1. ‘What’s love got to do with it?’ Emotional Bodies
Week 7
Embodiment & Feminist Theory

2. Recap
Considered how embodiment is an organising structure which ‘values’ some bodies more than others
Look at how bodies are always constructed through class, ‘race’ and gender, disability and ageing
Considered the construction of ‘deviant bodies’ and ‘bodies at risk’

3. Outline Consider the social context of emotions
Look at the role of emotional labour in employment
Consider emotion work within heterosexual relationships

4. What are emotions? Think about your experiences of emotions
Pride Shame Nostalgia Embarrassment
Anger Fear
Joy Sadness
Discuss with your neighbour an experience of one of these emotions

5. What are emotions? Emotions are often related to the social context.
Emotions are physical sensations
But our understanding of them arises through our social knowledge

6. Public emotions
Acknowledgement of emotions also based in the social context and varies in time and space
In the UK, shift in attitudes
Public mourning of the dead
Rise of confessional TV
Acknowledgement is varied
Sadness of victim’s families but not perpetrators

7. ‘Feeling Rules’ Most social groups have ‘feeling rules’
Happy at birthdays or weddings
Sad at funerals
Those who don’t comply may be publicly admonished

8. Emotions as inherent
Lupton argues there are 2 main perspectives on emotion
Emotions as inherent
Born with set basic emotions
Expression differs from society to society
Individualised understanding
Cognitive theory

9. Emotions as Sociocultural constructions
Emotions are always experienced, understood and named via social and cultural processes
Learnt rather than inherited behaviour
Shaped by social institutions, social systems and power relationships
Examples in social theory
Marx – alienation
Durkheim – anomie

10. Discuss to what extent you think emotions are socially constructed

11. Gendered emotions
Lupton argues that the ideas of ‘emotional women’ and ‘unemotional man’ have a powerful hold in western society
Emotion is coded as female
‘Get in touch with your feminine side’
Women associated with ‘good emotions’ but also irrational, and loss of control

12. Unemotional man? Masculinity may encourage the ‘denial’ of emotions
Boys don’t cry
Rationality and reason
Independence rather than dependency
But some emotions ‘reserved’
for men
Anger and rage

13. Emotional Labour
Hochschild drew attention to the ways in which feelings are increasingly commercialised and commoditized
Entry to emotions into the marketplace
Drew a distinctions between
Emotional work Reconstituting emotions in line with feeling rules
Emotional labour Similar work, but to induce change in others

14. Service industries
Hochschild drew attention to the ways in which employees are required to ‘feel’ the right emotions
‘Emotional labour requires one to induce or suppress feeling in order to sustain the outward countenance that produces the proper state of mind in others’
Hochschild A (1983) The managed heart. London University of California press p7

15. Service industries Hochschild draws a distinction between: Deep Acting
Requirement to actually feel the right emotions
Surface Acting
Requirement to display the right emotion

16. What impact do you think emotional labour has on workers?

17. Private emotion work
Jackson argues that social scripts are an importance resource for understanding romantic love
Boy meets Girl stories
Valentines Day
Chocolates, flowers and rings
These scripts identify ‘love’ relationships and the expected social norms

18. Changing Intimacy? Giddens suggested that intimacy is changing
‘pure relationships’ based on equality between partners
Jamieson argues that this ignores gendered power relationships
Women’s responsibility for emotional labour within relationships

19. Family Emotional labour
Women are ‘responsible’ for emotional labour (emotional women)
Part of caring
Monitoring and regulating the emotional states of others
Performing intimacy within heterosexual couples
Often acts were unreciprocated

20. Summary Considered the idea that emotions are socially constructed
Looked at feeling rules and emotional labour
Considered how these might be gendered

21. Next week Look at the presentation of self
Examine feminist critiques of the fashion and beauty industry
Look at the debates over cosmetic surgery