The shame of servers: Inquiry and agency in a Manhattan cocktail lounge.

With the history and function of the worker's inquiry in mind, this paper presents the serving women in their own words, describing how the expectations placed on them as gendered affective laborers creates a forced, false, and relentless intimacy with customers that in turn produces a reflexive internal cycle of shameful experience and memory for a group of servers. This manifestation of shame complicates the idea of worker's inquiry because the inquiry itself further triggers the negative emotional cycle. But the peculiar insularity of shame - its potential to facilitate emotional boundaries and defensive strategies - means it can also be harnessed and utilized as a powerful tool for autonomy and emotional emancipation. With the schizophrenic nature of shame in serving work in mind, this research explores the inherent emotional risks for workers in the American affective labor economy, and how small social changes in expectations on the part of consumers of affective labor can greatly lessen these risks. The paper concludes by suggesting that sociologists critically engage with the many manifestations of shame in affective labor to expand and rethink the concept of the worker's inquiry to reflect the emotional needs of the ballooning number of service industry laborers in Western economies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]