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The image displayed states that “Sex Work is Work.” This seems to be a controversial viewpoint, with lots of differing opinions on how a woman can use her body in exchange for making money. Millian Kang’s study “The Managed Hand: The Commercialization of Bodies and Emotions in Korean Immigrant-Owned Nail Salons”, explains how those who perform body labor must not only deal with the customer’s expectations and feelings, but also their own (Kang, 2003, p. 820). Kimberly Hoang discusses sex work in her study, “Economies of Emotion, Familiarity, Fantasy and Desire: Emotional Labor in Ho Chi Minh City’s Sex Industry.” These women working as sex workers had to commodify their emotional and body labor in order to obtain financial stability they would not have been able to achieve with other service jobs (Hoang, 2010, p. 270). Hoang also details how Ho Chi Minh City’s sex industry has an economic structure predicated upon the amount of emotional labor delivered (Hoang, 2010, p. 270). Thus, to these women in HCMC working as sex workers, sex work is work, and for many of them it is the only kind of work they can engage in to support themselves financially.
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This image depicts a woman putting on a facade, a happy presentable face, to mask her true emotions which resemble sadness and negativity. In the workplace, women are often expected to have an upbeat and beautiful appearance to help sell products and make customers or clients feel comfortable. Here, the woman in the image shows acts of emotion management as explained by Arlie Hochschild in The Managed Heart. Instead of displaying how she truly feels, she surface acts and appears happy, similar to how Hochschild describes the ways flight attendants are required to keep an amiable presentation for work and conceal their emotions.
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The work that a flight attendant performs while on the job relates to the concept of body labor in Millian Kang’s study “The Managed Hand: The Commercialization of Bodies and Emotions in Korean Immigrant-Owned Nail Salons.” Kang defines body labor as “the provision of body- related services and the management of feelings that accompanies it” (Kang, 2003, p. 820). The dimensions of body labor include the physical labor of managing one’s bodily appearance and pleasure of customers, the emotional labor of managing and displaying certain feelings and readily responding to customers’ feelings about servicing them, and routine body labor involving efficient, competent physical labor and minimal emotional labor. Flight attendants must successfully perform all three dimensions of body labor in order to make their customers satisfied and to represent their airline company.
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In this image, a woman is holding a mask of her smiling facial expression that reveals her inner thoughts behind it. Underneath the mask is a computerized machinery based inside her mind. This demonstrates ideas of an altruistic false self that emotional labor creates. By performing emotional labor such as surface acting as joyful, the woman became more invested in others that her own sense of self got diminished. This art shows how she has lost her ability to freely think and has become similar to that of a computer with automatic responses based on what is expected of her, and in this case that is a positive facial expression.