Hermeneutic Labor: The Gendered Burden of Interpretation (with Dr. Ellie Anderson)
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- Опубліковано 30 тра 2024
- Dr. Ellie Anderson, Philosophy professor and co-host of the Overthink podcast, discusses her work on hermeneutic labor, mostly drawing from her 2023 paper "Hermeneutic Labor: The Gendered Burden of Interpretation in Intimate Relationships between Women and Men". Building on Hochschild's famous work on emotional labor, as well as more recent interventions from Feminist Love Studies, Ellie lays out the argument she makes in her paper to define a new kind of exploited labor, hermeneutic labor, that cisgender women perform more than men in intimate heterosexual relationships.
Check out the full episode of Overthink on the topic, Emotional Labor: open.spotify.com/episode/3VSD...
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Hi Dr. Anderson,
I run my school's Philosophy Club and every week we read a different article. We read this article and everybody loved it, including me. We got a lot of it. There were some critiques, but overall everyone agreed that this concept is incredibly useful, especially in understanding everyday interpersonal situations. Just wanted to say thank you for the great article.
Best,
Nicholas Urich
What separates Hermeneutic labor from actual cases of emotional insecurity and manipulation? Suppose someone who is quiet and emotionally reserved receives a gift that they genuinely like and expresses thanks, but because they do not act super excited or gush at length about the gift, the giver becomes angry and disparages the person for hating the gift, contrary to the person's stated feelings. Would you say that the giver is performing Hermeneutic labor even though they are the ones misinterpreting the other and demanding uncharacteristic behaviors?
I think she’s arguing that good hermeneutic labour needs to be oriented towards dialogue. I had exactly the same question before attending a webinar of hers recently, where this element was much more central. To be valuable and respectful of the other person, hermeneutic needs to be communicated and collaborate with that of the other person, to combine your interpretation of them with their own interpretation of themselves, to lead to a co-written interpretation of how to move forwards.
The giver will perform hermeneutic work only if they expend effort in trying to make sense of, and express, their emotional reaction, and the recipient's emotional reaction, to the situation.
If the two people have known each other for a while, then we would expect the giver to already have a sense that the recipient is quiet and reserved. If the giver does not know this, despite having interacted with the recipient for considerable time, this could suggest that the giver does not spend much time/effort trying to understand the recipient's emotional reactions to things. So, it could be that the giver is unskilled in performing hermeneutic work, and/or, they rarely expend effort in such work.
Fascinating paper - distinguishing hermeneutic labor from emotional labor allows for more nuanced dialogue and hence more effective solutions. How can one get a copy of your paper? Is it freely available? You might have mentioned that, and I seem to have heard it mentioned, thank you for your patience in my not listening well.
It's available for free online! If you search up the paper title you should be able to find it :)
A very useful term. I'll be thinking about this. Thanks for sharing!
I wish more people could understand the necessity of this. Also I think there is no need to make it sexist since it is not about male-female axis, it is radiating-consuming axis. In order to be balanced both man and woman must alternate regularly between these two states which are same dynamics as in breathing. Generalized views such as ones expressed in the first minute are the primary driver that widens the gender gap that makes both sexes frustrated. When we insist on the opposites instead of complementarities of the sexes we broaden the extremes which have two opposite effects. It increases both mutual attraction and mutual intolerance between the poles - which led to the decomposition of family unit and the infidelity crisis. I am referring to romantic relationship shift from one-to-one to many-to-many that is the result of maximization mindset. Almost all relationship problems can be boiled down to synchronization of these phases - and these days we are have maximizer/consumer mindset so we try to elongate the consuming phase which happens at the expense of others. Then we make up all sort of stories to excuse ourselves and we burrow deeper into the confusion. We simply lack virtue - yet year after year we substitute one philosophy for another and our shame is cradled gently like a baby. ALSO, When you put an emphasis on the asymmetry that, to be fair, cannot be reliably measured (meaning that these are all private moment between two people that are recounted with biases) you are doing a disservice to men that are relationship oriented and you are empowering intransigent women. Once, again, this should be viewed as interpersonal issue.
This makes sense to me & I can’t wait to read the paper. There’s a nursing concept - “reflective practice” that reflects this (less in practice than theory) process of making sense of the information at hand to arrive at the best course of action for the patient. 😂🎯
So interesting, thanks for sharing this!
Thank you! I believe that hermeneutic labour is indeed a very imortant notion
Banger. I'll be checking out the paper for sure!
Love this type of long form content! More sit down break downs of things you have written!
Could you please explain P.F. Strawson’s classic ‘Individuals’ (especially the ‘Sounds’ chapter)?
Do your own hermeneutic labor…kidding! Hope she does! Good luck!
@@sergiosatelite467 I have been trying to understand it for the past week and I just can’t get my head around it lol. Sadly, I have looked all around the internet, and I can’t seem to find anywhere which does an in-depth or detailed explanation of those first chapters in Strawson’s book 😞
If these relationships are so exploitative, why don't women just decline to enter them? According to Anderson, it's because unlike men, women depend on romantic relationships for their personhood.
I feel that this state of affairs is surely a central component of misogyny. Moreover, it also seems quite relevant to the question of why women find heterosexual romantic relationships unsatisfying. It seems like a patently unhealthy attitude to take towards romantic relationships, and it should be unsurprising that people who anchor their personhood to romantic relationships, or gaining wealth, or having a prestigious career, should find those endeavours less satisfying, and should "ruminate" more about them, than people who do not anchor their personhood to those things.
It could be that men are responsible for creating that state of affairs. Regardless, I feel that this state of affairs isn't given much consideration/emphasis in Anderson's paper. Instead, that women depend on romantic relationships for their personhood is assumed, as a background condition, and the focus is on how such relationships play out between men and women. But, Anderson does not examine the extent to which the interpersonal dynamics that emerge between men and women are the result of women depending for their personhood on romantic relationships, despite that being the decisive factor in why women are in the relationships to begin with. Thus, on Anderson's account, the fact that women depend for their personhood on being in a relationship explains why women enter into relationships... but it does not influence the (emotional and hermeneutic) dynamics that emerge in those relationships. This seems questionable.
This is brilliant. 20 minutes jam packed with useful and intelligently presented information.
Constantly having to read, interpret, and reinterpret the act of interactions with others (men) with the subtext: "How am I supposed to act?" Rather than What do I feel and expressing that more openly. And not taking on the burden of understanding the other's out of touch feelings that they don't even know they are having. They have already been taught how they are suppose act rather than how to interpret their own feelings, leaving the burden of understanding their own feelings to the person (woman).
You are one hundred per cent right - this phenomena deserves a much wider understanding.
Love your channel…but you need a De-Esser on your microphone to eliminate the high pitched whistling. All the best!
I feel like hermeneutic labor is not essential to the heterosexual situation, but contingent upon certain factors. I am, of course, arguing for a materialist approach. That is not to say that today hermeneutic labor isn't overwhelmingly found inside of heterosexual relationships, but I wanted to just focus on the specifics in a relation more generally which may give rise to the burden of hermeneutic labor. In any situation basically where one side has a goal which would give rise to guilt for that side if stated clearly and which is covered up very well by all sorts of manipulations, the other side is bound to feel some iffy-ness and will try to communicate and reason with that goal. I FEEL LIKE THAT IN SO MANY PLACES, GOSH THANK YOU FOR GIVING US A TERM
It seems like a dialectical materialist analysis in missing here, also the relationship between a man and his "no-nonsense" expecting boss. People in general should be aware of "hetero pessimism". This is the first time I've ever heard of it.
This is so interesting
Damn, that's good. I mean, I feel like you have expressed something that has happened in the lives of me and my partner.
Really enjoyed this. Philosophy being put to good use.
But with medical field it might be interesting as the perception of public and initial perception of those entering which is guided by career goals but the general perception of those entering is influenced by this gendered notion within the various branches in the medical field through a proto-typical view of men entering obstetrics medicine needs to inculcate more sensitization towards all gender while the gender sensitization in general medicine is from a basic gender roles and more towards maintaining more medicine then more sensitive towards gendered words apart from emerging terminology in medicine for gender neutral terms but one other side the hierarchical structure is with that paramedical and nurses staff are more kind towards patients in care and after work we rarely see them and ghost them but with doctors they are added to that this interpretation task in and out and include this feminine role in caring field like psychiatry, medicine, gynecology and this lesser feminine in surgery, orthopaedic but it other parallel in anesthesia, radiology, intervention cardiology, oncology but all the person involved does have this emotional labour and the hermeneutic labour not always in love relationship but definitely in patients relation and standard of care and sometimes all together avoidance of this social interpretation from our interpersonal tensions with colleagues and with patients too, personally I have experience through my interaction the labour put in by obstetrics doctors towards more feminine perception in field towards patients and after work interpretation to equally obsessed with women counterparts for men and yes both are benefited might not complete on the burden empirical but yes the therapeutic gain to getting up in the relationship is there and definitely not all shady or mystify the relations but interpersonal
interpretation labour which also gets this gendered imbalance power struggle but goes hit and miss even when its all women and even when its all men definitely social culturing play huge role in general unequal burden on women to give the gains and are accepted to produce this fine labour of hermeneutics, yes it a lesser explored part in the field making knowledge and it looks back at this knowledge but it rarely concern with the practice of learning the knowledge like the humanities do unlike STEM but their are pioneering works and psychiatry personally reflects with me. Thanks, a loving igniting article and resources/books I did check most of them and relevant to my further studies in psychiatry and anthropology. ❤️
Actually, Swedish society which is coinsidered to be feminine (in contradistinction to American or Japanese societies which are found to be masculine), because Swedes emphasise focusing on relationships rather than success and competitiveness, is considered to be superior.
❤❤❤
I'm curious about how this might work out with those of us men with ocd/gad where interpretation has often gone pathologically awry, also to the detriment of women and hetero relationships (millenial here)
I wish I understood what the presenter was saying; there's so much jargon in her presentation that I'm unable to understand even the jist of it.
Have you ever "ruminated" about a relationship that you are in? Specifically, have you found yourself trying to make sense of your emotional reaction to a relationship, squaring that with what appears to be the emotional reaction of your partner?
Anderson argues that that "ruminating" is an essential component of successful, happy intimate relationships. She describes it as a form of "labor", and she claims that in heterosexual relationships, it is often the woman who performs that labor. By contrast, men do not perform the labor, and merely benefit from it, in the form of "neatly packaged interpretations of their feelings/emotions" that are provided by their female partners.
Hi! This is a summary of an academic article. If you'd prefer a less academic discussion of the same content, we recommend our Emotional Labor podcast episode: overthinkpodcast.com/episodes/episode-71?rq=emotional%20labor
Yaaaas queen slay!
How does peer review work for philosophy papers like this? It seems you are giving your professional opinions, which may or may not align with the opinions of your reviewers or the journal.
Will they publish anything that’s coherent/consistent? Is there some method to measure it against? Does it need to lie within tradition, like previous Phenomenology results? How much freedom are you given to explore without conforming to what’s already there?
I’m coming from a stem background, it isn’t clear to me how peer-review works within the humanities.
Next time someone talks about female intuition Iˋll send them here. Good thinking!
women should run all jails and prisons
What you call hermeneutic labour used to be called empathetic understanding. Women have been better at empathetic understanding because of their socialisation. It used to be considered as an asset (a good competence) women have and men should try to acquire.
I think that women's emotional intelligence should be celebrated and men should strive to improve themselves in such intelligence.
Appreciate the inconspicuous misandry 😊
Ellie you should switch to psychology!
Not that crap.
first we need to find out how many genders are out there right now. than we take Manhattan
It’s a spectrum. You don’t have to take memorize the entire colorwheel to acknowledge and be respectful
l do@@Riley-reso l respect women and l love Leonard Cohen
@@Riley-reso They weren’t being disrespectful, they were making a joke while quoting a Leonard Cohen song, dude.
@@ApolloELM cool. My respond still stands
@@Riley-reso Yes, and it’s still a response to a comment which didn’t say otherwise.
The misogynists are shaking
Rigid suppression of emotions in men is not emotional labor, it is emotional neglect and benefits no one
I am utterly and absolutely confused. Could someone dumb it down for me?
Instead of just "emotional labor" that women take on in relationships-- the argument is women take on the labor of interpreting her man's emotions and maintaining the health of relationship.
Goofy liberal nonsense.
@@salsa83just say you didn't understand any of it mate
@@salsa83 Dawg, this is BEYOND what a false political-dichotomy of liberal and conservative says. This is academic, and I very much doubt you even had a grasp of what was being said
Men are typically bad at naming and explaining their feelings. Often men say things like “just feel like shit, idk.” Other times men bottle it all up and explode (seemingly) randomly later on. This is taught from a young age.
Women tend to be better at naming and explaining their feelings. They’re more likely to say “I’m upset/anxious/annoyed/embarrassed/etc because of x y and z.” This is taught from a young age.
Male and female partnerships, because of this, end up in a place where women have to decipher and explain the feelings that the male partner is unable/unwilling to do. So not only do women have to parse through, ruminate on, & interpret their own feelings, they must do the same for their male partners as well.
This interpretation of emotion is time consuming and even considered work in some contexts (think therapists), yet men are never expected to take on that burden. Instead, their female partners do it all for them without questioning it. Men reap the benefits (immediately understand the emotion that was previously indecipherable to them, spoon fed the appropriate way to communicate that emotion from their partner) with 0 effort, while women work overtime in perpetuity just to keep the relationship afloat.