How Theater (Trans)lates/Forms: Gendered Emotional Labor in Pelin Esmer’s Films

Abstract

This study engages Arlie Hochschild’s (1983) “emotional labor” through Pelin Esmer’s documentaries: The Play (2005) and Queen Lear (2019). The films follow Mersin’s villager women through the course of 15 years seeking to understand how theater transformed their lives, meanwhile displaying the unequal gendered distribution of emotional labor. Emotional labor was initially defined as that which is undertook due to employers’ imposing/restricting certain displays of emotion. Social scientists further investigated the concept especially in its unequal social distribution, for example regarding gender whereby emotional labor largely burdened women due to biological determinist assumptions about their ‘emotional nature.’ The two plays documented in Esmer’s films, The Outcry of Women and Queen Lear, (trans)late emotional labor from invisible to visible thereby attesting to the (trans)formation of women’slives based on theatrical representation. The essay details this process through the stories of three women in particular – Fatma Fatih, Zeynep Fatih and Behiye Yanık.