Definition: The systematic requirement to generate, suppress, or modify authentic feelings to fulfill the emotional expectations of authority structures in the Master's House, creating internal division between genuine experience and performed response.
Arlie Hochschild's research reveals how capitalism extracts emotional energy through the commodification of feeling. Service workers must "sell their souls" through constant emotional performance, displaying feminized deference and friendliness regardless of their actual state. This creates estrangement from authentic emotion - workers become alienated from their own feelings through constant performance. The "emotional proletariat" emerges, predominantly women and marginalized people who must manage others' emotions for survival.1
Operational Mechanism
Relational Labor extends beyond simple behavioral compliance to colonize the internal landscape of feeling itself. Within Domination Systems, subordinates must not merely act appropriately but experience appropriate emotions, transforming authentic internal states to match external requirements regardless of personal truth or wellbeing.
This mechanism creates what philosophers term performative authenticity—the demand that performance appear genuine rather than calculated. The emotional laborer must convince not only observers but themselves that required feelings represent authentic rather than imposed responses to circumstances. This requires Bad Faith.
Systemic Function
The Master's House depends on Relational Labor because simple behavioral compliance proves insufficient for maintaining complex Domination Systems. These structures require willing participation that appears natural rather than coerced, genuine rather than manipulated. Relational Labor provides the mechanism through which this willing participation gets manufactured.
The system particularly values positive emotional responses to subordination—gratitude for exploitation, enthusiasm for constraint, loyalty to authority that operates against subordinate interests. These responses serve as evidence that domination has penetrated beyond external behavior into internal experience itself.
Psychological Impact
Relational Labor creates what psychologists recognize as internal fragmentation, where authentic feelings become separated from expressed emotions through systematic practice. This division enables short-term functioning within Domination Systems while creating long-term psychological strain through continuous internal contradiction.
The requirement to perform unfelt emotions while suppressing genuine responses creates what we term affective dissonance—a state where internal emotional landscape becomes increasingly disconnected from external expression, leading to confusion about authentic feelings and decreased capacity for genuine emotional response.
Consensus Extracts Relational Labor
Under Enforced Consensus:
-
Those who hold systemic trauma must dilute their truth to remain in the circle
-
Those with marginalized identities must translate their perspectives into palatable language to the Dominator
-
The dissenter must self-regulate while the Dominant self-expresses
The emotional and spiritual labor required to "agree" becomes asymmetric.
Recognition
Recognizing Relational Labor requires developing sensitivity to the difference between authentic emotional response and performed feeling. This recognition often emerges through noticing moments when expressed emotions feel disconnected from genuine internal experience or when emotional responses appear shaped more by external expectations than internal truth.
See also: Bad Faith, Performance of Freedom Within Unfreedom, Master's Mirror
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emotional_labor