  Terms such as "affective labor" and "emotional labor" pepper feminist
critiques of the workplace. Though there are theoretical nuances between the
two phrases, both kinds of labor involve the management of emotions; some acts
associated with these constructs involve caring, listening, comforting,
reassuring, and smiling. In this article I explore the different ways academic
mathematicians are called to provide emotional labor in the discipline, thereby
illuminating a rarely visible component of a mathematical life in the academy.
Underlying this work is my contention that a conceptualization of labor
involved in managing emotions is of value to the project of understanding the
character, values, and boundaries of such a life. In order to investigate the
various dimensions of emotional labor in the context of academic mathematics, I
extend the basic framework of Morris and Feldman [33] and then apply this
extended framework to the mathematical sciences. Other researchers have mainly
focused on the negative effects of emotional labor on a laborer's physical,
emotional, and mental health, and several examples in this article align with
this framing. However, at the end of the article, I argue that mathematical
communities and mentoring structures such as EDGE help diminish some of the
negative aspects of emotional labor while also accentuating the positives.
