The Commercialized Love:A Study Of Domestic Women Workers From The Perspective Of Emotional Labor

As a response to the emergence of social care crisis,market-oriented domestic labor has increasingly become the focus of researchers’attention in recent years.The main body of domestic work is female domestic workers.Scholars pay more attention to the physical and mental work of them.Their emotional labor is often ignored and needs to be discussed systematically.The research object is the female domestic workers from a domestic housekeeping company in Xiamen.The researcher entered the company as an intern and collected fieldwork information through observation and interviews.This research is based on Hochschild’s emotional labor system and labor process theory,combining with the "labormanagement-customer" tripartite relationship as an analytical perspective,to explore how female domestic workers can learn emotional labor rules based on their own experience,the practical process of emotional labor,the practical results of emotional labor and the impact on the main body of female domestic workers under the relationship of "labor-capital-customer".With the emphasis on the subjective perspective of domestic workers,this research found the following three aspects:First,the source of female domestic workers ’ emotions and the process of acquiring emotional labor social rules:female domestic workers who take rural middle-aged women as the main body,take their own emotions after being marketed from the private sector,it has become a commodity attached to domestic manual labor.In this process,domestic workers use their own emotional memory to learn the emotional rules of acting under the control of the housekeeping company.Second,in the specific labor process,the practical process of the emotional labor of domestic workers:the employer controls the emotional labor of female domestic workers with the help of emotional manufacturing,time and space double oppression,panoramic monitoring and the assistance of the housekeeping company.Correspondingly,female domestic workers achieve the purpose of obtaining economic remuneration or social recognition by performing surface and deep acting k.Among them,some female domestic workers also use emotional acting to achieve improper purposes,and even destroy the employer’s family.Regarding the"disruptive" behavior of this "close stranger" to the family,employers often take the initiative to demarcate and negotiate or terminate the employment relationship.Third,under deep emotional labor female domestic workers’ unions have emotional breakdown and alienation,and consumption can help them relieve the tension of emotional alienation.And it is also easy for female domestic workers to fall into subjective alienation.Whether they become the main body of urbanized labor or return to the role of family care,female domestic workers still cannot escape from the dual oppression of urbanrural differences and traditional patriarchy.