Working at the Edge: emotional labour in the spectre of violence

Drawing on semi-structured interviews with police officers, door(wo)men and prison officers we present intimate, emotional and sometimes harrowing accounts of both the physical and emotional pain routinely endured by those employed as agents of social control. This article positions labour undertaken in such contexts as ‘edgework’; exploring how the boundary, or ‘edge’, between safety and danger is negotiated and managed ‘in the moment’ through embodied performances of empathetic and antipathetic emotional labour and emotional neutrality. Placing the concepts of edgework and emotional labour in dialogue, we open up a space in which to explore gendered conceptualisations of emotional labour and offer a more feminist appreciation of edge work that moves us beyond narrow concerns with pleasure, to account for embodied experience and emotional performance. In so doing, this paper offers a unique insight into the emotional labour repertoires of both men and women who work in the spectre of violence.