Matters of the Heart and Mind: Emotional, Affective, and Intimate Labour

What does it mean when feeling itself becomes a form of labour? In today’s global economy, managing emotions isn’t just a private act; it’s productive labour. From tech offices to humanitarian spaces to domestic-care jobs, emotions, care, and affect have become tools for survival. These transformations reflect the enduring legacy of modernity, the Enlightenment ideal of the rational, self-disciplined subject, now reconfigured through the emotional architectures of contemporary capitalism.

    Drawing on Choroszewicz (2022), Richard and Rudnyckyj (2009), and Chambers and Grover (2023), this post examines how emotional, affective, and intimate labour sustains capitalism not only by generating profit, but also by shaping who we are expected to be.
When Data Needs Feelings
    But this isn’t just about being nice at work. Choroszewicz reveals how emotional investments enhance the value of data itself. Feelings become productive assets, helping to build relationships that enable digital collaboration.
    She links this to feminist ethics of care, noting that emotional responsibility, commitment, and attachment not only make people good colleagues but also make data more valuable. In other words, care becomes a form of infrastructure, embedding emotional labour within the rational systems of modernity itself.
Governing through Tears
    In Indonesia, workers attend “Emotional Spiritual Quotient” training, where learning to cry becomes part of professional development. These “ritual tears” aren’t just emotional release; they produce what the authors call “built-in control”: an internalised moral discipline that aligns workers with neoliberal goals like productivity, responsibility, and anti-corruption. Here, affect becomes a technology of subjectivity, a means through which individuals learn to feel, act, and govern themselves within neoliberal moral orders.
    Yet affect isn’t only disciplinary. In Mexico, activists cultivate an affective form of conviviality, emotion used not to dominate or pity, but to build solidarity and mutual recognition across inequality. Richard and Rudnyckyj describe this as affect’s “antidote to estrangement”, a reminder that feeling can also heal and connect, not just control.

In her study of healthcare data work, Marta Choroszewicz (2022) shows how IT experts rely on emotional labour: staying calm, empathetic, and composed, to maintain trust across teams. Their “professional composure” keeps partnerships running smoothly between public institutions and private tech companies.

Figure 1 - The emotional architecture of data work

Meanwhile, Richard and Rudnyckyj (2009) take us to Indonesian factories and Mexican NGOs to explore affective labour, how emotions are used to govern conduct and reform the self.

Figures 2 and 3 - Affect as both control and solidarity.

Caring Masculinities and Market Morality

    Thomas Chambers and Sondra Grover (2023) look at men working in domestic-care roles in India, a space usually coded as feminine. These male domestic-care workers, or MDCWs, perform what the authors call “caring masculinities”: emotional expressions that both affirm and challenge gender norms.
    For men like Rishi, caring for an employer’s ageing parents is not just a job but a moral question: “What sort of man would I be if I abandoned them?” His labour embodies both duty and servitude: affection and control co-exist, uneasily but necessarily.
    Chambers and Grover show how these performances of care become commodities, sold on the market to fill the care deficit created by neoliberal restructuring and elite migration. Here, the authors argue that caring masculinities become a marketplace commodity, and emotion becomes a capital currency of intimacy that sustains the moral and economic demands of modern life.

Figure 4 - The price of care in a neoliberal world.

Across these three ethnographies, one thing stands out: feeling is work. Whether through tears, care, or composure, emotional and affective labour keeps social and economic systems running.

References

Chambers, T. & Grover, S. (2023). Masculinities and Paid Domestic-Care Labour in India.

Choroszewicz, M. (2022). Emotional Labour in the Collaborative Data Practices of Healthcare.

Richard, A. & Rudnyckyj, D. (2009). Economies of Affect. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute.

Figure 1 - https://media.istockphoto.com/id/1823779605/vector/emotional-intelligence-or-emotional-quotient-framework-diagram-chart-infographic-banner-with.jpg?s=612x612&w=0&k=20&c=7ImWU_JOs1ApZHpunLlRN2Lgc1czCgM3Xp9PshP2acc=

Figure 2 - https://www.imd.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/09/Crying-at-Work-2-1440x719.jpg

Figure 3 - https://ichef.bbci.co.uk/ace/standard/3840/cpsprodpb/0a36/live/1b5878d0-8bc0-11f0-9e15-d152589384fd.jpg

Figure 4 - https://www.care.com/c/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2021/04/LeanneP27-202046090446022535None-1620x1080.jpg