WSQ: Women's Studies Quarterly

How does it feel to live under precarity? What kinds of stories do we embrace to navigate the murky waters of economic insecurity, worker disposability, and social and ecological waste that indicate danger much like the petrochemicals bubbling up to the surface of a Louisiana bayou? Sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild ventured into such a world during an excursion billed as "A Journey to the Heart of Our Political Divide" (2016). Her latest book, Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right, explores the relationship between precarity and community. In capturing the impact of emotion on politics, she witnessed the pull of Donald Trump among those who felt belittled by elites, left behind by globalization, and harmed by government preference for those they perceived as less deserving, that is, for African Americans, immigrants of color, unbelievers, the poor, gays, and even white women. As one man told her, "These days, American men are an endangered species too" (2016, 61), and many of her new friends cared as much, if not more, for that species than those on any list published by the Environmental Protection Agency.

For more than three decades, Hochschild has offered keys to unlocking the contours of emotional labor and the tensions between work and family. She has claimed both that it is "through emotion" that we "know the world" and that "the idea of independent self, separated from history and circumstance, is a fiction" (2013, 4). The interdisciplinary field of women and gender studies has embraced her terms: "the managed heart," "the second shift," "the stalled revolution," "the time bind," "the care gap," and "the outsourced self." She has probed the ways that service sector jobs require the management of emotions through work rules; she has exposed the commodification of attachment through advice books and hired substitutes, [End Page 119] as seen in Gravesite Maintainers, Rent-A-Grandma, Find-A-Friend, and other internet services that have emerged to remake intimate life. She has explored the care work of transnational mothers and gestational surrogates. Precarity emerges in her oeuvre less as a concept belonging to political economy, though Hochschild deftly contextualizes her "close-up approach" (ix) of hanging around people whose circumstances provide grist for understanding emotional labor at home and other workplaces, and more as a form of emotion work to hold it at bay, relieve its tensions, explain its haunting, or offer a truer narrative.

Instead of commenting on her classic works, I turn to Strangers in Their Own Land as a text for this Age of Trump. Living in coastal California, where no one I know voted for that man, I am more attuned to undocumented communities of color and transnational academic exchanges than life in red states. As an intersectional scholar of women's labor and social politics, I don't want to blame the working class for Trump; indeed, his supporters had a higher median income than Hillary Clinton's. But as I watched, horrified, during the presidential campaign, I felt that he connected with white people. He captured anger, rage, hate, and hurt in ways that overshadowed "real" reasons for precarity, loss of good jobs, or perilous security. Clinton could not begin to reach the emotional places that he crawled into.

Hochschild delivers as she delves deep into the stories that make sense of the world to see if she can scale "the empathy wall" (2016, 5) that separates progressive academics like us (dear reader?) from Tea Party activists and evangelical Christians. "A deep story is a feels-as-if story—it's the story feelings tell, in the language of symbols," she explains. "It removes judgment. It removes fact. It tells us how things feel" (135; emphasis in original). Seeking to understand this "subjective prism" (135; emphasis in original), she goes to Lake Charles Parish and its environs to unravel "the Great Paradox": "great pollution and great resistance to regulating pollution" (21), the worse social indicators amid the lowest taxes, meager public spending, and least regulation.

The deep story that emerges goes this way:

[S]trangers step ahead of you in line, making you anxious, resentful, and afraid. A...