This interview is based on Meaghan Furlano‘s article ‘Manosphere creep: Emotional and hermeneutic labour in Netflix’s Adolescence’
This interview was conducted by Alex Yates.
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Your article focuses on how Netflix’s Adolescence presents emotional and hermeneutic labour. How do you define these terms, and why are they important to consider in feminist media and cultural studies?
Emotional and hermeneutic labour are similar albeit distinct concepts. Emotional labour has roots back to 1979, when sociologist Arlie Hochschild published a now famous book called The Managed Heart. In it, Hochschild describes what she saw as a new form of labour—something different from the mind-numbing, man-as-extension-of-the-machine type labour that Marx and others had written about. She was interested in how workers, like flight attendants and bill collectors, were required to feel and emote in certain ways to adequately perform their jobs. Unlike the machine-worker who could actively despise their work, the emotional labourer had to wear a perpetual smile or frown—whatever emotion their work demanded of them. Essentially, work was entering emotional life; it was reshaping and extracting from it.
Hochschild coined the term emotional labour to describe the process through which emotions are transformed into a part of work. Emotional labour is labour because it requires that one continually manage their emotions and the emotions of others, either by inducing or suppressing emotions in oneself. Workers intuitively know what emotions are required of them, and which they need to evoke in others, through feeling rules. Feeling rules, Hochschild contends, are the culturally prescribed norms that individuals learn about through the process of socialization. Some feeling rules can be learned in childhood socialization (particularly those having to do with gendered performances), while others are learned in the training period of a job.
When one is aware of what emotions are required of themselves and others, and when one is aware that their or others’ emotions are not consistent with that feeling rule, they have to engage in surface or deep acting to rectify the situation. Surface acting involves the faking of a desired emotion, such as a flight attendant smiling despite dealing with a rude customer. Alternatively, deep acting happens when the flight attendant actually feels the emotions she is expected to embody. No longer does she pretend to be happy; she is happy. She has changed the way she feels to better align with the feelings mandated by her job. Hochschild worried this could lead to alienation: being untethered from one’s own emotions, unsure about which belongs to the self.
Hermeneutic labour, in contrast, is a relatively new concept. Feminist philosopher Ellie Anderson coined the term in her 2023 article—and it has more to do with cognitive work in intimate (often heterosexual) relationships than with work in the “public sphere.” She argues that hermeneutic labour involves three skills: the ability to cognitively grasp one’s emotions and clarify them to others, interpret the moods of others, and engage in creative problem-solving to minimize interpersonal conflicts. She argues that women are generally the ones performing this labour for the benefit of their masculine partners, often without reciprocity or acknowledgement.
Because both forms of labour are culturally pervasive, exhausting, and disproportionately impact women, they have become objects of interest to feminist scholars. Hermeneutic labour is, again, a new concept, and I wanted to bring it into the field of feminist media and cultural studies with this article by exploring how it (and emotional labour) takes shape in popular media. Adolescence was a great place to start because there was virtually no conversation about how such labour was manifest in the series, despite its glaring portrayal. Why was no one talking about it? Perhaps because such labour has become so naturalized that it goes unremarked, I thought. So I wanted to draw attention to it and make it remarkable—to help problematize it.
You discuss the show’s portrayal of emotional and hermeneutic labour in paid and unpaid settings. What can Adolescence tell us about the demands that these forms of labour place on women in both the workplace and the (heterosexual) family?
The series really wonderfully shows how emotional and hermeneutic labour operate in both the unpaid “private” sphere (through Manda) and the paid “professional” sphere (through Briony). Both women are shown reeling in the demands of their labour. Briony is exhausted and disgusted after her final session with Jamie, who has spent the episode taunting and being violent towards her; meanwhile Manda struggles to keep the Miller family afloat. She is constantly tiptoeing around her husband’s emotions, caring for everyone while no one cares for her.
It’s also important to recognize that Briony is paid for her labour while Manda is not. The pay does not make the labour any less stressful, but it does lend itself toward recognizing Briony’s work as socially valuable. Manda’s labour is not recognized as such. In fact, it’s not recognized at all—not by the characters and not by the many audiences reviewing the series online. Again, I found this fascinating and wanted to bring this topic into the discourse.
Your article touches on the concept of ‘manosphere creep’ as the process of anti-feminism moving from niche online spaces into the mainstream. How do you understand the relationship between the extreme and the mainstream when it comes to anti-feminist politics?
This is a great question! It would be inaccurate and misleading to compare “the extreme” to “the mainstream” as if they were two dichotomous, easily separated spaces. It’s better to consider these concepts as existing on a spectrum because there’s a lot of overlap.
Think about it: sentiments that are popular in the manosphere—like the idea that women’s “purpose” is to serve men—have their roots in more “mainstream” norms and histories. You don’t have to look far in pop culture to find a film that objectifies its women characters. What makes “the extreme” extreme is that it takes parts of mainstream culture that are normalized and generally accepted (though still problematic), like objectification or the gendered burden of emotional labour, and then amplifies them among a concentrated audience. These sentiments then seep back into more “mainstream” spaces, like school classrooms and work, where they can show up in behaviours that trigger public safety threats or otherwise psychological distress.
Also, since we’re currently living in a period of anti-feminist backlash, more “extreme” ideas are increasingly becoming more “mainstream.” Basically, the mainstream is not a haven from more extreme ideas but is rather a jumping off point for them. This means that, when we’re talking about how to end violence of all kinds, we need to start with tackling ideas that circulate in the mainstream, as they provide the foundational base upon which the extreme comes into being. Dismantling the bottom of the pyramid means the top loses its footing.
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Meaghan Furlano is a PhD Sociology student at Western University, where she also works as a graduate teaching assistant, research assistant, and research lab manager. As a feminist media and cultural studies scholar, her research interests include gender inequality, feminism, neoliberalism, antifeminism, body culture, social media, AI, and menstruation.
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