A thought-provoking and incisive book.
A Detroit-based British journalist examines the gender bias and misogyny underlying what she calls “extractive emotional capitalism.”
Early on, Hackman defines emotional labor as “the primordial training that, before anything else, women and girls should edit the expression of their emotions to accommodate and elevate the emotions of others.” Through research and interviews conducted over seven years, the author explores how such "editing" and "elevation" constitute an invisible yet heavily exploitative form of work. She observes that such labor is tied to the enforcement of traditional gender norms intended to keep women (and men) tied to specific roles. This “enforces a system where supposedly altruistic women serve supposedly emotionally helpless men.” Hackman vividly demonstrates that this system encompasses both the domestic and professional spheres, affecting the lives of women across lines of race and socio-economic class. One area in which it most visibly operates is the service industry, in which a largely female workforce is at the mercy of business owners and executives who often fail to pay servers enough to create an agreeable experience for patrons, who may (or may not) offer the remuneration one restaurant employee called “the difference between economic survival and destitution.” Hackman argues that part of the way the system justifies itself is not only by devaluing women’s work, but—and almost paradoxically—suggesting that emotional labor “is so valuable that it is incalculable, making it sacrilegious for it to be paid.” As she critiques the neoliberalism that has given rise to an economic system built on invisible exploitation, Hackman issues a clarion call to rethink the true relationship between empathy and power. “It’s time to bring emotional labor into the light and to plant the seeds for reckoning and transformation, for a new kind of understanding of what it means to live together, in society,” she writes. “Our joint humanity depends on it.”
A thought-provoking and incisive book.Pub Date: March 28, 2023
ISBN: 978-1-25077-735-5
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: Jan. 10, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2023
A revelatory meditation on shattering journeys.
Bearing witness to oppression.
Award-winning journalist and MacArthur Fellow Coates probes the narratives that shape our perception of the world through his reports on three journeys: to Dakar, Senegal, the last stop for Black Africans “before the genocide and rebirth of the Middle Passage”; to Chapin, South Carolina, where controversy erupted over a writing teacher’s use of Between the World and Me in class; and to Israel and Palestine, where he spent 10 days in a “Holy Land of barbed wire, settlers, and outrageous guns.” By addressing the essays to students in his writing workshop at Howard University in 2022, Coates makes a literary choice similar to the letter to his son that informed Between the World and Me; as in that book, the choice creates a sense of intimacy between writer and reader. Interweaving autobiography and reportage, Coates examines race, his identity as a Black American, and his role as a public intellectual. In Dakar, he is haunted by ghosts of his ancestors and “the shade of Niggerology,” a pseudoscientific narrative put forth to justify enslavement by portraying Blacks as inferior. In South Carolina, the 22-acre State House grounds, dotted with Confederate statues, continue to impart a narrative of white supremacy. His trip to the Middle East inspires the longest and most impassioned essay: “I don’t think I ever, in my life, felt the glare of racism burn stranger and more intense than in Israel,” he writes. In his complex analysis, he sees the trauma of the Holocaust playing a role in Israel’s tactics in the Middle East: “The wars against the Palestinians and their Arab allies were a kind of theater in which ‘weak Jews’ who went ‘like lambs to slaughter’ were supplanted by Israelis who would ‘fight back.’” Roiled by what he witnessed, Coates feels speechless, unable to adequately convey Palestinians’ agony; their reality “demands new messengers, tasked as we all are, with nothing less than saving the world.”
A revelatory meditation on shattering journeys.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2024
ISBN: 9780593230381
Page Count: 176
Publisher: One World/Random House
Review Posted Online: Aug. 2, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A fierce, penetrating, and empowering call for change.
Artist and activist Vaid-Menon demonstrates how the normativity of the gender binary represses creativity and inflicts physical and emotional violence.
The author, whose parents emigrated from India, writes about how enforcement of the gender binary begins before birth and affects people in all stages of life, with people of color being especially vulnerable due to Western conceptions of gender as binary. Gender assignments create a narrative for how a person should behave, what they are allowed to like or wear, and how they express themself. Punishment of nonconformity leads to an inseparable link between gender and shame. Vaid-Menon challenges familiar arguments against gender nonconformity, breaking them down into four categories—dismissal, inconvenience, biology, and the slippery slope (fear of the consequences of acceptance). Headers in bold font create an accessible navigation experience from one analysis to the next. The prose maintains a conversational tone that feels as intimate and vulnerable as talking with a best friend. At the same time, the author's turns of phrase in moments of deep insight ring with precision and poetry. In one reflection, they write, “the most lethal part of the human body is not the fist; it is the eye. What people see and how people see it has everything to do with power.” While this short essay speaks honestly of pain and injustice, it concludes with encouragement and an invitation into a future that celebrates transformation.
A fierce, penetrating, and empowering call for change. (writing prompt) (Nonfiction. 14-adult)Pub Date: June 2, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-593-09465-5
Page Count: 64
Publisher: Penguin Workshop
Review Posted Online: March 14, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2020
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