ABSTRACT
Though social science research on the body may be questioned on similar grounds for paying insufficient attention to emotion, this chapter examines how it might be possible to provide an embodied understanding of emotional labour in social science. It seeks to divert the tendency for emotional labour or emotions in organisations simply to be reduced to an object of disembodied cognitive analysis. The chapter begins by tracing the hegemony of cognitive analysis to the Cartesian dualism between mind and body. It critically examines the literature on emotional labour and discusses possible reasons as to why it remains largely disembodied. The chapter also attempts to develop an embodied and gendered understanding of emotional labour and concludes with a discussion of the value of, and the obstacles to developing, embodied understandings of gender, the body and emotions at work. It seeks to restore the body to its rightful place in examining studies of emotional labour.
