Editing Arlie Russell Hochschild (section)

===Emotion in social life: Feeling rules and emotional labor===

Hochschild proposes that human emotions—joy, sadness, anger, elation, jealousy, envy, despair—are partly social. Each culture, she argues, provides its members with prototypes of feeling which, like the different keys on a piano, attune us to different inner notes. She provides an example of the Tahitians, who have one word, "sick," for what in other cultures might correspond to envy, depression, grief, or sadness. Culture guides the act of recognizing a feeling by proposing what's possible for us to feel. In ''The Managed Heart'', Hochschild cites the Czech novelist [[Milan Kundera]], who writes that the Czech word "litost" refers to an indefinable longing, mixed with remorse and grief—a constellation of feelings with no equivalent in any other language. It is not that non-Czechs never feel litost, she notes; it is that they are not, in the same way, invited to lift out and affirm the feeling.

We don't simply feel what we feel, Hochschild suggests. We "try to" feel the way we wish to or think we should feel based on socially derived [[feeling rules]]. And we do this through [[emotional labor]]. For example, in [[The Managed Heart: the Commercialization of Human Feeling|''The Managed Heart'']], Hochschild writes of how flight attendants are trained to control passengers' feelings during times of turbulence and dangerous situations while suppressing their own fear or anxiety. Bill collectors, as well, are often trained to imagine debtors as lazy or dishonest, so they can feel suspicious and intimidating. As the number of service jobs grows, so too do different forms of emotional labor. In the era of COVID-19, she argues, many front-line workers do the emotional labor of suppressing heightened anxieties about their own health and that of their families while dealing with the fear, anxiety and sometimes hostility of the public.<ref>{{Cite web |last=Stix |first=Gary |date=2020-11-01 |title=Emotional Labor Is a Store Clerk Confronting a Maskless Customer |url=https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/emotional-labor-is-a-store-clerk-confronting-a-maskless-customer/ |access-date=2024-05-20 |website=Scientific American |language=en}}</ref>

Emotional labor has gone global, she argues. In her essay, "Love and Gold," in ''Global Woman'' she describes immigrant care workers who leave their children and elderly back in the Philippines, Mexico or elsewhere in the global South, to take paid jobs caring for the young and elderly in families in the affluent North. Such jobs call on workers to manage grief and anguish vis-a-vis their own long-unseen children, spouses, and elderly parents, even as they try to feel—and genuinely do feel—warm attachment to the children and elders they daily care for in the North. Hochschild describes such a pattern as a [[global care chain]].