logo
Emotional labour with Rose Hackman

Emotional labour with Rose Hackman

Rose
The patriarchy that we live in really expects women to be catering to the emotions of everyone around them constantly.
Yumi
Hey, before we get started on this episode, I want to confess that I've been feeling bad because about two months ago, it was my producer Tamar's birthday and I wanted to make her a cake to mark the occasion, but it landed on a real pinch point in my life and I just didn't have time. I think it's important to show people around you that you care about them.
Rose
Emotional labour is the expectation that someone will be in charge of communal wellbeing. It is the expectation, the responsibility of showing up emotionally for the people around you.
Yumi
This showing up is work that's invisible and deeply undervalued. Being considerate of the emotional needs of your community is often written off as something women are just better at because of our gender, like braiding hair or knowing when it's time to bake a cake. It's a form of work that's never acknowledged even though it underpins our homes, our relationships and even our economy. But emotional labour comes at a cost. By being the emotional heavy lifters, women tend to put their own needs lower on the list, making sure the emotional lives of our loved ones and friends are sorted first.
Rose Hackman is a journalist and author who's been looking into the concept of emotional labour for over 10 years. Her book is called Emotional Labour. In it, she calls out the lack of recognition women get for doing all this exhausting extra work and makes the case that men need to get their acts together to ease our burdens and to build better, more equal relationships. I'm Yumi Stynes, ladies, we need to talk about emotional labour. As part of Rose's research, she looks at how the expectation of emotional labour falls on women in all the different areas of our lives.
Rose
So a woman walking down the street is going to be told to smile. A woman at work is going to be told if she's not constantly smiling at rest that she has resting bitch face. And at home, of course, women are charged with taking responsibility for communal wellbeing.
Yumi
Whether that's diffusing the tension at the family Christmas, mopping the tears on your kid who's just had a horrendous day at school or keeping the work wheels frictionlessly spinning by baking birthday cakes. Rose says that even though expectations of emotional responsibility are highly gendered, they're not related to biological sex. We weren't born this way.
Rose
Neuroscience research, psychological research very clearly shows that the types of skills that are associated with emotional labour are fundamentally human. They're not gendered. So boys, girls, men, women are perfectly able to feel and express empathy. It's just we are incentivizing one gender, one sex to constantly be performing those types of skills.
Yumi
So how did we get to this point where we're expected to put the emotional needs of those around us above our own? Rose says it boils down to the fact that we live in a society that prizes men far more than it prizes women. Picture us as the handmaids of fun.
Rose
It's about women being facilitators of people's experiences, being buffers of shock and pain and about men being the primary enjoyers of experience of life, society, et cetera.
Yumi
I feel like you're describing me, Rose. And I don't necessarily think it's all bad. In terms of helping people have a good time, showing leadership, caring about my community, whether it be a small group of friends or workmates, setting the tone and the same at home. I've got kids really, really managing their emotions and always being attuned, very attuned to the emotions of those around me. It is interesting though, when you think about men being not attuned, I can't even imagine. I cannot imagine for a second what it would be like to be misattuned or non-attuned to the emotional wellbeing of those in the room with you. So how do they benefit from that?
Rose
Totally. I just want to start off by saying that you're completely right that this kind of work is beautifully valuable. The problem is we live in a society that completely undermines, devalues this kind of work. I would say that the biggest way in which they benefit is time. And time might seem very simple, but it's actually huge. You know, over the last few decades, we've seen, especially in dual income households and straight dual income households, we've seen a lot of the domestic labour gap narrow, but not fully. And one of the ways in which I like to think about emotional labour, because of course there's a lot of domestic tasks that are not strictly emotional. It's not just emotional development and literacy in the household.
Rose
Although women are still expected to take charge of communal wellbeing, which has all sorts of knock-on effects in terms of what they do or what we do, all sorts of activities that no one wants to do, we will take on, you know, taking an aunt to the airport, making dinner, cleaning. Those tasks are not strictly emotional, but fundamentally we will do them because we often are saving other people from doing them or someone's got to do them. And also we understand that those simple tasks and actions fundamentally contribute to the makeup of a smooth, happy, loving household.
Yumi
And while driving your aunt to the airport means that she feels loved and you feel more connected to her, this kind of work means there's less time for play. In the US, there's an almost one hour leisure time gap per day between men and women. And it low key annoys me to think that they could have been driving Aunty Bobo to the airport and I could have been the one at home playing with myself.
Rose
Women come home from work and instead of a man might be able to take an hour to meditate or to go to the gym or to read a book. And still to this day, women are expected to be putting their extra time, their leisure time to work for the benefit of others. And I think that for those of us who sometimes feel exhausted, whether it's because we have children in our home or a lot of obligations that can really add up, one hour is really a life lived for yourself versus a life lived for others.
Yumi
If you're a regular listener to this podcast, you'll have heard me talking about the mental load. And yes, although there is some overlap between the mental load and emotional labour, they're not the same thing.
Rose
So the mental load really refers to specific part of overwhelmingly something that happens to women at home, which is the idea that they are responsible for the household. And that I like to illustrate it as the idea of having a lot of tabs, like computer tabs open in your brain at all times. They're keeping tabs on, do we need more soap? Who's picking up Susie from practice? Are we on top of the groceries this week? Oh my gosh, I need to check in with this cousin, this next door neighbour, this immediate family member. So that's the mental load. This idea that overwhelmingly very often women are tasked with being responsible for the household. And that means so many invisible, exhausting, interminable activities that they have to shoulder. Emotional labour is quite different. Emotional labour is the expectation that someone will be in charge of communal wellbeing. It is the expectation, the responsibility of showing up emotionally for the people around you.
Yumi
The term was first coined by academic Ali Hochschild in the 1980s, who was researching the work of managing feelings in the service industry.
Rose
She famously took the example of flight attendants who were not so much tasked with handing out food and beverages on airplanes, but were tasked really with conveying a feeling of safety, of care, of sexiness. And Ali Hochschild equated this emotional labour in the workplace to a form of emotion work, what she called it, that we'd long been accustomed to seeing women provide in private.
Yumi
So I think the flight attendant example is good because it's so clearly the management of people's experience emotionally. But can you talk us through a more rudimentary job situation like for instance, where I work, where we're not so much public facing, we're just dealing with people from our organization. How in a situation that's less about the service industry, are women expected to shoulder all the emotional labour?
Rose
There's been all of this research that shows that in male dominated industries, specifically white collar industries, where you might think that emotional labour is not a central part of the job. So a lawyer, an engineer, a journalist, men in order to get ahead need to do two things. They need to be confident and competent. So they need to be really good at what they do and really loud about being good at it. And women in order to be promoted, to get ahead in the workplace in white collar industries, they have to be confident, competent, and they also have to do emotional aid. They have to be other oriented. They have to be constantly providing an extra layer of other oriented traits of, you know, being a team builder. They have to actually be constantly performing often subservient expressions that reassure everyone around them that they're not actually threatening while also trying to show that their confidence of being good at their job. So it can often feel for women in white collar sectors, like they're very much stuck between a rock and a hard place and they're effectively being set up to fail. There is a litmus test that we apply to women in these white collar industries that absolutely do not apply to men.
Yumi
Further to that, in my two and a half decades of working in media, I don't think it's ever been a man who baked and brought in a cake for a colleague, ever. And yeah, making cakes is a real thing, as he's remembering that Tamar, my producer, has a dairy intolerance and he's also a great baker herself. So no packet mix nonsense here. That's all emotional labour. But the cake is also a stand in for all the labour we do in making sure people feel happy, included and cared about in a workplace. It mightn't be baking. It might be listening to people whinge. It might be making sure there are enough spoons in the office kitchen. Let's take the labour out of the workplace and into the home. When it comes to emotional work in heterosexual relationships, Rose says her research points to a pattern, that while men might be emotionally engaged early on in a relationship, as things progress, the burden of this labour falls to women. And in the long run, both sides miss out.
Rose
Because these are essential skills. If you don't train people to practise essential skills, you're effectively making them really not great at preserving positive relationships. So I know that the statistic here is that 70% of the time when a divorce is filed, it's a woman filing it. And there's been a huge discussion about a male loneliness epidemic, and the tragedy, the very real tragedy of male deaths of despair. The problem is when you cast one gender as being really good at emotions, and another gender of being not emotional at all, the problem is we're setting up boys and then men for failure. Because the skill set of forging positive relationships, of being someone that other people want to be around, of being thought of as someone who's really a kind, thoughtful, empathetic person. If someone doesn't have those skills, they're probably not gonna be able to maintain as many relationships as someone who does. And that is a huge driver for sickness, for isolation, for loneliness, and then all sorts of mental health diseases that end up being extremely dangerous to the people themselves and maybe even the people around them.
Yumi
I just want to agree wholeheartedly in what we see, which is men who are middle-aged and upwards really struggling to connect with others if they don't have a partner there to facilitate it for them. And you can see them floundering. There's so much dysfunction there.
Rose
Totally. And I think you hinted at what happens. I think a lot of the time, that expectation that women should be the emotional facilitators for men in romantic relationships, that ends up making a woman effectively the broker of social relationships, the broker of communal activity.
Yumi
And it's not just communal activity. Women are also charged with the role of bringing other people's emotions into equilibrium, especially our male partners.
Rose
There is some part of this that is weaponizing competence, and we can talk about it in a very light way. And then there is a part of this that is effectively you're training women to be buffers of tempers, to basically either try and get someone who's depressed back up or someone who's very volatile down. This is actually a very kind of dark, sordid training that we are enforcing as a society when we offhandedly tell a girl, a woman on the street to smile. We are telling her, you exist to facilitate the emotional experiences of the people around you. And if you're not doing that, we're going to remind you that's what you should be doing.
Yumi
There are real dangers when it comes to men not being able to manage their own emotional wellbeing.
Rose
One of the things that I really get frustrated as is a lot of the conversations that our policy people, our politicians have about divorce rates and marriages and birth rates completely ignores the fact that one in four women is going to be the victim of domestic abuse in her lifetime. So when you say that we need to figure out how to keep marriages alive, you're effectively saying you want to ignore a culture of women who are dealing with very volatile situations because sadly the nature of domestic violence as it stands is men beating up the women or the children in their lives.
Yumi
Does your research include what happens with lesbian couples?
Rose
Yes, my editor, if I'm being fully honest with you, who is actually a queer woman, wanted to make sure that we drummed home how unequal heterosexual couples were as a kind of essential, you know, the beginning of the book. Queer couples are much more egalitarian, but very often the person in the couple who takes on more of the feminized role ends up incurring a lot of the inequality that we are familiar with in straight couples. Very interestingly, actually, the data in the US also showed that among heterosexual couples, mixed race couples tended to be more egalitarian. And what you would maybe ponder for both of those groups, and I'll go more into queer couples in a bit, is that when you don't have a set cultural script, there is more opportunity to renegotiate the script and to have a conversation that feels maybe, you know, more adapted to not necessarily societal expectations, but the specificity of your individual circumstances.
Yumi
Rose isn't just looking at emotional labour from an academic, aloof perspective. As we all do, she has got skin in the game.
Rose
I got married at 24 after a relatively short courtship. And that first marriage was really, it was very clear to me in that very short-lived marriage that the expectation was that I should, you know, play a lot of specific roles, not ask too many questions, adapt to the career of the man I had married, and, you know, be a caregiver first and foremost.
Yumi
This uneven distribution of the emotional work in her first marriage came as a surprise to Rose.
Rose
My dad died at a really young age. It was just our mum and my two sisters. So I hadn't really witnessed on a familial level a degree of gendered inequality the way I then later went on to understand that, you know, it was so prevalent.
Yumi
Let's talk about emotional labour in the bedroom. What does that look like?
Rose
I'm so glad you brought up lesbian couples. A lot of the way in which traditionally we explained away the orgasm gap in heterosexual couples was this idea that women's bodies, which are so mysterious, and orgasms were just so hard for women, and it's just men's, you know, was just like much more straightforward. And also that men's orgasm fundamentally was the main event, which if you think about that, I couldn't think of a better way of understanding emotional labour inequality, the idea that men's enjoyment is central and women are there to facilitate men's enjoyment. And if they can like have a nice time, maybe while that's happening, then good for them, but that's not really what we care about.
Yumi
One of the ways in which heterosexual women put their own emotional needs beneath those of her male partner is by faking orgasms.
Rose
But a lot of us are not necessarily handed a script when we first start having sex. And yet the understanding that the boy slash the man is there to be catered to. And of course, then you have the literature on faking it during sex. You know, what's so fascinating to me when I did this research is I came across academic articles that didn't just show the prevalence of faking it during sex, which for women is still relatively high, but then also tried to understand why it was that they were faking it. And this one study really shows that women are faking it because one, it will actually accelerate men being able to enjoy sex to their full capacity. And two, because they understood that men feeling like they had performed to their women would then be able to have an orgasm themselves. Women, we're not all being told that this is what we have to do. And yet there is this fascinating phenomenon that women know they have to effectively stroke the ego of their male partner. Then if they're told, was it good? They have to say, yes, yes, yes, it was wonderful.
Yumi
If there's a woman listening right now who is faking orgasms. And I mean, the whole thing is so fascinating to me as well because I thought we'd all grown out. I thought we'd agreed as a cohort to stop doing that. But if there is a woman who's listening right now who's faking orgasms to stroke and protect the ego of her partner, what advice would you give to her?
Rose
So what I would say is ideally you need to have a very sobering conversation with your male partner because your pleasure, your enjoyment, your time is worth just as much as your partner's time and enjoyment and pleasure. And a new way of living, not just only for yourself, but for yourself and for others. It doesn't need to be either or, starts now. But I will also acknowledge because of the interviews and women I've spoken to over the last decade at this point, that I understand that for some people they're in a survival mode and they can't actually rock the boat. And if they can't rock the boat, what I would invite them to do is reflect on why that is and whether it's time to think about a situation I dynamic in a new way.
Yumi
You mean get the fuck out of there?
Rose
I do. I do.
Yumi
Should we be looking at ways of compensating the work of emotional labour, perhaps financially and in non-financial ways?
Rose
I mean, paying for emotional labour is always a bit of a provocative statement, sadly, in spite of the fact that as I mentioned, it's actually a central part of millions of jobs. Yes, I absolutely think that emotional labour should be paid for in the workplace that looks like actually giving raises to those essential jobs that we so depend on. We all know that more humane workplaces make for better workplaces, make for more resilient workplaces. You know, emotional labour should be part of a job description, very honestly. So that employee, worker doing emotional labour, even if they're an engineer or a journalist, actually have that emotional labour recognized, evaluated on it so it's not just, you know, shoved into the boxes of the women workers, the minority workers who feel like they have to do it. And then those who are good at it get rewarded for it. You know, right now, emotional labour is not part, we don't see it as a promotable skillset. We see it as something actually that's just more part of the support roles. If anything, someone who's really good at emotional labour is going to be less prone to promotion than someone, you know, who's refusing to do it. That's seen as more of a power case. So there needs to be a real adjustment that has to happen.
Yumi
So what Rose is saying there is that if I ever get around to making Tamar's birthday cake and we stick the candles in and we sing happy birthday, that is actually top-notch employee labour going on there, which should be recognized and potentially promoted. I understand the assignment and I'll get baking this afternoon. But what about our personal lives? How could this idea of compensation or reward work there?
Rose
Valuing emotional labour, you know, can look like a lot of different things. It can look like, I mean, ideally we go towards a world of open-ended reciprocity. So a world where we're not counting necessarily tit for tat, but we know that if we're showing up for a person or for a group of people, you know, we are acknowledging through those actions that we're part of an emotional network, that I'm a human being, I'm an individual, but I'm not operating all by myself. I am effectively surviving because of these other people around me. I'm going to show up for those other people, but I have to trust that those other people fundamentally also understand that they're part of the same emotional network and they're going to be giving back to me.
Yumi
I feel like as somebody like you who's so aware of this emotional labour, you'd see it in ways that maybe the rest of us aren't that switched onto yet. Have you ever experimented with going on strike emotionally?
Rose
Hey, yeah, I mean, I'm trying to get better and better at deciding when someone is owed my emotional labour and when someone is not. Another reason why I think the term, the framing emotional labour is wonderful, is because I think that previously we thought of women just being emotionally available 24 seven. That kind of emotional labour is an infinite form of work that should be just delivered to everyone nonstop.
Yumi
You know how Rose got married at 24? Well, she's not with that guy anymore.
Rose
I'm now married again, and I'm married to someone who's wonderful. And I met him in my thirties and we only got married a year and a half ago. And it's much easier to build a relationship with egalitarian aspirations once you understand more of the world, more of yourself and more, you know, the kind of person that is going to be a good fit.
Yumi
The thing I like about this is that there's nothing wrong with doing emotional labour. Things like helping your nut job friends remain on speaking terms with their workmates or hugging your children until they regulate and get all soft and relaxed and trusting. Those skills are gifts that we keep putting back into the world again and again. The thing that Rose helps us to understand is that the work is vital, should be shared across genders, acknowledged and rewarded, and that it doesn't spring from an inexhaustible well. We can get tired. We can say no. Being able to opt out of this labour, recognise that we are deserving of care ourselves and maybe even a couple of slices of that cake, that's the yum yum in this sum sum.
Yumi
This podcast was produced on the lands of the Gundungara and Gadigal peoples. Ladies, We Need To Talk is mixed by Ann-Marie de Bettencor. It's produced by Elsa Silberstein. Supervising producer is Tamar Cranswick and our executive producer is Alex Lollback. This series was created by Claudine Ryan.
Orange background

Try Our AI Features

Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:

Comments

No comments yet...

Related Articles

Olivia Newton-John's widower John Easterling finds love with American businesswoman
Olivia Newton-John's widower John Easterling finds love with American businesswoman

News.com.au

time7 hours ago

  • News.com.au

Olivia Newton-John's widower John Easterling finds love with American businesswoman

Olivia Newton-John's widower has found love three years after her death. Daily Telegraph reports John Easterling, who married the late Australian singer in 2008, has moved on with US businesswoman Sarah Owen. Owen is the founder and owner of two companies: Striphair, which is a gentle grooming brush for pets, and Betty's Best, The outlet claims the pair met at a New Year's Eve event in December, 2022. Newton-John died at her ranch in California in August 2022. She was 73. The Grease star, who suffered a long battle with breast cancer, spent her final days at the sprawling Santa Ynez Valley estate with Easterling, where the couple had lived since purchasing the property in 2015. Easterling sold the home for $US7.95 million (AUD$12.16 million) in February this year after it was first listed in June 2024. 'Olivia and I made many wonderful memories at our home in Florida and the ranch in California. The message that keeps coming through so clearly is to love life, live life, and never forget about the good things that are going on,' Easterling told PEOPLE at the time. 'The 'Indian Way' Ranch in Santa Ynez is a spectacular property where I can see a new family having great nature adventures and relishing the life experience. I'll still maintain a presence in both Florida and California.' Easterling, who founded the Amazon Herb Company in 1990, first met Newton-John in 1993 when they were married to other people. After years of friendship, the pair began dating in 2007 before marrying in a spiritual ceremony in Peru in June 2008, followed by a legally-binding wedding on Jupiter Island in Florida. Newton-John's first marriage was with Matt Lattanzi, who she met on the set of the 1980 film Xanadu. They later married in 1984, welcoming their daughter Chloe Lattanzi in January 1986. The couple divorced in 1996. At the time of her death, Easterling paid heartfelt tribute to Newton-John, describing every day with his wife as 'supernatural.' 'Every day with Olivia was a bit of magic,' Easterling wrote. Lattanzi, for his part, shared a joint statement written by his current wife, Michelle. 'Today we lost one of the world's greats Olivia Newton-John. Matt and I are so overwhelmed with the love and gratitude shared with us by friends, family and a deeply loving community of fans who will all miss Olivia's presence in this world,' Michelle wrote in a post shared to Facebook. 'I have heard truly lovely stories and memories from people near and far, and honour in each of you where those feelings and memories come from. 'Nothing will replace the icon we lost, yet her legacy is alive and well in our hearts and memories, as well as her contributions to our global culture, her beloved daughter Chloe Lattanzi, and her cancer research and wellness centre in Melbourne, AU.'

Bella Thorne claims Charlie Puth turned on her for refusing to sleep with him
Bella Thorne claims Charlie Puth turned on her for refusing to sleep with him

News.com.au

time8 hours ago

  • News.com.au

Bella Thorne claims Charlie Puth turned on her for refusing to sleep with him

Bella Thorne claims Charlie Puth publicly lied about their relationship because she refused to sleep with him. The former Disney star made the claim in the comment section of an Instagram post about Little Mix singer Jade Thirlwall 'never' wanting to collab with Puth again. 'Yeah I mean. he lied to the entire world about me and started a hate train. All because I wouldn't … Do the deed with him,' Thorne, 27, wrote. Page Six has reached out to Puth's reps for comment. Thorne and Puth, 33, were briefly linked together in December 2016, shortly after the actress broke up with her ex Tyler Posey. The duo were caught kissing in Miami and attended iHeartRadio's Jingle Ball together where he serenaded her during his performance. Things turned sour just a few weeks later when the singer accused the actress of cheating, claiming she had not ended her relationship with Posey before pursuing things with him. In a slew of since-deleted tweets, the record producer accused Thorne of putting him in a love triangle with the Teen Wolf actor. 'I can't believe what I'm reading,' he wrote at the time. 'No one should have their heart messed with like this, and I'm not going to be in the middle of it.' Puth did not call out Thorne by name, but directly apologised to Posey, 33, making it clear who the tweets were about. 'I don't know Tyler personally, but I know he shouldn't be treated this way,' he wrote, adding, 'She told me she was not with him anymore. This is all news to me.' The model denied the claims, tweeting back just hours later, 'Ty and I have been broken up for like over two weeks and charlie and I ARENT DATING we are friends. That article was written forever ago,' referencing a Paper magazine piece published earlier that week. 'Charlie and I were hanging out. he saw an old interview and got butthurt but instead of texting me and asking about it he put it on Twitter,' she further explained. Both Thorne and Puth moved on with other partners and have not brought up the messy situation until now. Thorne is engaged to Mark Emms. She went Instagram-official with the Emms Productions and Eastern Road Films CEO on Valentine's Day in 2023. 'Find someone u want to share ur candy with,' she captioned the loved-up carousel of PDA pictures. Puth, for his part, married Brooke Sansone in September 2024 after a decades-long friendship. 'There was always a spark and chemistry between us, but the timing never seemed to work out — until it did,' Sansone shared. 'It's like an invisible string was always there, showing us that timing is everything.'

Why queer artists Fletcher and JoJo Siwa are causing controversy in the LGBTQIA+ community
Why queer artists Fletcher and JoJo Siwa are causing controversy in the LGBTQIA+ community

ABC News

time10 hours ago

  • ABC News

Why queer artists Fletcher and JoJo Siwa are causing controversy in the LGBTQIA+ community

While Pride month is over for another year, queer music lovers are still talking about two of the community's most divisive stars. US singers Cari Fletcher and JoJo Siwa are known for their queer pop anthems and have a passionate lesbian fanbase. Both singers have identified as lesbian or queer, so their recent announcements that they are dating men have shocked and upset certain fans. It has sparked a broader conversation about the erasure of bisexual and pansexual identities and the pressure placed on celebrities to live up to fan expectations. And if you're thinking "who the heck are Fletcher and Siwa and why do people care?", let us fill you in. JoJo Siwa rose to fame on the hit TV show Dance Moms in 2014 for her extroverted personality. She began releasing music in 2016 aimed at children, before branching out to pop music for an older audience. Siwa came out in 2021 by posting a photo of herself in a T-shirt that said "Best Gay Cousin Ever." The 22-year-old has more than 11 million Instagram followers and more than 500,000 monthly Spotify listeners. In 2024, she proudly (and erroneously) declared that she "invented gay pop". She later conceded that while she didn't invent the genre, she would love to be its "chief marketing officer." Cari Fletcher, better known by her stage name Fletcher, became a queer icon after the release of her song Becky's So Hot in 2022. Fletcher also came out in 2021, after getting fans to ask her questions on her Instagram story. One fan asked if she was lesbian or bisexual. "I get this question so much. I just exist. If someone needed to put me in some sort of category, for themselves to better understand, I would say I identify as queer," Fletcher posted on her story in response to the question. The 31-year-old has more than one million Instagram followers and more than two million monthly Spotify listeners. Things started to blow up for Siwa earlier this year while she was a contestant on UK Celebrity Big Brother, a television show in which celebrities must live in a house together, completing tasks all while being cut off from the outside world. People started to ask questions as she became very close with her fellow co-star Chris Hughes, despite still being in a relationship with Australian content creator Kath Ebbs. On the show she said she didn't feel she identified with being a lesbian anymore. "I have always been afraid of feeling queer, like I have always said lesbian right, but I feel so queer," she said whilst on Celebrity Big Brother UK. "I am switching letters: f*** the L, I am going to the Q." Queer is an umbrella term for people who are not heterosexual or cisgender. It encompasses a range of sexualities and gender identities and is often used by people who feel they don't fit neatly into a box. Shortly after the show had ended, Siwa broke up with Ebbs (who very publicly called her out on it) and announced she was dating her male Big Brother co-star. She doubled down on her comments inside the house, saying in an interview with YOU magazine that she felt "pressured" into labelling herself a lesbian. "And I think I did that because of pressure," Siwa said, adding that a lot of it came from "inside the [LGBTQIA+] community at times." "From people I know, from partners I've had," she added. RMIT University's senior public relations lecturer Dr Damien O'Meara said: "We have plenty of bi and pan people who don't feel welcome in our community." He believes Fletcher and Siwa are offering a good opportunity to start a conversation and "challenge the erasure that's taking place". Around the same time, Fletcher released her single Boy, signalling to fans she was in a relationship with a man. But her decision to archive all her previous social media posts about her music on same-sex relationships led to fans accusing her of erasing her queer identity. "When you've made your entire brand of wlw (women loving women) music and art, only to turn around and talk about how 'magical and liberating' it is to be with a man, it just feels like it was all a phase for you," one social media user said. Dr Natalie Krikowa, a senior lecturer at the School of Communications at the University of Technology in Sydney and a member of the LGBTQIA+ community, said both artists were entitled to talk about their relationships but there should be an additional level of "care, empathy and respect" given to fans who have come to expect something different. "I think it is important that these conversations are had without it escalating into biphobia and bi erasure, because there is a fine line that we should not be crossing." Fletcher talked about the backlash she received in a TikTok video and has now unarchived all her posts. "My queerness is not a phase, I have always identified as a queer woman," she said in the video. Dr O'Meara pointed out that the 31-year-old's brand is through her music which is "very personal". "It explores her feelings and what she's going through, and a lot of her music has always said, 'well, this is what I'm dealing with right now.' And so, if we think of that as Fletcher's brand, what we have is her using her music to explore this," Dr O'Meara said. Bi erasure and biphobia are terms for the questioning or dismissal of bisexuality. But Dr O'Meara said Siwa and Fletcher had actually opened up an important conversation about bisexuality. Author and editor of Nonsense Newsletter Patrick Lenton, who is bisexual, agrees. "Invalidating that relationship and being angry about it stems from believing that bisexuality or queerness as a sort of broader thing isn't as valid as something say like lesbianism," he said. He added that Siwa, as a 22-year-old, is discovering what her sexuality is "in a very public platform, in real time." "In that particular case, I would've hated for anyone to be viewing and commenting on my sexuality journey when I was that young, because it was a mess." Mr Lenton said there is a lot of online gatekeeping " over who is valid in their queerness and who is allowed to be queer," pointing to bisexual actor Kit Connor (from Netflix's Heartstopper). "He was basically bullied into coming out before he was ready, because people were saying 'oh he's not queer enough to play a queer role' and it's really weird and backwards idea of looking at things." Sarah Scales, a PhD candidate at Swinburne University who is researching parasocial relationships and celebrity scandal, said part of the problem here is the "parasocial interaction" many people have with celebrities, which is a one-sided relationship that is usually between a fan and a celebrity that has no mutual development. She said people can feel upset, disappointed and betrayed if they feel their trust has been broken with someone they look up to, or someone they see within themselves. She said JoJo Siwa's fans may have reacted more favourably if she addressed her relationship breakdown with Kath Ebbs earlier and was more open about her attraction to Hughes. "If they heard it from her first in a more active way, it might have been different."

DOWNLOAD THE APP

Get Started Now: Download the App

Ready to dive into a world of global content with local flavor? Download Daily8 app today from your preferred app store and start exploring.
app-storeplay-store