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Bad feeling at work: emotional labour, precarity, and the affective economy

ABSTRACT Returning to Arlie Hochschild’s foundational work, this article argues for the ongoing relevance of emotional labour in understanding the subjective demands placed on those working at the intersection of affective labour and precarity. Drawing on a range of feminist analyses, I understand emotional labour as the work entailed in producing profitable (often positive) affects at the level of the individual worker, thereby challenging views of affective labour that focus on the affects that circulate productively under neoliberalism. The stakes of such emotional labour in the affective economy, I argue, are heightened by conditions of labour precarity in which many workers are asked not only to produce positive affects, but also to subordinate the bad feelings that can arise alongside socio-economic insecurity. I understand the demand for positive affect from workers as emerging not only due to the productivity of such affects under neoliberalism, but also because the prevalence of positive feeling operates ideologically to normalize precarious working conditions. Bad feeling in this context threatens to challenge the neoliberal status quo. Drawing extensively on Tatjana Turanskyj’s 2011 film Eine Flexibe Frau, I identify the cultural and workplace logics by which bad feelings are excised and suppressed, primarily through the presumption of bad feeling as wilful. These logics complicate any effort to read a straightforward politics of resistance or refusal into bad feeling; however, I conclude that to view bad feeling as structurally embedded and functionalized within capitalist logics offers a means by which to respond differently to those who feel bad as we encounter them in the precarious affective economy.