Becoming an emotional worker and student: exploring skin and spa therapy education and training

ABSTRACT This study connects to the term ‘emotional labour’, coined by [Hochschild, A. R. (1983) 2003. The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling. 2nd ed. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press], and explores how skin and spa therapy students are constructed as emotional workers in learning processes surrounding the body. Drawing on a poststructural approach, inspired by Foucault, regularities of description and self-description were analysed in the material, which consist of interviews and field notes derived from observations of classroom interaction. The results show how student subjectivities are produced as a response to the presumption about body availability in the educational arrangements. It also shows how students are positioned and position themselves as emotional workers through three reoccurring issues surrounding the body; the body as a private sphere, the body as a place of pain, and disgusting peculiarities of the body. Here, struggling subjectivities emerge, striving to overcome the obstacles that the body might entail in becoming a professional. The participants self-position and are positioned as responsible concerning each other’s’ learning processes, making their bodies available for their classmates to practice on, communicating their thoughts and feelings as posing clients, developing their empathic abilities towards future clients. Thus, the participants are not only produced as emotional workers, but emotional students, pinpointing the necessity of educational research on emotional labour.