IDENTITY, GENDER AND CARE ‘WORK’

This essay will discuss gender identities with a focus on femininity in relation to emotional labour and Care work. I will discuss how re examining and re- representing gendered work such as “care” can contribute to a shift in subjective physical and emotional boundaries that define so called “masculine” and “feminine” characteristics. I am using Hotchchild’s work `The Managed Hearts to explore the complexities and multiple dimensional nature of emotional work/labour. Emotional labour is a common thread that runs through all notions and versions of care work. My intention is to re- value gendered work to encourage to gendered expression as a spectrum, availible to all sex’s and people, deconstructing heriaracical and patricarcal narratives of gendered subjectivity. By revaluing “care work” specifically, through theories of emotional labour, I hope to deconstruct hegemonic masculinities and feminitites, and to encorage, progressive fluid versions of masculintiies (Connell, 1987, 1995) and femininities, unsticking them from assigned sex, making them emprically availible to all across settings and groups (Shipper, 2007, p1). I want to think about how visible, social and economic value can be added to care work, value that is separated from current moral and gendered subjectivities that are currently attached to it, and how this might work in future technological and global landscapes. It is important to note here that I am aware of the intersection implications on care workers' social and economic value, but for this paper the focus will be on gendered subordinations and magnalilastions. 

This essay aims to build on Mimi Shcippers “Recovering The Feminine other: Masculinities, Femininity, and Gender Hegemony”(Schippers, 2007). Roles that sit under the umbrella of Care Work are vast  I have chosen to focus on ethnographies that focus on institutional health care work, such as nursing and hospice workers in the west. I have chosen to focus on these roles as these practices require “extensive amounts of emotional work” (Bolton, 2009 p.85), on top of medical, physical and institutional responsibilities. I will use on ethnographies by  people with different needs, including peers, family members and patients. The workers are simultaneously managing their emotional and the emotions of others, as well as technical, medical and organisational responsibilities. In the first half of this essay I will use Naturalising Power Naturalizing Power: Essays in Feminist Cultural Analysis to understand how feminity, care and power structures are linked, how and why this work and these qualities are subordinated alongside theories of naturalisation that contributed to hegemonic and categorical, patriarchal narratives. I will then discuss femininity, emotional labour and carework, as a means to revalue this work and so rethink hegemonic femininities and masculinities that define our gendered identities. 

Naturalisation, Gender Identity and Care 

Naturalization is “the act of causing something to be natural”, our fixed ideas of our individuality and identity are shaped and reinforced by visual and cultural representation that we, human beings across cultures imprint into our environments. Our identity, relationships to each other, our bodies, our feelings and our environment can not be separated. Naturalising Power includes a collection of essays that focus on supposed intersections and “domains of” family sexuality, race, nation and religion are affected by differentials of power that come embedded in culture (Carsten, 1998, p2). This work discusses how hierarchies of power seems “God” given or “natural”, but are actually socially and culturally constructed through embedded narratives created in response to the uncertainty of the human condition and its unanswered questions such as ‘who we are?’ and “where we are going?”(Carsten, 1998, p3). I am arguing that the reality is that our identities, bodies, consciousness, relationships and environment are always in a state of flux in response to social needs, visible culture and power structures. This means our gender and or version of gender is not fixed, biologically, physically or mentally. It will take collective work and time to unravel deeply embedded narratives. Globalisation and technology are speeding up this process, these traditional eurocentric colonial identities are being fragmented by globalisation and decolonisation. For the purpose of the essay I will not delve deeply into the theories of the naturalisation surrounding intersectional minorities. However Caring, Nursing, and female gender roles are strongly synonymous and statistically dominated by women (Zhang and Liu, 2016). To unravel this we must acknowledge examples of how naturalisation of gender identities have embedded proclaimed structural male dominance. 

Naturalisation is dependent on believed narratives, such as origin stories and theories of natural order, this includes the Euro-centric version of kinship, defining women and men by what they contribute to procreation, rooted in blood, bodily fluid and symbols. An example of how stories myths and institutions such as religion and science can provide identity and meaning (Carsten, 1998, p.2) is the Aristollian explanation of human procreation in Generation of Animals 1979. Aristotle asscoiates male seman with the sentient rational soul and menstrual blood was associated with nuritive soul. According to Aristotle women depend on men for their humanity, he writes “ that is why in cosmology they speak of nature of the earth as female and call it mother”, (Carsten, 1998, p.8). This is just one example of how we create narratives and beliefs with religious symbols, myths and reproductive process and fluid were connected through storytelling, symbolism. Aristotle's views were introduced to the West by Muslims and then used by multiple religions to rationalise notions of gender, such as God the Father and Mary the Mother in Christianity. This combination of symbolism, faith and power has driven the naturalisation of male power and female subordination. A form of sense making, when something is naturalised in this sense it is made to seem logical. Aristotle's ideas linking male blood with paternity and female blood became embedded in our political, philosophical and religious narratives and thus social consciousness. 

The idea of the subordinated the  nurturing mother is embedded deeply in our concept of female identity and played out, personally, politically and economically in the arena of care work and emotional labour. This is an example of how we can identify a series of events affected by relationships, movement, and power that have imposed and contributed to the feminine characteristics of the caring nurturing female. Identifying how these 

components can create, reinforce subjective and objective versions of gendered identity will help us to rethink dominant masculinities and femininities within this current period of history in the west. By exploring emotional labour and using this to revalue Care Work it exposes how the “quartet” of kinship, economics, politics and religion are reliant on each other, but also how through globalisation decolonisation, categorical narratives and thought are becoming outdated and so are hierarchical boundaries that have been opposed due to race, gender and class. This can be seen in current alternative versions of kinship and genders (Levine, 2008). However the interplay between this quartet still has deep connections with how we value Care Work, so called emotional labour in both private and public spheres. “Culture is what makes the boundaries of domains seem natural what give ideologies power and and what makes hegemonies appear seamless” (Carsten, 1998, p.8), I hope to challenge these ideas by bringing attention and visibility of the complexities of emotional labour. 

Gender Identity, Femininity, and Emotional Labour The American Psychological Society define gender identity as a “person’s internal sense of being male, female, or something else”, and gender expression as “the way a person communicates gender identity to others through behavior, clothing, hairstyle, voice, or body characteristics.” and gender expression as “the way a person communicates gender identity to others through behavior, clothing, hairstyle, voice, or body characteristics.”(Connell, 2019), this affects what is defined as feminine and masculine. Raewyn Connell defines Masculinities as “patterns of practice by which people both men and women engage in that position, she also claims that anyone interested in changing power structures must also be interested in the changes in the life of men, (Connell, web page). By re-valuing, and re appropriating subjective feminine practice, such as emotional labour (another example would be passiveness), I hope that dynamic gendered identities become more inviting to all people and socially accepted within larger community, whilst giving recognition to those engaging in Care roles. “Gender” can be defined as the ways in which the “reproductive arena”, which includes “bodily structures and processes of human reproduction”, organizes practice at all levels of social organization from identities, to symbolic rituals, to large-scale institution (Schippers, 2007, p1). How can we understand this in the area of care and the practice of emotional labour? 

Hothschilds “The Managed Hearts, Commercialisation of Human Feeling” first introduced the idea of emotional labour (Hochschild, 2012) she describes emotional labour as the management of feeling to create a publicly observable facial and bodily display; emotional labor is sold for a wage and therefore has exchange value. I use the synonymous terms emotion work or emotion management to refer to these same acts done in a private context where they have use value (Hochschild, 2012) .” Her chapter on Managing Feeling (Hochschild, 2012, p.35) shines a light on the multiple roles, performative nature and psychological and physical costs that are involved when performing emotional labour outside of domestic kinship groups and within the workplace (Hochschild, 2012, p.43), Hotchchild’s work also highlights our dependence on the commercialisation of type of work in capitalist society. What is emotional labour and what does it demand and cost? Hotchchild defines “Emotion as a bodily orientation or signal act which demands us to assess, manage, label”, she describes this as the process of feeling (Hochschild, 2012, p.3). This process often uncovers an unconscious perspective, these different levels of reaction are then left to workers to manage, whilst managing the emotions and feelings of patients”. I hope that highlighting the different dimensions of emotional labour can add value to the status and economy of roles such as healthcare workers, as well as untangle the devaluation and subordination of emotional work and that of femininity that contributes to hegemonic gender identities. Mimmii Shcipper offers an alternative conceptual framework for how gender hegemony operates through masculinities and femininities, placing men’s dominance over women at the center, allowing space for multiple configurations of femininity. Her work “1) offers a conceptualization that does not reduce masculinities to the behavior of boys and men or femininity to the behavior of girls and women, 2) provides a definition of femininity that situates it, along with masculinity, in gender hegemony and allows for multiple configurations, and 3) is empirically useful for identifying how masculinity and femininity ensure men’s dominance over women as a group locally, regionally, and globally (Connell & Messerschmidt, 2005), and how they legitimate and perpetuate race, class, ethnic, and sexual inequality” (Schippers, 2007). By bringing attention to the layered roles, complexity and sacrifices that are made within this work I hope to rethink how we might value, represent or identify this work. 

In Hotchschild’s Chapter “Gender, Status and Feeling” (Hochschild, 2012, p163), Hotchschild poses the question; “Is emotion work as important for 

men as it is for women?’ Her answer is no due to 1. the lack of access to power authority or social status in society, she claims that women make resources out of feeling and offer it as a gift and that gender is called on “to do different types of work, and so emotion work is important in different ways for men and for women. She writes, “On the whole, women tend to specialize in the flight attendant side (or health care) of emotional labor, men in the bill collection side of it. This specialization of emotional labor in the marketplace rests on the different childhood training of the heart that is given to girls and to boys."What are little girls made of? Sugar and spice and everything nice. What are little boys made of? Snips and snails and puppy dog tails." Again another example of the naturalisation of a stereotype of femininity, that is played out in the workplace. 

Care Work, Emotional Labour and Value Hochschild's The Managed Heart Focuses on the commercialisation of emotional labour within service roles such a flight attendants and service work, I am focusing on Health Care for the reason of the wider social and emotional dependency on these roles and the extensive psychological work that is included in this type of emotional labour, I personally believe these should be celebrated and appreciated for all their complexities. My aim is to change the current narrative that reinforce and naturalise the idea of care as a feminine, and challenge the subordination of the feminine by revaluing this type of work. For example a nurturing and empathic job expectations should be understood as complex and challenging, psychologically and physically demanding. In my opinion the social status of Care needs to shift and this is entangled in gendered and economic value. Furthermore because of current technological advancements in the health care sectors, workers are expected to engage with both technological and emotional aspects of the role (BALKA, 2016, p181). 

These themes are explored in Rebecca Selberg’s study “Femininity at Work Gender Labour and Changing Relations of Power in A Swedish Hospital”, which demonstrates how changing political and social landscapes, in this case Neo liberalism to the Welfare state, can change notions of “femininity’. Selbergs study is an example of how care and emotional labour in the home and work are expected without appreciation or economic value, whilst being layered with extra responsibility to adhere to a technological post neolibral climate. In Pallavi Banerjee’s review of Selberg’s study she writes, “labour 

performed and in relation to bodies and the ways in which gendered practices are maintained, reconfigured and challenged within the organization of work”(Banerjee, 2014), providing an example of how gendered identity and so called characteristics are naturalised through work. Selberg perhaps, more progressively, reports that Gender scholarship has identified how paid care work reproduces male dominance and reinforces women’s subordination, but also how labour and workplaces provide a critical space for women to create a voice through development of new forms of communal identity and struggle. Selberg then introduces “normative femininity”, a form of femininity that she argues is derived from a moral and ideological authority linking the feminine to motherhood and bringing up a nation” (Banerjee, 2014). This is also discussed The Careless Society—Dependency and Care Work in Capitalist Societies by Beatrice Muller, where she discusses how the “bourgeois notion of motherhood shifted from a purely biological role to a simultaneously biological and social one (Beer, 1987, 164), (Müller, 2019) and that unequal gender relations can thus be considered a condition that enabled the emergence and reproduction of capitalism (Hagemann-White, 1984; Beer, 1987)”(Müller, 2019). She acknowledges that women's oppression existed before capitalism, however claims its practice within capitalism had a profound effect on the separation of the reproduction and production spheres, which naturalises the nurturing narrative of femininity further (Müller, 2019). Instead of focusing on this exploitation and economic subordination of such ‘normative femininity. I hope to rethink the cultural narratives that surrounds emotional labour, this can be achieved through new representation of care through cultural practice such as research, creative practice, academia and the media. 

Laura Dresser is an academic who’s practice focuses on low-wage work and workforce development systems and writes about ways to build stronger labor market systems. In her report “Valuing Care by Valuing Care Workers, The Big Cost of a Worthy Standard and Some Steps Towards It” she explores how we can revalue this work economically, she writes “improving these jobs requires dramatically and fundamentally reshaping an understanding of what care work is”. Boris and Klein argue that the reason why care work pays so poorly is the the relabling of emotional labour from a “labour of love” to “unskilled work that any woman can perform”, to make this shift we must shift the current subordination of feminine characteristics, (Dresser, 2015, p6). In Beatrice Mullers The Careless Society— 

Dependency and Care Work in Capitalist Societies she argues intersectional disparities in unpaid work are no coincidence, but instead a basic condition of capitalism. Dresser describes care as ““priceless” work, of such critical importance to both family and society”(Dresser, 2015, p1), and argues that to solve this problem significant money and infrastructure that reflects the public's interest. Dressers report is complex and detailed, she concludes that to solve the problem of undervalued workers they “need to be put at the center of the project”, providing a new narrative of care by giving workers a voice and visibility(Dresser, 2015, p22.) More importantly she claims that care work will not be displaced by technology and that job demand is growing faster than any other sector, however because of moral gendered and intersectional subjectivities the position of these jobs are not elevating socially or economically. This very notion may shift the value of Care Work as unlike other professions there is not, as of yet, scope to replace emotional labour with technology. 

The final Ethnography I will discuss is Nicky James’s work hospice care workers Nicky James Care = Organisation + Physical Labour + Emotional Labour. This work also addresses the multiple invisible roles and responsibilities that are expected and carried out under the umbrella of “Care”. James’s definition of a `carer’ is defined as someone who “gives sustained, close, direct mental and physical attention to the person being cared for” (James, 1992, p489). By examining the components and ideologies of care James highlights the outdated linguistic associations of care with kinship care and domestic care. In her section on organisation, she claims that to create “effective” care organisation is the link between how the balance of physical to emotional is balanced and maintained. She includes this quote by Sharpe “It is ironic that organising involved in combining home childcare and job would qualify for a management diploma yet it goes unrecognised outside the home”. (Sharpe, 1984 , p233). Her work highlights the multidimensional psychologically complex aspect of care work which remains largely invisible to the public and society. This could be argued due to the linguistic and societal perceptions of “Care” and its tie to traditional kinship ideas of motherhood. Is it we separate linguistic perceptions of care from gendered identity, or is there a call for new terminology. I would argue that its a case of re-valuing femininity and attached attributes of empathy, emotional expression, affection 

“The emotional component of human service has been ignored by classical theories but is critical in all human service” (James, 1992, p500) 

The final part of this work contextualises emotional labour within establish emotional labour as a key factor in domestic and workplace care work, she writes it as much hard work as physical work. Emotional labour is about action and doing and describes it as a personal exchange, which can rely on the performative aspect of this as described by Hotchschild. However in a Health-care setting a level of trust is expected from the carer and authenticity affects the effectiveness of care. The nurses' descriptions of 'good care' included 'spending time', 'involvement', 'listening,' 'being there', and 'family care' denoted the quality of care they aimed to give (James, 1992, p500). The carer is managing their emotional plus the emotions of the patient and family all of whom are experiencing trauma. This leads me to my final point about the development and status of healthcare careers. Time and experience in said role creates higher and more effective levels of care through the development of a deeper understanding of human interaction emotion and trauma. This can only be gained through time and experience. James writes about status “At the hospice there was almost an inverse law of status and skill in emotional labour”, where the older auxiliaries were thought of as the ‘backbone’ of the team by doctors and higher paid nurses. The reasons that so much of the emotional labour lay with the auxiliaries, is because emotional labour takes time and requires considerable knowledge of the patient as a person. Doctors don’t have the time or the information, which is why auxiliaries, particularly older auxiliaries with experience of life, played the same role in the hospice that women do at home. This is a direct example of how emotional labour does not receive its deserved recognition economically or socially. James argues that emotional labour needs the same amount of training as physical labour does. The introduction of such training may well add value to the practice of emotional labour. 

Conclusion This essay does not aim to define gendered identities as natural or unnatural but nature as something that is under constant flux, determined by the proximity of our relationships, roles, narratives, symbols and representations. In this sense, gender identities are relational, and so there is always room for change and movement. To change the narrative to deconstruct hierarchies and hegemonic constructs applied to emotional labour, we must think about it in relation to economics, morality, cultural 

representation, and historic representations, all of which compound one another. Scholz understands value disassociation in the following way: “that female reproductive activities and their corresponding feelings, qualities, attitudes, etc. (such as sensuality, emotionality, and care-taking) are structurally split off from the value of abstract labor” (Scholz, 2011, 118, translation B.M.). Thus, “commodity-producing patriarchy” is constituted not only by goods and forms of money as ends in themselves, but the difference, seen as a feminine principle, is excluded as incomprehensible and contradictory, and therefore considered inferior “(Scholz, 2011, 118ff.) By creating visible a social economic value surrounding the narrative of emotional labour, we are also re-valuing femininity and thus unraveling gendered assigned work, deconstructing hegemonic and rigid gendered identities. Furthermore, separating them from their feminine and masculine counterparts. Although the linguistically relationship is tricky, So called feminine traits such as empathy, sensitivity and care would be encouraged and socially accepted in both male and female assigned sex, highlighting that identity is built around roles in social groups. 

If the workforce is more equally male and female then structural gendered inequalities may be lessened. This re appropriation of emotional labour through recognition, research and representation may cause care to be a more widely socially accepted role for men and other intersections, creating a more dynamic, and less hegemonic workforce. This will also affect public and private domains, including the domestic sphere, in which there is still a gendered division of labour, supporting Hochschild’s ‘economy of gratitude”(Hochschild, 2012). Looking to the future Care Work may actually become more valuable than any other kind of sector, based on our social dependence through changing kind, demand and “human” emotional labour involved connecting globalisation and technology with more fluid and multiple versions of gender identity, through the frame of work. 

“Playing roles within each of these segments of our social lives brings us into union with others ; we become a comm-unity. Knowing and practicing culture within these bounded domains have for a long time signalled the close relation between consciousness and society, In both the academy and public arena, the shift from thinking of community as a permanent entity to one constantly brought into being through varieties of expression has transformed not only how we think of academic disciplines and their claims, 

but also, and even more importantly, how we regard the various socio- cultural systems of the world and their values and attitudes.” (Masolo, 2002)