ABSTRACT
Performances of emotional labor hold real material consequences, researchers need to attend to the material aspects of organizational communication. This chapter focuses on emotional labor, and the extension of that labor, aesthetic and sexual labor, as a point of profit and problems. Service workers are marked by gender and often gendered in their organizations as workers are required to display appropriate gendered behaviors, are consigned to gendered work roles, and shape interactions along gendered assumptions. Not only are most low-wage jobs physical, but they are also often marked as dirty. There is a demand that workers display that appropriate look or aesthetic. Central to women's work is often sexual labor. Some authors argue that women's labor has been commodified through three aspects of performance including essentialization, feminization and sexualization. The chapter focuses on issues of class in workers' negotiations of emotional, aesthetic and sexual labor.
