جامعه شناسی کاربردی (Dec 2017)
Representation of Commodification of Emotions in Social Relationships (Research Case: The Movie Heavy Makeup)
Abstract
Introduction In recent decades social changes and developments in service sector have created an environment in which human emotions are turned into objects. This is known, in the literature of the sociology of emotions, as commodification of emotions. In Iran and after the revolution, significant changes have taken place in the structure of the economy in the sense that the service sector has been expanding over the other two sections, namely, agriculture and industry. From 1997 to 2005, Iranian service sector has expanded 3.6 % on average. This trend slowed down a little bit in the early years of the 2000s but picked up its speed pretty soon. On average, between the years of 2012 and 2014, 48% of workers were in the service sector. In addition, demographic changes of the 1980s, value changes after the war in the 1990s, expansion of higher education in the 2000s, and economic crisis of nuclear sanctions in the 2010s have influenced job opportunities, income expectations, and job performance. We believe that a "hunger for making money" has intensified the process of commodification of emotions in social relationships. This phenomenon can be studied either via a positivistic approach, asking people's opinion about money and how important it is in their social life or via an interpretative approach, in which the study of popular culture's products, especially movies, can be an indicative of the above process. Therefore, the purpose of this article is to interpret representation of emotions commodification in social relationships, based on a movie named Heavy Makeup. Keywords: commodification of emotions, narrative analysis, heavy makeup, social relations Materials and Methods In order to interpret how emotions are commodified in social relations, the movie Hard Makeup is chosen using maximum-discrepancy sampling method. In order to analyze the data, narrative analysis is used as a qualitative method belonging to the interpretive paradigm. Ontologically, narrative analysis is idealistic and epistemologically it is subjective. Moreover, it studies narrative genres and systematic narrating, and is a popular research method in cinema studies. In the present article, narrative analysis is applied at two levels of story and discourse to analyze the context of the movie. At the level of the story, representation of acts and personalities will be considered and at the level of discourse, the orientation of the movie towards these two levels will be explored. Discussion of Results and Conclusions This article aimed at analyzing commodification of emotions in social relations using a movie as an example. In doing so, the theory of Arlie Hochschild, an American sociologist and feminist, in the area of sociology of emotions was utilized to see how this process takes place. The results show that the discourse of Heavy Makeup represents a service-based economy in which actors are expected to rely on their emotions as a source of capital, utilizing it in economic transactions and social relationships in order to make profit. In other words, this discourse employs a storyline which shows all characters, who work in the service sector, perform "emotional labor" so they can bring their emotions in line with the requirements of their jobs and achieve their goals. In this way, feeling rules of such jobs require that job holders sell their emotions, not because of institutionalized and regulatory nature of work procedures, but because of over individualization of work process. This selling is in fact a sort of gambling over emotions in which obtaining money is the ultimate purpose. From the view of the discourse of the movie, none of the characters eventually reach their goals in the commodification process and fail miserably.
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