ABSTRACT
In the context of this chapter, which focuses on the developed country of Australia, this emotional labor is far less concerned with developed-developing care culture chains, but rather the specific forms of unpaid emotional labor and “feeling rules” that are becoming all-encompassing within contemporary technocultures and the associated affective technologies. By technoculture, I refer to the notion that culture shapes and is shaped by technology. Different media require appropriate types of emotional labor-various forms of often unspoken feeling rules. Affective technologies such as mobile media compel us to be more perpetually responsive within a logic of “perpetual contact” (Katz and Aakhus, 2002)—creating a phenomenon of labor that has been defined as “wireless leash” (Qiu, 2007). The gendered implications are striking. For example, Misa Matsuda (2009) has eloquently described the function of the mobile phone for Japanese children as a “mom in the pocket.” In order to understand some of the gendered performativity around types of labor and intimacy, I will turn to my preliminary case study of Melbournian women and their various forms of mediated intimacies and associated feeling rules.
