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The gendered workplace demands more than manipulation of behavior and appearance. Arlie Hochschild’s (1979) ethnography of flight attendants introduces another type of labor that is common in female-dominated occupations, which she dubs “emotional labor.” Emotional labor requires one to induce or suppress feeling in order to sustain an outward countenance that produces the desired state of mind in others (Hochschild 1983:7). Thus, emotion workers must always “display” an image that is determined by management, and “over time ‘display’ comes to assume a certain relation to feeling” (p. 90). Hochschild found that emotion workers, over time, may become estranged from their true feelings, which are ignored, disguised, or created in order to achieve a desired image.⁸

Hochschild’s notion of “display” and manipulation of feeling can be found at Bazooms, especially among the female employees. According to management, the Bazooms girl, when on the floor, is expected to “perform as if [she] is on stage.” This means embodying a specific image, sustaining an outward countenance, and behaving in specific ways. One manager with whom I spoke put it this way:

Well, after working eight years I can pretty much tell who will be perfect for the job and who won’t. [By looking at them?] Well, by talking with them and seeing what type of personality they have. You know, they must be performers as Bazooms girls. Nobody can be bubbly that long, but when you’re working you put on an act.

As Greta Paules (1991:160) put it, “By furnishing the waitress with a script, a costume, and a backdrop of a servant, the restaurant is encouraging her to become absorbed in her role—to engage in deep acting.” …

The corporate image that Bazooms projects of happy, sexy, eager-to-serve workers is what sells. What became clear to me on one of my first days on the job was that emotional labor is demanded not only by management, but by customers as well. For instance, one afternoon I approached a table full of marines without a smile or a “Can I help you?” look on my face. Their first words to me were, “You look pissed.” I felt I had to make excuses for what I realized was poor emotion management on my part.

Deference is a large portion of emotion work, according to Hochschild. “Ritualized deference is always involved when one is in a subordinate position” (Reskin and Roos 1987:8). Clearly, in the service industry, employees (the majority women) are expected to have been trained in “niceness” from an early age (girls are made of sugar and spice and everything nice). So “working as women” (or girls) naturally assumes that “a friendly and courteous manner” will be incorporated into the job. During training at Bazooms, new hires were instructed to “kill them [rude customers] with kindness and class.” In other words, suppress any desire to yell or lecture rude customers, and instead, defer to the old maxim “the customer always is right,” and treat them only with kindness. In this case, emotion work entails being at the service of others to the point of devaluing oneself and one’s own emotions. Because of their subordination and vulnerable positioning, women become easy targets of verbal abuse, and of others’ (managers’, customers’, even colleagues’) displaced feelings. When kindness is not effective enough in handling rude customers, Bazooms asks their waitresses to defer to the management. “Problems” are then handled by the men, who must also manage their emotions, but they are more allowed to wield anger, since they have been socialized to express “negative” emotions from an early age (Hochschild 1983:163)….