Love’s Labor Earned

Abstract

To most women today who find themselves exhausted by unwaged, unappreciated emotion work, receiving payment for it probably seems like a pretty delightful idea. Yet, while the idea of women billing the men in their lives for emotional services rendered may succeed on some level as a rhetorical provocation regarding gender roles, treating emotional labor as a commodity—or a previously untapped resource to be monetized—suggests that the market is the solution to, rather than a cause of, gender inequality.