‘This is not emotional labour’; transgender studies vs transgender studying
In October 2021 to January 2022 I was consumed, devoured and drained by a 3000-word essay for my Critical Heritage Module. The question I chose to answer: ‘To what extent is heritage useful in addressing critical global issues today? Select one key issue to consider.’ The issue I chose to consider (because I hate myself apparently): transgender heritage.
My essay writing process is a bit of a mess. I ponder, I research, I print out reams worth of essays, I take out every single vaguely relevant book from all the university libraries I have access to, I search indices, I highlight quotes, I write up quotes, I wake up at 3am and record slurred possible sentences for weeks and months. Of course, I write up in a few days. I ended up with enough research and vaguely bubbling nervousness for at least a dissertation— I usually do.
‘Trans Heritage - philsophy, problems and practice’ was excellent of course, even publishable apparently. But it does not mitigate the very indignity of spending my good trans time and good trans money to purchase and read The Transsexual Empire— what an elaborate act of self harm. Have Janice Raymond and Raymond Blanchard and JK Rowling (let down) and every US lawmaker who signed a restrictive bathroom bill won when all the thoughts in my little trans head are doom doom doom?
Arlie Hochschild coined the phrase ‘emotional labour’ in The Mangled Heart, meaning to fake or suppress feeling, creating an friendly and forthcoming outer appearance. She constructed this to describe the smiles forced onto the faces of customer-facing workers, and the emotional regulation necessary for service work. But much like ‘death of the author’ (whose contemporary usage seems almost universally connected to salvaging the intellectual property of virulent transphobes by their disappointed and traumatised former fans), this sociological term has become hazy and memetic — used, reused and misused by an always-online Twitter class of anxious semi-intellectuals. No disrespect to the always-online Twitter class, my membership dues are never late, but we all should understand that academic language tends to become perverted (worst case scenario) or reformed (best case scenario) online.
Julie Beck for The Atlantic in 2018 calls this ‘concept creep’ — the taking on of wider meanings. In the case of emotional labour, the term has expanded to include venting to friends, the splitting up of housework, the horror of answering emails, allyship, and parenting. Can this be applied in an academic sense as well? The work we do researching, theorising, and writing on difficult, contested, and traumatic histories and subjects is an accepted norm of humanities and of heritage studies.
It certainly feels like I am performing some type of emotional labour when I research transgender history. I am driven to anxiety, fear, anger, and hopelessness when I read and absorb legacies of violence and disenfranchisement, medical horrors, and colonial othering of fellow trans and gender plural people and communities to which I feel bonded through time and space.
I often think: ‘How does she do it?’. How do Susan Stryker and Sandy Stone and Thalia Mae Betcher and Shon Faye and Christine Burns do it? How do they fight and write without imploding with grief? And it is ‘she’: pioneering trans women who have so, so much to lose and often do. Transmasculinity is confusing and vulnerable and often humiliating but my sisters are the ones we all think of when it comes to life-threatening transphobia.
I find Talia Mae Bettcher astounding, the pages of her work on the metaphysics of transphobia and discourses of deception run red with murdered and mutilated transgender women with a soft intimacy and funerary reverence. It is tear-jerking, always. Susan Stryker and Sandy Stone’s laying of foundations of transgender studies, often using allusions to my favourite novel Frankenstein is like coming home.
I did not thrive in undergrad, I was some kind of happy, but academically brittle. English literature, as much as I appreciate her installation of essential critical theories and philosophies into my psyche, is in the past. My future is heritage. I have never felt so academically satisfied as I have this year and my grades testify to that. However, my personal, emotive investment in the work I have been doing has taken its toll. This is not a unique feeling. My coursemates and I often share sentiments of despondency, specifically around the climate crisis, decolonising heritage and a reactive political right, and the state of the job market we will be thrust into in September. We despair, we moan, we clink pint glasses and reuseable coffee mugs but we have no solutions. We must stare into the abyss of current and promised catastrophic natural and cultural heritage loss, the seemingly ethically impenetrable thieves’ cache of our national museums, and museum entry-level jobs requiring ten years volunteering and a PhD. And the abyss stares back.
