Theorizing emotions to understand the ways bodies are shaped and controlled.
I’m 21 years old. I can feel my stomach twisting and turning as the meeting progresses and my agenda items get closer. I feel myself sink a little bit lower in my chair. I tightly cross my legs at my ankles, trying to look as unimposing as possible as I try to maintain the perfect tone of voice that says, “I’m talking, so pay attention, but please don’t think that I’m being hostile.” It’s the result of a lifetime of being expected to be kind, articulate, and unemotional in my delivery. I’m hyperaware of my surroundings as I start to talk, and I see someone in the room fall back into his chair with exasperation, roll his eyes, and check out of the discussion, all in one second. I’m not angry with him and I know he doesn’t hate me, but I think about it for weeks afterward, taking extra care to always smile at him when we pass by each other for the next little while.
I’m 18 years old. Two guys from high school, who used to be my acquaintances, are aggravated when I become more outspoken, always giving me shit for sharing feminist ideas. They are quick to turn any Facebook post I make into an opportunity to make fun of me. Seeing their names pop up in my notifications window makes my heart race. I realize that I shouldn’t be expected to take their bullshit in jest, and delete both of them as Facebook friends. For months afterwards, both of them occasionally try to get me to engage with them online, publicly commenting on my Instagram posts or tweeting at me, “Shailee, add me back on Facebook!”—not because they care that I deleted them, but because they think it’s funny to try to get a rise out of me. All I want to do is send off a long string of tweets at these guys, but I’m forced to be the bigger person.
I’m 13 years old. I’m tasked with doing a class project with a guy who has publicly bullied me all year, making fun of my facial hair and brownness. When it’s just the two of us, he acts human, and talks to me with more respect. I amp up the kindness and manipulate my own feelings so that our interactions aren’t stressful, and eventually I end up doing the whole project myself. We both get an “A” and he goes back to making fun of me. I still feel an intrinsic need to impress the men in my life, even when they’re overtly terrible.
I’m eight years old. I’ve been living in Canada for less than three months, having immigrated from India with a thick accent in tow. I go up to my teacher’s desk to ask her for help and say, “I don’t understand the opposite question.” She furrows her brows at me, and says, “What?” I repeat myself. She says, “I don’t know what you’re saying.” All that’s happening is that I’m saying opposite like “uh-paw-zit” instead of “opp-uh-zit,” but she doesn’t have a clue. At this point, I feel utterly tiny, and am one second away from giving up the question. Something finally clicks for her and she laughs ridiculously loudly, her laugh bellowing through our small third grade classroom. She says, “OHHH, opposite! I couldn’t understand you!” I go home and practice saying the word “opposite” the way she said it. Seeing or hearing the word makes me cringe, because it’s connected to this memory and the feelings that go along with it.
I’m six years old. We visit my aunt’s apartment for a cup of tea and her husband tries to pick me up. I step back, looking up at my parents with big eyes, hoping that they’ll pick me up instead. I don’t like this uncle, because even as a six-year-old child, I have a strong feeling that I don’t want to be there. My parents laugh and nudge me towards him, saying “hug your kaka!” I sit stiffly on his knees for a minute while he coos and cuddles me, feeling primal disgust that no child could properly articulate with her limited vocabulary. I jump off, resigning myself to sitting alone in the next room until we can leave.
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It exists in all our interactions, relationships, homes, and workspaces; in education, entertainment, and sports; between you and everyone you know. Emotional Labour can be defined as slowly taxing and under/unacknowledged acts of expected, repeated work that people do to modify or hide their feelings so that they can more easily navigate life. It can be conscious and deliberate, or unconscious and learned. The term was coined by Arlie Hochschild in 1983, and has since been heavily discussed as a feminist concept in the essentialist notion that “women perform emotional labour for men.” Emotional labour, however, is a practice felt and carried out by most people based on their environments. Black men perform emotional labour for white people. Disabled people do that work for able-bodied people. Trans people do emotionally laborious work for cis people. And, it’s not so easily categorized into a binary; women of colour do emotional labour for white people and men of colour, for example. When expectations of labour are internalized within people, they can impose them onto their own groups.
Another example of a subtle but everyday mechanism that builds up negative messages over time are microaggressions. A sociological term as well, it was coined nearly fifty years ago by Chester M. Pierce to give language to the daily, regular insults and slights that he faced and saw imposed upon other African-Americans that created negative internal and external perceptions of Blackness in them over time. Some people would say they experience microaggressions on a daily basis. Microaggressions can be applied to any group of marginalized people in our society and have a profound effect on individuals over time, because each microaggression sends an implied message that is much more aggressive. For example: a white person clutches their purse as a Black or Latino man approaches or passes them. Hidden message: you and your group are criminals. Or: two gay men hold hands in public and are told not to flaunt their sexuality. Hidden message: same-sex displays of affection are abnormal and offensive. Keep it private and to yourselves (Derald Wing Sue, “Microaggressions in everyday life”).
In the deeply emotive text “The Fact of Blackness,” Frantz Fanon provides insight into the way that some people can come into the world already designated as objects based on the ideologies that predate them. Fanon analyzes the knowledge systems and assumptions that are all in effect when he experiences racism to suggest that there is no expression of personal identity that is objective or unaffected by histories, various emotions, societal hierarchies, and dominant gazes. All the seemingly small actions and behaviours that form the white gaze, such as “the movements, the attitudes, and the glances of the other” and “a thousand details, anecdotes, and stories” have created a pervasive, harmful idea of Blackness in the world Fanon is born into; thus, his Blackness is not self-defined, but rather, is defined and fixed upon him by the white man (418). Blackness is a fact that he is born into, instead of an identity that he is able to shape.
U of T Equity Studies professor Anne McGuire says, “The meaning of the body is constituted relationally; we are in our bodies only insofar as we are around other people, other objects, other environments.” Microaggressions and emotional labour play heavily into each other, and in most scenarios can be talked about concurrently as ways that emotion can shape and control our bodies. Many of the arguments that devalue those concepts as legitimate theories of critiquing and understanding our societies are rooted in the belief that those things cannot be “scientifically” or “objectively” studied; that these things are not real, but rather, are perceived by people as part of a culture of “victimhood.”
To those who are skeptical of the impact emotional concepts like emotional labour and microaggressions can have on people, I remind you that diminishing people’s lived experiences and silencing them when they speak about their own emotions—anger, exhaustion, sadness, tiredness, bitterness, and more, as a result of discrimination—has long been the way that important voices have been systematically kept out of conversations to create conclusions that favour those in power. Just because we can’t necessarily measure or outlaw them, or create direct one-to-one comparisons, doesn’t mean we should not discuss those experiences to try to understand them. Let’s read everything emotionally. Let’s talk about emotion as a tool of power, a currency, a political concept.
Further reading:
Arlie Hochschild, 1983. The managed heart: commercialization of human feeling. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Derald Wing Sue, 2010. “Microaggressions in everyday life.” PsychologyToday.
Frantz Fanon, 1952. “The Fact of Blackness.” In Black Skin, White Masks. 109-139.
Trinh Minh-Ha, 1989. “Write your Body” and “the Body in Theory.” Excerpts from Woman, Native, Other. 36–44.
Sara Ahmed, 2004. The Cultural Politics of Emotion. Routledge.
Shailee Koranne, 2015. “Me, My Hair, and My Brownness.” In The Aerogram.
