Emotional performance at work becomes commodified labor when feelings are bought and sold.

Evidence

To manage their emotional states, employees engage in two sorts of acting. ‘Surface acting’ is the equivalent of faking a smile or acting as a character without personally identifying with the role one is playing. In ‘deep acting,’ the employee works to identify with the feelings she needs to project to keep customers satisfied. Whether she engages in the acting consciously or unconsciously, and whether she enjoys herself or not, this acting requires effort, which Hochschild qualifies as labor, arguing, “When deep gestures of exchange enter the market sector and are bought and sold as an aspect of labor power, feelings are commoditized.” — Theresa M. Senft, Camgirls, 105

Categorization

• DEFINE: Distinguishes surface acting from deep acting as deployed in emotional labor theory.
• XREF: Directly connects to the reader’s interest in how decorum and emotional performance toward others operates as work. — connects to: Workers must now perform enthusiasm for work rather than merely perform the work. — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 1705; Emotional labor requires inducing or suppressing feeling for others’ sake — Brooke Erin Duffy, (Not) Getting Paid to Do What You Love:…, 70; Emotional capitalism exploits emotions’ fleeting performativity, which feelings lack — Byung-Chul Han, Psychopolitics: Neoliberalism and New…, 98 (+4 more)
• SEED: An angle: whether camgirls’ ‘authentic’ self-display counts as deep acting that commodifies their feelings.

Broader Connections

• Emotional labor requires inducing or suppressing feeling for others’ sake #expands (0.92) — Brooke Erin Duffy, (Not) Getting Paid to Do What You Love, 70
• Emotional capitalism exploits emotions’ fleeting performativity, which feelings lack #expands (0.85) — Byung-Chul Han, Psychopolitics, 98
• Mandated self-expression makes affective demands on Control-society workers #expands (0.85) — Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism, 84
• Companies treat measurable emotion as a predictor of spending and profit #exemplifies (0.75) — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 883
• When visual appearance is labor, bodily modification raises the commodity’s exchange value. #corroborates (0.72) — Grant Bollmer, Katherine Guinness, The Influencer Factory, 157