Today we share the second of six pieces of public writing selected for publication from an assignment in ENGL 801 “Graduate Studies in English”: a piece of public scholarship (700-1,000 words) which tailors an academic paper and its scholarly intervention of 10-12 pages for a general-interest audience.
Read more about the assignment and the first publication, “Who is Writing?” by Mizanul Bari (MA ’27), in the post from December 11, and the second publication, “Localization: Some Local Nonpharmaceutical Interventions During the COVID-19 Pandemic in Ghana” by Daniel Effah (MA ’27), in the post from December 16. Now, on to “Why You Should Read the Comments of Paris Paloma’s ‘Labour’: Everyday Work, Capitalism, and Unrecognized Emotional Labor” by Ruth Okon (MA ’27) —
— Karin Westman, Professor and Department Head / Instructor for ENGL 801 B/ZA (Fall 2025)
If you want to understand how the patriarchal system and capitalism collaborate to devalue the emotional labor women experience, start with the comment section under Paris Paloma’s “Labour” video on YouTube.
The comment section reveals the denial, dismissal, and quiet extraction of labor that women endure every day!
The first time I came across Paris Paloma’s “Labour” was through a viral TikTok video of a live performance that had somehow found its way into my weekend guilty pleasures of binge-watching TikTok videos to recharge emotionally and mentally. In the video, Paloma is singing to an audience full of women who sing along with her:
The women in the audience all looked like they just remembered the last chore they did that no one thanked them for.
Paloma’s song has been widely called a feminist anthem, but what caught my attention wasn’t only the audience’s reaction to the song in the video, but the interaction of netizens in the comment section of the video. Some of the men dismissed the lyrics and insisted the song was exaggerated. One even wrote, “this doesn’t happen in real life and even if it does what’s wrong with women and house care?” which made me wonder what planet he lives on. To counter his point, a woman responded, “I married at 18, have 7 children, no social life, tied to housekeeping chores. Yes, I relate to this song and lyrics…15 years of emotional, mental, and physical subservience.”
These comments revealed something familiar: the kind of everyday work women do that goes unrecognized because it has been normalized as chores women just have to do because of their sex. This lack of recognition isn’t just a matter of manners or personal ethics. It’s built into our systems quietly in ways we barely question. Emotional labor still sits on women’s shoulders wrapped in the language of duties, even though these duties function like a whole invisible economic system running in the background.
The term emotional labor was first coined in 1983 by sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild to refer to jobs that require people to manage the feelings of others at the expense of their own. According to Manisha Schifellite, emotional labor has expanded into a lens for viewing “all kinds of paid and unpaid work including household chores, household management, social organizing at the office, and intimate relationships with an eye toward the hidden unacknowledged costs of time, effort, and stress.”
And yet society rarely treats these duties as “work” and considers them as just things women are good at. Because this work is naturalized, it becomes the perfect example of unpaid, unrecognized labor. It’s a kind of economy that benefits everyone except the actual worker. When you line this kind of economy that benefits those in power up next to Marxist critiques of capitalism, the similarity becomes impossible to ignore. Capitalism relies on workers producing value they rarely get to enjoy. The worker’s labor is productive, but the benefits flow upward to the bourgeoisie and maintains the structure of the capitalist state. In the same way, the emotional labor of women sustains homes, relationships, and workplaces, but compensation is often non-existent.
In Paloma’s “Labour,” the woman in the song is an unpaid laborer who carries out the most fundamental services needed for the survival and sustenance of the relationship, paralleling capitalism’s dependency on the exploitation of its workers to thrive. Bolla Madhavi and Konda Nageswar Madhavi, in their essay “Feminism Through a Marxist Lens: Intersections and Insights,” emphasize that this unpaid labor is vital for the functioning of capitalist economies but remains largely invisible and undervalued. In the same way, women, just like the woman in the song, undertake unpaid work every day. The United Nations Women states that “Women and girls do 16 billion hours of unpaid care every day – powering families, communities, and economies. Yet this work remains largely invisible, undervalued, and unequally distributed.”
When emotional labor goes unrecognized or is undervalued, this emotional labor enthrones inequality in homes and workplaces and builds a society where women are expected to give endlessly while asking for little. Unrecognized emotional labor is a powerful engine of patriarchy and capitalism because it keeps one group doing the necessary work for peanuts or nothing at all.
Challenging such inequalities is just one of the many reasons why art matters. Songs like “Labour” allow us to see emotional labor not as a private experience of one woman but as a public issue. What Paloma’s song reflects is not a momentary frustration prevalent in just this generation: it points to a pattern that has influenced women’s lives for generations. The emotional labor of women produces comfort and stability in societies, much like the labor of the worker in a capitalist state does. Yet, women remain outside the realm of proper recognition and find little to no satisfaction in ensuring stability through emotional labor that is invisible.
So, in the end, what makes Paloma’s “Labour” so powerful is the recognition it gives to women who share the same frustration of emotional labor. The performance of “Labour” unites women across physical and digital spaces, and the comment section further reveals how women claim space to share their truths, even in the face of patriarchal silencing.
Works Cited
“FAQs: What is Unpaid Care Work and How Does it Power the Economy?” UN Women, 23 Oct. 2025, https://www.unwomen.org/en/articles/faqs/faqs-what-is-unpaid-care-work-andhow-does-it-power-the-economy. Accessed 5 December 2025.
Hochschild, Arlie Russell. The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling. University of California Press, 1983.
Madhavi, Bolla, and Konda Nageswar. “Feminism Through a Marxist Lens: Intersections and Insights.” International Journal of English Literature and Social Sciences, vol. 9, no. 4, 2024, https://doi.org/10.22161/ijels.94.3. Accessed 4 October 2025.
Paloma, Paris. “Labour.” AZ, 2024, https://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/parispaloma/labour.html. Accessed 24 October 2025.
Princing, McKenna. “What Is Emotional Labor and Why Is It Important?” Right as Rain, 2 March 2022, https://rightasrain.uwmedicine.org/life/relationships/emotional-labor. Accessed 5 December 2025. Schifellite, Manisha. “Hidden Costs of Emotional Labor.” The Harvard Gazette, 3 Dec. 2019, https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2019/12/why-our-culture-undervalues-emotional-labor/. Accessed 5 December 2025.
— Ruth Okon (MA ’27)
K-State English 