Autoethnographic Emotion: Studying and Living Emotional Labor in the Scholarly Life

Abstract

In this paper, I planned to describe emotional labor at domestic violence shelter, and to examine how it both hurts and enhances employees. But then I ran into a crisis of representation. How can I tell their stories when I haven't formulated my own? This autoethnography attempts to enact a “loving epistemology” (Laible, 2000) to explore the paradoxes of being a feminist teacher and a scholar and constructing a life, and examines the emotional labor involved in studying emotional labor.

Keywords:

• Autoethnography
• scholarly life
• loving epistemology
• emotional labor