confidence while also being extremely nurturing. And traditionally, this has been a feminine coded profession for this very reason.

Ellie: 13:31

Well, in fact, it used to called stewardess, right? Rather than flight attendant. So it was like explicitly female coded.

David: 13:36

Yes, it was specifically female named, and so they, they make you feel safe and well on a flight, and they are paid for that. We could say just as much as they are for pushing the card and reading the announcements, and according to Hochschild, this is emotional labor.

Ellie: 13:56

So we can see from this that flight attendants' salaries is dependent on this emotional labor. It's not just a byproduct of their work. It's rather something that is integral to it. And Hochschild does a really good job of making this clear in her analyses, actually, of the work of the flight attendant, of their job descriptions and how they're trained. And she describes emotional labor as follows. So this is her original definition of it, "the management of feeling to create a publicly observable facial and bodily display." So it has to do with managing your feelings, right, so that they get expressed in a very particular way that's appropriate to the particular situation at hand. And it's key to her view that emotional labor is sold for a wage. So in this sense, emotional labor in her original theory only applies to workplace interactions.

David: 14:47

Exactly. She says that managing your feelings at home, for example, in your relationship with your partner, in your friendship with your BFF, or maybe even in public, semi-public spaces like a classroom when you're a student and you have to manage your emotions to stay calm and collected. She says all of that is not emotional labor, and she uses the term emotional work to refer to that. So she disambiguates those two terms. And I think this is obviously different from how people talk about emotional labor today. When I think about people talking about this concept, I think about how women describe the emotional work that they have to do for men in the context of romance and friendship.

Ellie: 15:26

Puzzling over the text message, writing in the journal.

David: 15:29

Yes, or, or you know, even just the work of bringing up that difficult conversation topic at dinner and being the one that then has to be presented as needy, et cetera. But the interesting thing is that Hochschild herself has recently said in an interview that discourse on emotional labor today exhibits what she calls concept creep, where it's almost as if the concept is creeping away from its original, meaning going into places where it shouldn't go.

Ellie: 15:58

And you know that I'm pretty sympathetic to that charge. I think it's a problem when people start using words in kind of just like ways that are completely unrooted from their original intentions. Obviously language is malleable, but I do think it's important for us to be clear and specific and consistent with our terms. So I'm sympathetic to Hochschild's argument that there's this concept creep, but I also think that her original view of emotional labor is perhaps dependent on too clear a distinction between waged and unwaged work. A lot of feminist theorists argue that the very distinction between waged labor and unwaged labor is itself dependent on rendering women's labor invisible. For instance, women who do housework don't get paid for that work, but they are actually doing burdensome activity that generates value because they are allowing, say, their partner or other members of their household to go out and work and come home to a healthy dinner and a clean house, right? So even though Hochschild does an amazing service and originally conceiving of the term emotional labor, I'm actually pretty convinced by other feminist theorists such as Kathi Weeks, who disagree with her and think we can talk about labor, including emotional labor outside of the context of waged work. So that means we can extend it to intimate relationships.

David: 17:15

Yeah, and the concept of unwaged labor is really interesting because especially in the context of the domestic sphere, I think women's work in domestic spaces produces an instrumental value insofar as women, for example, do all the cooking, do all the cleaning, the child rearing, and that is something that has obviously some instrumental merit, but we can also talk about this other more indirect form of value that comes from effectively being the flight attendants of the home. So constantly keeping things calm for the husband and the children, making sure that the male partner is content, so on and so forth. And a lot of this emotional household management is done to ensure the productivity now in the more technical sense of the term, the economic productivity of the man. And so I, I agree with you that the distinction between the private and the public, or between waged and unwaged labor kind of breaks down because in some ways the value that the man produces for a wage is itself made possible or supported by this other form of work that happens behind the curtains.

Ellie: 18:27

I wanna note that it's not just feminine coded on her view. I think the way that emotional labor gets talked about nowadays is pretty much just in a feminine coded way. And you mentioned the flight attendants, David, which are by far the most famous example from The Managed Heart. But another example she gives in that book is that of bill collectors have a bit of a more masculine coded profession. The bill collector has to present a really confident and aggressive front to the people whom they are collecting bills. She says that the purpose of bill collection, in part, uh, at least the emotional labor side of it, is to deflate the customer's status so that they kind of wear down the customer's presumed resistance to paying. And to that extent, they have to be sort of this aggressive, stable, masculine figure. And that is a form of emotional labor for her as well.

David: 19:17

Well, and it makes us question the idea that I, I do think you're right, is floating around in contemporary discourse that equates emotional work with the feminine. And this brings to mind for me the work of the philosopher Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò, whom listeners might remember from our episode on climate change and reparations. And he makes the argument that there are forms of emotional labor that are uniquely masculine. And he wrote a paper arguing that in general, the stoic ideal of the individual who is in full mastery of their emotions, which is the ideal that most men are socialized under in patriarchal societies, requires a pretty harsh and incessant emotional labor on the part of men in regards to their own emotions. Now, the labor here is not communicative. It's not about sharing your feelings with other people. It's actually quite the opposite. It's about the compression of your emotions, bearing them so as to render them effectively inactive.

Ellie: 20:18

Yeah, and you know, I've talked with Olúfẹ́mi about this work. I've written about it, and we'll talk about that a little bit later. And I think his work on this has been really interesting as a counterpoint for me to a lot of the feminist discourse about emotional labor, that seems to imply that emotional labor is just done by women. Because I think if we think about Arlie Hochschild's original definition as the management of feeling, she'll also talk about it as a way of evoking and suppressing feeling. We can very much see stoic attitude as a form of emotional labor under certain context, right? Just as a nurturing attitude or an overly effusive attitude can be emotional labor under certain context as well.

David: 21:18

Ellie, I think it's time for us to jump from the personal story that you told us at the beginning of the episode to the theoretical work that you have done inspired in part by that story. You know, hopefully the article just owe its existence exclusively to that awful guy. Umm.

Ellie: 21:35

He's actually, he's not awful. He's just, like, in certain, in certain ways, was not, was not a good partner.

David: 21:41

He's just a stoic ideal.

Ellie: 21:46

Under the guise of being like an emotional person. But I think David, yeah, there is an extent to which, like I said earlier, I think philosophers, personal lives are often the inspiration for theoretical views. Of course, my view shaped, developed and changed as I read other work, right? A lot of which was empirical psychology, a lot of which was philosophy, gender studies, et cetera. So it's not like I was I'm gonna make a philosophy out of this one shitty experience. But it was more like, what the heck is going on here? How do I use my philosophical tools and writing skills in order to figure this out? And what resulted is the piece of which I am proudest, which is this article called Hermeneutic Labor.

David: 22:25

This article introduces a new concept that you are coining and that is making an intervention in the literature on emotional labor.

Ellie: 22:33

We love an intervention.

David: 22:34

Love an intervention. We love coinage.

Ellie: 22:37

We love coining terms.

David: 22:39

Uh, we're like out here minting terms left and right. But let me share with our listeners the full title of this article, which came out in the journal, Hypatia: Top Feminist Journal.

Ellie: 22:50

Oh, thanks. Well, and it actually just came out last month. This is 2023. I submitted the article in 2020 and then it went through like a horrificly long process due in part to the pandemic and like just the academic publishing cycle. So yes, it is now finally out. You can read it.

David: 23:09

Yes, the inertia of academia at work, but the title of the article

is "Hermeneutic Labor: 23:13

The Gendered Burden of Interpretation in Intimate Relationships Between Men and Women." And I want us to spend quite a bit of time talking about your view, because I have to tell you, Ellie, I was just like pouring over your article yesterday while having my morning coffee at home, being like, oh my God, this is so good. The research is on point, and I have lots of questions.

Ellie: 23:37

Yay. I am so excited to talk about this article. So hermeneutic, fancy word, it it means interpretive basically. So hermeneutic labor is the labor of interpretation and it has to do with interpreting your own feelings and those of others as well as expressing them. And I think it's what's going on a lot of times when people are talking about emotional labor, I think what they're actually better talking about is hermeneutic labor. Hermeneutic labor is what I was doing when I was writing in my journal or analyzing the person's text message. Emotional labor is what I was doing at the date while I was trying not to cry while dumped. But the hermeneutic labor is that lead up of, of preparing the conversation to be brought up, right, then trying to convey it in as intelligible a fashion as I could. So hermeneutic labor is a little bit closer to cognitive or mental labor than emotional labor, but it's related to it.

David: 24:30

Yeah. And, uh, we will tease apart these distinctions in terminology, but in terms of the big picture of the article here, I wanna begin somewhere else because one important idea that opens up the discussion in your article is your claim that the concept of labor can be used in the context of intimate relationships. And this is how you differentiate yourself from some other people have, who have written about this in the past and whom we've discussed just now.

Ellie: 24:57

Like Arlie Hochschild.

David: 24:59

Yes. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. And on your view, we can talk about emotional labor in intimate relationships because these relationships in contemporary American society are exploitative of women. And so just begin by talking to us about this relationship between the use of the term labor in connection to the private sphere, and then this notion of exploitation.

Ellie: 25:22

Yeah, so I do think that on the whole contemporary American society thrusts men and women into heterosexual relationships that are exploitative of women. And so I really, I really am claiming that. And what I mean by that is exploitation in the sense of a person or group unfairly benefiting from using another person to achieve gains at the expense of the person who is used. I'm drawing this from the philosopher Judith Farr Tormey, who describes women's nurturing labor for men as a zero sum gain. Because what the exploiter gains, the exploitee loses. So, more or less, the idea is that women are giving up their own cognitive, emotional, interpretive resources to men on a daily basis in addition to like actual material resources as well, but that's a different story, in order to ensure the emotional wellbeing of the relationship and of the man. I think there are two elements to this exploitation as I see it. One is that the labor disempowers, the one who is laboring. And so women, it's not as if they're often rewarded in intimate relationships for the emotional labor that they do. In fact, they're often punished for it. And so there's this sense that women need to be performing emotional or hermeneutic labor, which we'll talk more about. But I think, like I said, is really what's more often happening, but that when their labor becomes visible, it's actually treated as something they shouldn't be doing. It's like, why are you obsessing over this relationship? Why are you thinking about this so much? Why are you pushing me right? And one study that I found really interesting on this note was a social psychology study suggesting that it's not actually the case that men and women have different expectations for their relationships. So a lot of times you'll hear that, well, women just want more out of a relationship than men do. And in fact, this study found that that's not the case. It's just that men and women have different perceptions of when their emotional needs in a relationship are being met. And I think you can kind of read between the lines that that's because men's emotional needs are being met more than women's.

David: 27:32

Women's, yes.

Ellie: 27:33

And there's a second dimension to this exploitation as well, which is that women are often made to think that this kind of work or labor that they're doing is actually futile, even though it produces value, in my view, they're made to think that it's a waste of time. They're criticized for obsessing over relationships. They're criticized for, you know, not passing the Bechdel test in the Sex and the City TV show because they're talking about men all the time, right? So there's a sense that there's a double bind that women find themselves in, in which they are tasked with doing this labor, but they're not actually rewarded for it. And I think this starts in early childhood where you see young girls being trained as what scholars call relationship maintenance experts and boys not being trained in that at all, and actually actively being taught to suppress their feelings and not give a shit about the feelings of others.

David: 28:30

That's a great term, a relationship maintenance expert.

Ellie: 28:33

I know there were so many terms I came across in this research that were just like so enlightening for me, and truly David. There are like zillions of empirical studies and tons of incisive feminist analyses about this type of phenomenon where most heterosexual relationships involve a really stark divide of care labor, who's doing the work of raising emotional issues, who's articulating their needs, while also tending to the emotional needs of others, even when they're, you know, totally opaque. Right? Who's doing other centered mental planning and managing the household and social lives and schedules and spoiler? It is indeed, indeed mostly women who are taught to think that this is just women's intuition, right? It's like, oh, women are naturally more emotional and caring than men are. I think women's intuition, as I talk about it in the article, is really just a cover for the exploitation of hermeneutic labor.

David: 29:24

Yeah. In this notion that women are just fundamentally intuitive, gives men a free pass on their emotional cluelessness or incompetence or the way in which they fumble over those emotional discussions where a partner raises the question of their needs and their desires. And I, I like how you point out that it's not only that men are unable to do that well, but that as a culture, we kind of laugh it off as a joke. Like there goes the man not knowing what's going on.

Ellie: 29:55

Exactly.

David: 29:55

Yeah, and in the process, the woman is led to internalize men's inability or unwillingness to engage emotionally as just a quirky personality trait that, in the end, will, I guess, work out for the best for both the man and the woman.

Ellie: 30:11

Which ends up actually in infantilizing men too, and really creating blockages for them, experiencing their own emotions. This is something that Bell Hooks talks about in her work on love and masculinity, is that there's this, this real inability that a lot of men experience to express or even feel their emotions, uh, because of the way that masculine norms are constructed.

David: 30:31

Yeah, and I, I will want to ask you more questions about the specific mechanisms through which that imbalance manifests in relationships. But I think before we go to those mechanisms, I want to ask you a question about this concept that you introduce, because the central idea of your article is that women do a lot of emotional work in their relationships. But you argue that the right term that we should be using for describing what is going on is not emotional labor, but what you call hermeneutic labor. And so can you talk to us for a little bit about what the difference is between emotional labor and what you're calling hermeneutic labor?

Ellie: 31:14

Yeah, and for the record, the claim is not that women don't do emotional labor, it's just that I think, like I said earlier, a lot of times when we use the term emotional labor, what we are actually talking about is hermeneutic labor. So maybe I have like a different worry about the concept distinctions than Arlie Hochschild has because for instance, I am agnostic about whether women do more emotional labor than men do. I think if I had to guess, I would say they probably do, but I also take Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò's point that stoicism and other sort of masculine norms around lack of emotionality can themselves be viewed as forms of emotional labor as well. So I think that, I don't know. I think it's kind of tricky to simply say that women are doing more emotional labor than men are, even though it may be right. I don't think it's tricky. I actually think it's very straightforward and very clear that women are doing more hermeneutic labor than men, by which I mean the work of interpreting your own emotions, interpreting the emotions of others, conveying those emotions in a clear and sort of shiny package, and figuring out ways to move beyond an uncomfortable situation by having solutions for the future. Right? And so this is the labor of bringing the conversation up, of trying to bring it up at the right time so that you're not scaring the man away, which I evidently failed to do in the story that I, that I began with.

David: 32:38

You did. Yeah you're, you're a bad worker, Ellie.

Ellie: 32:42

I just, I just need to get, I need to stop writing articles about feminist theory and get back to my laboring practices, better laborer, although we'll have some more to say, I think later in the episode about how personal lives have changed since that ar since the article was first drafted.

David: 32:57

Hopefully for the better.

Ellie: 32:58

De, de, oh my. So much, so much for the better. I have learned from all the theory that I have read. And so for instance, there's this psychologist called Ronald Levant who was writing in the 1990s when he noticed something strange among his male patients. Many of them seem to exhibit a condition that he was used to seeing as pathological. And that pathological condition is known as alexithymia, which is the condition of being unable to put your emotions into words. And Levant concluded that this condition was so rampant among the men that he was working with, that it was actually their normative condition, like it was the standard default condition among the men that he was working with. And so he called this normative male alexithymia which basically just means that this pathological condition is part of the average scripts of masculinity in our culture. So boys are not encouraged to develop literacy around their emotions. I think that speaks to an insufficiency of hermeneutic labor, right? It might also speak to an insufficiency of emotional labor, but alexithymia is the condition of not being able to put words to your emotions. It's a problem of articulation, interpretation, and understanding, rather than of what Hochschild calls evoking and suppressing emotions because recall emotional labor for her is evoking and suppressing emotions. It's managing feelings, whereas I'm talking about a sort of second degree work of managing feelings, which doesn't have to do with evoking and suppressing emotions, but with interpreting them.

David: 34:28

Yeah, and I think if we go back to the example of the flight attendant, it's a really good way to contrast those two concepts because the flight attendant doesn't really interpret the emotions of the passengers. They don't care about that. You know, I, as a flight attendant, I don't care if you're sad or depressed or happy, as long as you sit down and remain calm, as long as I suppress certain disruptive emotions and maybe elicit some baseline positive emotions, and that would be emotional labor, whereas what you're talking about has a much more clearly delineated cognitive dimension, having to do with language, having to do with sharing.

Ellie: 35:06

Relection, contemplation, conversation.

David: 35:09

And so now that we have a, a sense of the distinction between these two, I wanna go back to the question of, of mechanisms. How it is that this imbalance in hermeneutic labor takes root in intimate relationships. And just now you talked about one, which is this normative alexithymia, the fact that men are just trained and taught not to be communicative about their emotions, and in fact, incapable of doing so.

Ellie: 35:34

Of even naming oftentimes.

David: 35:35

Naming like, don't know if I'm angry or frustrated because I'm just, RAWR.

Ellie: 35:41

Did you grow up in a household like that? Because I certainly did.

David: 35:44

I did grow up in a household where the men in the generation above me were just like that. But because I was raised primarily by women, by five women, that did not get transferred to me and I didn't have a father figure in the house. So I had a, a, a non-typical gender upbringing in that regard, which is not to say that I'm not alexithymic, I who knows? I, maybe it's part of my male intuition that I intuit nothing. And so there is a lot of mechanisms that you talk about that are quite fascinating. Again, one of them is this normative alexithymia, another one is these representations of men in popular culture as emotionally clueless, which normalizes a certain kind of incompetence around interpersonal dynamics. But then you mentioned this other mechanism that you get from psychological research, which is the demand withdraw pattern. Basically the dominant mode of communication in many heterosexual relationships. Is this situation where the woman presents an issue for discussion. That's the demand, and then the man freaks out and responds simply by shutting down and withdrawing, which is what we saw in your story.

Ellie: 36:59

I know, and you see it also in, in all kinds of other dynamics and intimate relationships like stonewalling or just kind of shutting down, running off to one's man cave. Saying this isn't the right time and sometimes it genuinely might not be the right time, right? Like I think ob obviously people of all genders can be responsible for shitty forms of communication.

David: 37:23

Of course, of course.

Ellie: 37:24

But you're right that there is this really stark gender dynamic to the demand withdraw pattern. And that was something that just kept coming up in the research that I was doing from psychology on this, which is that. Actually, not only is the demand withdraw pattern really psychologically unhealthy, that is, it ends up making all parties involved feel really, really unhappy about how things went. But it is also the default mode of communication in relationships between women and men. So it is super unhealthy, and yet it is also the most standard form of relationship communication between women and men.

David: 38:02

I know. And it's weird to think about demand and withdraw as a form of communication since it's actually the shutting down of communication. So the, the dominant model of communication among men and women seems to undo the very possibility of communication, or at least communication around emotional issues.

Ellie: 38:19

Totally. And it reminds me of something that the feminist philosopher Sara Ahmed talks about when people raise issues that they've been reflecting on for a long time, which is that by talking about the problem, you appear to be the problem. You become the problem and right. So the idea is often that like, oh, this crazy woman obsessed with our relationship status, just won't stop talking about it. Why are you stressing me out by causing a problem? Whereas for the woman raising the issue, it's often something that she's really been thinking about for a long time.

David: 38:49

And you know, we can think about all these mechanisms like alexithymia or the demand withdraw pattern as relatively standard in relationships between men and women in intimate relationships. But you also note that the question of hermeneutic labor should not be seen as static or monolithic because it can be modulated by additional factors like questions of race, questions of class. So there's a whole section in your paper where you talk about the specific dynamics that this might take between black men and black women, for example. But I, I wanna ask you about the class component a little bit, because this stood out for me as I was reading it. And this might be because I do come from a lower class background, and so this is the part of the article that dealt specifically with that, and you point out that relationships among working class people may be more vulnerable to hermeneutical labor imbalances than, let's say middle class and upper class relationships. How come?

Ellie: 39:53

So the reason for this is historical. It's that in recent decades, there's been a push in public discourse towards talking about one's emotions more specifically. A lot of this originates with the rise of psychoanalysis in the 20th century. And so it became kind of cool to start going to therapy or analysis and to talk about your emotions. But this becoming cool was a very bougie type of thing. And so therapy, you know, is, is to this day often still only accessible to people of a certain income status. And so there were all of these articles coming out around like, we need to talk about our emotions and all of these pop psychology books and self-help books coming out in, let's say, the past 50 years. And a lot of these books were being read by women. And so there was this strange thing that happened where upper class and upper middle class women and men both started talking more explicitly about emotions and going to therapy. But lower income women were often reading these books or hearing about this phenomenon of therapy and of talking about your emotions more and were really inspired to bring that to their intimate relationships. But their partners weren't doing the same. Their, you know, let's say blue collar husbands didn't have the time or resources to be reading, Men are from Mars Women or from Venus or whatever, and actually wanna talk about it. And so there's this entrenchment of machismo culture and the sense that men don't need to talk about emotions among lower income folks, among lower income men, that is, even as lower income women start to have more of an interest in joining people of higher income levels, in having discourses around emotions and therapy.

David: 41:36

And now let me ask you a final question about this, because everything that we have said so far hinges on the idea that we're talking about a relationship between a man and a woman. So it is about heterosexual relationships under patriarchy. Probably monogamous, but maybe not. That's a secondary question. How do queer relationships figure into your account of hermeneutic labor? Because on first glance, it might seem like maybe the same thing could apply, but then we have difficulty distributing the roles. You know, like who's the emotionally unavailable spoon and who the emotionally needy fork here?

Ellie: 42:17

Yeah. I think this is a great question because when I was writing the article, I wanted to really narrowly focus on relationships between women and men, because I don't think that the same dynamics are gonna apply in queer relationships. However, one thing that I, I do think is that by men and women here, I might be implicitly meaning cisgender men and women because a lot of the gender imbalance in care labor is laid down in childhood like that. That's when you are sort of an apprentice emotional and hermeneutic laborer. And if you are socialized as a girl, then you are likely to be much better equipped to do hermeneutic labor. Then someone who socialized as a boy is. So, for instance, I wouldn't say that a relationship between a man who transitioned in his adulthood and a cisgender woman would be likely to have this exact same dynamic. Right. I did find one article that talked about femme identifying folks in relationships and how there tended to be a much better distribution of care labor in those types of relationships, regardless of the person's actual gender identity. And the author of that article concluded that femininity seems to be essential to marital happiness.

David: 43:33

So marriage, marital relationships between masc for masc individuals are unlikely to culminate in happiness.

Ellie: 43:41

I'm sorry, David. I hate to tell you.

David: 43:43

Well, I'm sorry to tell you, I'm not particularly masc either.

Ellie: 43:48

You know, like I might be a cisgender man, but it's not like I'm super masc.

David: 43:53

Okay, that, that's really fascinating because again, you know, I would have this intuition that queer relationships would be different, but I also do not want to shield queer relationships from the possibility that they replicate some of these noxious patterns because independently of how you're socialized as a kid in light of the gender that you've been assigned, we are all socialized under a normative model of relationships, and that's the relationship of the demand withdraw pattern. That by and large, we all saw in our parents.

Ellie: 44:28

And, and that we were, that also is reinforced in our childhoods in different ways. For instance, when both fathers and mothers read to their daughters, they use more emotion words than when those same parents read to their sons.

David: 44:42

And if early childhood formation plays such an essential role, I think there is grounds here for a kind of gender pessimism about the possibility of happiness in relationships between people. And so I don't know where to go with this other than say that we have a lot of work to do, or rather to undo the things that have by now become the pillars of our gender interpretation.

Ellie: 45:19

Enjoying Overthink? Please consider supporting the podcast by joining our Patreon. We are an independent, self-supporting podcast, and as a subscriber, you can help us cover key production costs as well as gaining access to an exclusive digital library of bonus content and more. Luckily, I do think there is some hope because not all of our relationships fall into the dynamics of exploitative hermeneutic and emotional labor that we have identified. I wanna think now, David, about how we should distinguish these exploitative kinds of labor from the emotional support that we offer friends and lovers, like are we in a position now in society where somebody on Twitter is gonna be like, my friend made me sit down for an hour today and told me all about her problems. I'm wanting to Venmo request her 50 bucks for my emotional labor.

David: 46:14

Oh my God. I could totally see somebody doing that on social media. But you know, this is a really important question about how we use the terms emotion and labor, because it gets very complicated. So, for example, if your partner does have a long day and asks you to talk about it, should we understand that demand along the lines of an employee employer dynamic even though, as we mentioned earlier in the episode, the person who coined the term emotional labor really limits it to, to wage labor and to the workplace. I do worry that using the term for these personal relationships sometimes leads us to think in capitalist terms about interpersonal dynamics. So I do have a worry about concept creep a little bit.

Ellie: 47:05

Yeah. And I, because I believe, and I suspect that you also believe that people can make others do unreasonable emotional labor. In the article, I distinguish labor as a burdensome activity, and I, although I don't say all labor is exploitative, I do think we're living in a capitalist society where it pretty much empirically is so, I think like hermeneutic labor, the structure of it in our society is fundamentally exploitative. But I also think there are all kinds of things that we do, like when we give emotional support to people or when we help them talk things out, that would not at all be considered labor in this sense.

David: 47:43

Yeah, no, and I mean, obviously I agree with you that there is an imbalance along gender lines about this kind of work around the emotions, and it's not just about romance and marital dynamics. Think also about friends, right? We all have that friend who is kind of self-involved and only talks about their emotions and their life situation, and never inquires into the wellbeing of others and expects other people to be there to provide constant emotional support. So even though I worry about using the term labor for these personal relationships, part of me says, no. Yes, that is work. And it can be in balance and it can be exploitative. And we need a Marxist analysis of, of the extraction of value that happens in those cases. So we need to talk about the emotional proletariat and the emotional bourgeoisie. But I still have this, this concern a, about how to square off the fundamentally quantitative nature of a lot of value that gets quantified in the labor market. So again, how much does a heart to heart with a friend cost? How much should I expect in return for giving my partner a massage or for, you know, lending a supporting ear? And to that, I don't have a good answer.

Ellie: 49:01

I am still thinking about this as well, but for me, part of it has to do with the idea of the power dynamics that are involved. Because if we're just thinking about the exploitation side of things, one of the really big insights from feminist love studies, which is an area of inquiry where a lot of these ideas come from, is that women's love labor towards men is disempowering. But I don't feel disempowered when I'm having a conversation with a good friend about a problem that she's having, right? Or when I'm talking with my sister about, you know, any manner of things. So I think in those latter situations that I'm describing, there's not a sense of disempowerment, right? It's, it's not, it doesn't even feel like power is present. And so I, maybe there's something worth probing a little bit there.

David: 49:49

I myself wouldn't say that power is present because I do think power is everywhere, like air.

Ellie: 49:55

Well, I'm saying it feels like it's not.

David: 49:57

Oh, I see, I see. Yeah, and I guess if you feel like power is not present, it's an indicator that maybe there's a power balance for all practical purposes such a way that no party feels the weight of the relationship falling on their shoulders.

Ellie: 50:11

Related to that as well is this idea that I've worked on in some of my other philosophical writing about reciprocity, which doesn't just mean like a tit for tat exchange, right? It doesn't have to be the case that I talk about my feelings for 30 minutes, and then you get 30 minutes and any more than that is disempowering. Reciprocity rather in an existential sense where it's a recognition of the other's freedom and a sense that your own freedom is being recognized as well. And so it, it's not about using somebody as an emotional punching bag or just as like a means to an end, like your own emotional, I don't know, catharsis. It's more about a complex relational dynamic that is honoring the other's freedom. Then again, as I say that I'm, I'm also sort of struck by the idea that there are times when I wanna just go to my partner and like, vent and I know that he can take that or to go to a friend with that same desire. My, my really good friend who's my next door neighbor. Sometimes if we're having a hard day, like we'll just wanna cuddle, so maybe it is a little bit harder to parse like, am I honoring her freedom when I just wanna hug?

David: 51:22

No, but I think that's also a case in which you have to put something in the context of the arc of the relationship overall, so that those moments of venting where you need that person's energy coming to you are isolated and they're not the constant default of your mode of interacting with that person. Because if my neighbor came to me every day, or every time that I saw them and just only complained about their work, again, this is what I earlier described as a kind of self involvement that produces a really clear asymmetry in who gets to express their emotions and what the expectation for the other party is. And so I feel like in that dynamic, I would be reduced to the status of either a therapist or a counselor. And in that case, my freedom, my transcendental freedom as an agent, as a subject would not be recognized.

Ellie: 52:15

That David is interesting because it shows that even if there's not a tit for tat exchange, there is some sort of balance overall that one seeks in the economy of a relationship. I will say though, that that might help explain how asking for emotional support isn't exploitative, but it doesn't actually really answer the question of why it wouldn't be labor. Because somebody might come back and say, well, it's just that you are demanding the same amount of labor as I am demanding from you. And so we are employees, right? That are not, I don't, I don't know. Is, is it, maybe it's the absence of a boss that's the, that's what's not making it labor labor.

David: 52:55

We're all emotional self employees. I'm my own boss. No, I don't know. I think the reason that I earlier said that the terms emotion and labor get really complicated. This is one of those reasons, right? Because it is really difficult to disentangle because it is an effortful activity that can drain energy. And so there is no way to do emotional bonding without it taking some kind of energy. And so that already puts it into the camp of labor. Conversely, one could argue that all labor period is emotional labor, even physical labor and cognitive labor. You know, they leave you depleted and then you're not in that position to have emotional, emotionally fulfilling relationships or discussions with people at the end of a very long working day. And so that's, that's where I really kind of don't find my bearing in this literature. And nonetheless, we can all recognize those imbalances that we've been talking about. But in the case of your friend, I would say, if you're the kind of person that goes to your friend and says, Hey, I've had a really long day. Do you mind if I vent for like 20 minutes? Even having the cognitive or hermeneutic wherewithal to say that already puts you in a different camp than the people who expect others to do the emotional work for them, right? You're naming your emotional state.

Ellie: 54:22

True.

David: 54:23

You're bringing it up, you're putting it in context, rather than expecting the other person to do all of that for you. As a matter of course.

Ellie: 54:33

I like that a lot, David, and maybe this is the time to sort of say a little bit about our personal lives again. Because one thing I've been really, really struck by since I submitted the first version of this paper back in 2020 to the journal Hypatia, is that my primary partnership since then, which we've talked about in other episodes, does not exhibit this structure at all. Even though I am a cisgender woman in a relationship with a cisgender man. And I've puzzled over why that is, and it's still an ongoing area of my research because I, I don't think that the structure of my relationship suddenly means that my sample size wasn't large enough in the original article. Like I still really stand by what I said in the article, and at the same time, I'm in a relationship now that just doesn't exhibit the same structure. And so for me, a part of it literally might just be luck. I think there might be some partners who have a certain kind of chemistry where they don't actually need to communicate their feelings that much, where they can kind of intuit on both sides. What the other person needs. So that's kind of one possible working hypothesis I'm going with because my partner now doesn't have a degree in gender and women's studies. Like he hasn't read a lot of the feminist theory that I'm talking about, but yet there's a total egalitarianism, I would say, from a gender standpoint in our relationship. I will say though, that he grew up with a father who was really, really vocal about emotions. And so I think maybe there was a little bit of alternative modeling that happened from childhood about speaking about emotions such that I've never felt that the burden has fallen on me to interpret his emotions. And that's really not something I can say about any other relationship that I have had before with a man.

David: 56:21

Yeah, I mean, I, to, to talk about now to, you spent your five minutes on your relationship. Now it's time for my minutes on my relationship for it to be equal.

Ellie: 56:30

David, since you're not straight, you to exempt yourself. I'm I, totally wanna hear your thoughts.

David: 56:36

Yeah. No, I mean, that is the, the easy way out. But I think in my case, what has made my current relationship feel so fulfilling for me is that from a very early stage, I identified my partner's ability to communicate about emotions as one of his major virtues and attributes.

Ellie: 56:54

Mmmh.

David: 56:55

He didn't have a father that was effusively communicative, like your partner. But I sometimes chuck it off to the fact that maybe it's because he's French, and in French culture it is more common for people, men included to talk about emotions, sex, life, tragedy, tensions, you know, cul-de-sacs in interpersonal dynamics. I don't know how good of a working hypothesis that is.

Ellie: 57:19

No machismo in France. No. Hermeneutic laborer there, folks.

David: 57:23

I know that that's where, uh, machismo went to die in the 1960s, 70s and 80s, but it is the case that my partner is able to bring up discussions before that volatile moment that we talked about with the demand withdraw explode and from an early moment, I realized that this was something that mattered a lot to me, and it made me ruminate about the fact that what I was looking for in a partner was precisely the opposite of what I saw in the partners of the women in my life.

Ellie: 57:59

Mm. Yeah. Yeah.

David: 58:00

Who all exhibited that demand withdraw pattern. So I wanted somebody who came to me to talk about things that were difficult. I don't know, maybe that means that I'm like, am I the, the, am I the withdraw partner in this relationship? And he's the demand? I hope, I really hope not.

Ellie: 58:17

We should ask him.

David: 58:18

Yeah. No, but so in, in my case, I wouldn't quite put it in terms of intuition, which is how you put it. You said it's chemistry where they intuit one another.

Ellie: 58:26

That's a possibility. I just have to consider that. Yeah.

David: 58:29

Sure. For me, it really has to do with willingness to raise discussions and, uh, with talking know that sounds extremely simple and unsophisticated, but for me it has made a world of a difference in my personal life.

Ellie: 58:44

Well, and I think from like a straight woman perspective, that ability is so much more indicative of an actually feminist relationship than being in a relationship with a guy who's like read a bunch of Judith Butler, but is exhibiting the demand withdraw pattern in their everyday life. Right? Like it has a lot less to do with the actual content of the conversations that you're having or the values that somebody espouses, and a lot more to do with the walk that they're walking.

David: 59:16

We hope you enjoyed today's episode. Please rate and review us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to your podcasts.

Ellie: 59:24

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David: 59:29

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Ellie: 59:39

We'd like to thank our audio editor, Aaron Morgan, our production assistant, Clare A'Hearn, and Samuel PK Smith for the original music.

David: 59:46

And to our listeners, thanks so much for overthinking with us.