By contrast, emotional labor has exchange value because it is traded and performed for a wage.
[10] Cultural norms often imply that emotion work is reserved for females.
[13] The social theorist Victor Jeleniewski Seidler argues that women's emotion work is merely another demonstration of false consciousness under patriarchy, and that emotion work, as a concept, has been adopted, adapted or criticized to such an extent that it is in danger of becoming a "catch-all-cliché".
[14] More broadly, the concept of emotion work has itself been criticized as a wide over-simplification of mental processes such as repression and denial which continually occur in everyday life.
[14] Rousseau in The New Heloise suggests that the attempt to master instrumentally one's affective life always results in a weakening and eventually the fragmentation of one's identity, even if the emotion work is performed at the demand of ethical principles.