STATE OF THE ART

“THERE IS QUEER INEQUITY, BUT I

PICK TO BE HAPPY”
Racialized Feeling Rules and Diversity Regimes in
University LGBTQ Resource Centers

Stephanie M. Ortiz
Department of Sociology, Florida Atlantic University
Chad R. Mandala
Institute of Higher Education, University of Georgia

Abstract
As racialized and gendered structures, organizations can reinforce complex inequalities,
especially with regard to emotional labor. While the literature on emotional labor is estab-
lished, little is known about how race and sexual orientation shape feeling rule enforcement.
Interviewing staff at university LGBTQ resource centers, we argue that feeling rules have a
sexual orientation-based dimension and are experienced and enforced differently based on
race. White LGBTQ staff find that they can express anger strategically to bring awareness to
issues of race, but do not confront racism in their work for fear of alienating other Whites, which
they believe would harm their center. LGBTQ staff of color experience organizational
consequences for their anger, which is directed toward the racism they and students of color
experience in the university. Lacking the credential of Whiteness (Ray 2019), staff of color
find they cannot reach the benchmark set by Whites’ enthusiastic performance of emo-
tional labor. These feeling rules operate in service of what James M. Thomas (2018) calls
diversity regimes, which are performances of a benign commitment to racial equality, that
retrench racial inequality by failing to redistribute resources along racial lines. By sanc-
tioning anger toward the university—as an institution that reproduces racism—feeling
rules have organizational consequences: Whites can advance through compliance and
enthusiasm; staff of color are terminated or denied opportunities; and critiques of racism
are silenced. While created to address diversity, LGBTQ centers are purposely not
structurally positioned to radically shift resources in a way to combat racism, and feeling
rules maintain these arrangements while allowing universities to claim a commitment to
equality. These findings hold implications for broader concerns of racism, sexual orienta-
tion, and inequality within work organizations, especially manifestations of worker control
within diversity work.

Du Bois Review. 18:2 (2021) 347–364.

© The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of Hutchins Center for African
and African American Research
doi:10.1017/S1742058X21000096

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 Stephanie M. Ortiz and Chad R. Mandala

Keywords: Emotional Labor, Racism, Sexual Orientation, Diversity Regimes, Racialized

Organizations

INTRODUCTION

Organizations are locations where attempts at racial equality are made, but they often fail
or reproduce racial inequality in more covert forms (Acker 2006; Bell and Hartmann,
2007; Thomas 2018; Ward 2008). Racial inequality can be reproduced through how
general expectations around work are designed and implemented; that is, how rules and
material/social resources are paired to differentially advantage some racial groups over
others (Acker 2006; Evans 2013; Harlow 2003; Hochschild 2012; Kang 2003; Ray 2019).
Emotional labor is the occupationally required manipulation, production, and manage-
ment of emotions in oneself and others, and is one way that formal rules are organized to
shape how racial groups access resources (Evans 2013; Evans and Moore, 2015; Harlow
2003; Hochschild 2012; Kang 2003). While structural racism is linked to an affective
economy (Ahmed 2010; Lott 2012), and emotions themselves have a racial economy
(Bonilla-Silva 2019), organizations play a distinct role in differentially mobilizing and
controlling workers’ emotions through feeling rules. Feeling rules are the normative
expectations of how emotions are to be appropriately expressed and produced, and
their design and enforcement can maintain racial inequality (Wingfield 2010).
Emotional labor and feeling rules are stratified on the basis of gender and race
(Evans 2013; Evans and Moore, 2015; Harlow 2003; Hochschild 2012; Kang 2003;
Pierce 1999; Wingfield 2010). This leads to inequality in how people of color experience
their work and advance in their positions, which contributes to a racially stratified labor
market, even within high status or high prestige professional occupations (Bellas 1999;
Harlow 2003; Tunguz 2016). Race as a system of domination concurrently relies on and
produces gender and class hierarchies (Collins 2002; Collins and Bilge, 2016; Glenn
2002), which result in complex inequalities within organizations (Acker 2006). While
sexual orientation is also implicated in those processes (Acker 1990, 2006), heteronor-
mativity has been given scant attention in relation to both emotional labor and its
relationship to racial inequality within organizations. Thus, we ask: how are sexual
orientation-based feeling rules applied differentially among Whites and people of color?
This paper addresses the racialized differences in how feeling rules are enforced and
experienced across a multi-racial sample of seventeen full-time university LGBTQ
resource center staff. Through an analysis of interview data, we demonstrate how
Whites, even those with stigmatized gender and sexual identities, become the “affective
ruler that measures and naturalizes white feelings as the norm” (Muñoz 2006, p. 680).
We find that staff of color are measured against this White homonormative emotionality
(which centers cheerfulness and enthusiasm), and simultaneously constrained by racism
(which disciplines displays of anger directed at the racism perpetuated by the university).
We argue that racialized feeling rules, as corrective mechanisms within organizations to
dampen critiques of inequality, maintain and reproduce racial inequality in the university.
We link LGBTQ centers’ differential enforcement of feeling rules to what James
M. Thomas (2018) calls diversity regimes. Diversity regimes are ways that universities
can perform a commitment to racial equality, but fail to redistribute resources and power
along racial lines. This benign commitment allows universities to ask, “How is our
campus racist, how is our campus climate hostile, how are we reproducing racial
inequalities, when we are so clear in our commitment to the values of equality, fairness,
and multiculturalism?” (Thomas 2018, p. 145). Diversity regimes thus shift our focus to
the processes that produce that inequality within organizations claiming to be

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 Feeling Rules and Diversity Regimes

committed to racial equality (Thomas 2018). By demonstrating how centers use race-
and sexual orientation-based feeling rules to silence dissent, in work specifically
dedicated to diversity, we demonstrate how emotional labor is a key aspect of an
organizational structure that makes radical change within the university increasingly
challenging.

Care Work, Emotional Labor, and Feeling Rules

The mission of University LGBTQ resource centers is to support and advocate for
LGBTQ students’ wellbeing and academic success through educational programming
and outreach, with explicit goals to support the development of LGBTQ students,
faculty, and staff through emotional and social support. Day-to-day tasks for center staff
involve administrative duties and meetings with university administrators, but the
required crisis management must not be understated; students frequently seek out staff
to address suicides, sexual assaults, bigotry from other students or faculty, and family
issues. Centers thus require care work: tasks related to social reproduction, or contrib-
uting to the wellbeing of others, which can include helping to develop others’ capabil-
ities (Duffy 2005; England 2005). In this setting, care work also includes emotional labor
(Harlow 2003; Hochschild 2012). The noted costs of emotional labor for workers
are alienation, feelings of inauthenticity, emotional exhaustion, and reduced sense of
personal accomplishment (Erickson and Ritter, 2001; Harlow 2003; Maslach et al., 2001;
Morris and Feldman, 1996). The commodification of emotion within the university is
unsurprising from a queer of color critique. As Roderick A. Ferguson (2012) argues, the
administrative transformation of the university, along with its partnership with global
capital, means that an “ethos of market tendencies” pervades all economic and social
aspects of university life (p. 212). Thomas (2018) further demonstrates how affective
labor is central to how universities economize diversity, aiming to protect perceptions of
their efforts by producing excitement and satisfaction, while silencing negative affects.
The consequences of the commodification of emotion thus span beyond the individual
mental-health effects; they also include retrenching racial and gendered inequality
within an already stratified labor market (Boris and Klein, 2015; Duffy 2011; Vora 2010).
Emotional labor is key to how organizational inequality persists (Hochschild 2012).
One link between emotional performances across occupations are feeling rules. Feeling
rules are the exertion of power over employees’ intimate, private emotion management
and the enforcement of particular displays of emotion. These rules are how employers,
through both formal means such as trainings and job descriptions, and informal means
such as gossip, shunning, and ridicule, create and enforce expectations for how employ-
ees will manage emotions on the job (Hochschild 2012). These rules outline which
feelings should be felt, which feelings should be expressed, and how (Bericat 2016). Feeling
rules are gendered and raced, and vary according to context (Harlow 2003; Kang 2003;
Wingfield 2010). Professionals are argued to be privileged in the sense that they receive
training on how to manage emotions and receive peer support of their emotional labor
(Macdonald and Sirianni, 1996). Studies that center on White women professionals and
professionals of color point to an overall lack of support of, or no acknowledgement of,
expertise and authority, and the expectation that deference be performed (Bellas 1999;
Evans 2013; Harlow 2003).
The majority of the emotional labor literature has focused on how gender impacts
cisgender, most often White, women at work (Hochschild 2012) and more recently, how
race and gender impact cisgender men and women of color (Evans 2013; Harlow 2003;
Kang 2003; Wingfield 2010). Sexuality, while intimately connected to gender, race, and
labor (Acker 2006; Collins 2002; Hames-García and Martínez, 2011; Holland 2012), has

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 Stephanie M. Ortiz and Chad R. Mandala

been given scant attention. This is an important consideration because stigmas, negative
stereotypes, and the lack of protective policies against hiring discrimination in many
states means LGBTQ individuals already experience a disadvantage on the labor market
in relation to heterosexuals (Mize 2016; Tilcsik 2011). Further, “the worker” is
presumed heterosexual by most theories, which obscures analysis of how heteronorma-
tivity is produced and sustained institutionally (Ward and Schneider, 2009) in ways that
result in disparate outcomes for LGBTQ workers (Acker 2006; Mize 2016). Scholars
note that when a worker is not considered heterosexual, Whiteness remains the
normative status, reproduced as a conventional and natural form of association and
belonging (Halberstam 2015; Muñoz 2006; Self and Hudson, 2015; Ward 2008). This
positioning of queer bodies and spaces as White is referred to as White homonorma-
tivity, and has consequences on how inequality is produced within organizations (Self
and Hudson, 2015; Ward, 2008). As Tammie M. Kennedy (2014) argues, rather than
critiquing the institutional arrangements and norms of society as heterosexist and racist,
White homonormativity “creates hierarchies within LGBTQ communities where those
mimicking heteronormative gender identities are deemed most “worthy” of receiving
rights” (p. 121). This hierarchy of LGBTQ communities is also a racial one. This
suggests that in the case of work organizations, the enforcement of feeling rules on the
basis of race and sexual orientation would reinforce White homonormativity.

Inequality Regimes: How Racial and Gendered Inequality are Produced Inside
Organizations
Organizations are neither gender- or race-neutral; they both constitute and are consti-
tuted by racial and gendered processes at the micro level (demographic identity,
individual instances of prejudice or bias) and the macro level (processes of racialization
and the reification of gender norms) (Acker 1990; Ray 2019). Victor Ray (2019)
suggests that part of what renders organizations racial structures is their capacity to
link rules and blueprints for accumulating resources with the distribution of material
and social resources along racial lines. This process can work in service of inequality
regimes, what Joan Acker (2006) describes as “interrelated practices, processes,
actions, and meanings that result in and maintain class, gender, and racial inequalities”
(p. 443). Here, inequality is defined as

systematic disparities in power and control over goals, resources, and outcomes;
workplace decisions such as how to organize work; opportunities for promotion and
interesting work; security in employment and benefits; pay and other monetary
rewards; respect; and pleasures in work and work relations (Acker 2006, p. 443).

How organizations arrange the general requirements of work and control the inter-
actions of employees around race, gender, and sexual orientation are two of the key
ways that inequality is maintained (Acker 2006). Within universities, this can be
achieved through efforts to control the effectiveness of dissent, where student activists
are strategically incorporated into the bureaucracy against a backdrop of discourses
which deny a hostile racial climate (Johnson 2020). A second, and related, way that
inequality is maintained is through a broader performative commitment to diversity,
typically manifesting as public impression management and staged performances of
difference, such as the formation of diversity taskforces and committees, or public
statements against racism (Thomas 2018, 2020).
Formal and informal rules, which are applied and implemented differently, discip-
line individuals by shaping life paths and choices, and shape the subsequent unequal

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 Feeling Rules and Diversity Regimes

distribution of resources (Hochschild 2012; Ray 2019), including in a university setting.

It is clear that emotional labor is unequally distributed across race and gender, but the
analytical link of that labor to the maintenance of complex inequalities within organ-
izations, is the concern here. That is, power and authority within an organization’s
formal hierarchy, and the treatment of marginalized employees who are tasked with
performing the bulk of this labor, function as inequality regimes (Acker 2006; Hochs-
child 2012; Wingfield 2010).
Scholars have established how feeling rules are unequally applied on the basis of race
across of range of occupations, where people of color carry a heavier burden of emotion
management, managing both work/role-related frustrations and everyday racism and
sexism experienced on the job (Evans 2013; Evans and Moore, 2015; Kang 2003;
Wingfield 2010). Whiteness, however, has not explicitly been analyzed within the
emotional labor literature, despite the reality that feeling rules assigned to Whites
are also racialized. Such an inquiry is important to investigate for several reasons. First,
race is articulated, contested, and essentially made in everyday situations, including the
mundane realities that play out at work (Embrick and Henricks, 2015; Holland 2012;
Lewis 2003). Second, emotions play a role in the material, structural implications of
racism (Bonilla-Silva 2019); and emotions and their public and private management are
shaped by political values external to the individual (Holland 2012). Controlling the
emotions of social actors such that people of color are perceived to be irrational, angry,
or biased, while Whites’ emotions are seen as legitimate and rational (Muñoz 2006),
reproduces the racial order. Studies that do not examine the racial tasks of Whites within
organizations may also reinforce the idea that race is something people of color bring
into otherwise neutral organizations (Ray 2019). Third, racial and gendered inequality
do not merely exist in organizations; they are foundational to their structures (Acker
1990; Ray 2019).

METHODS

To explore emotional labor within University LGBTQ resource centers we conducted

semi-structured interviews with seventeen full-time staff at university LGBTQ resource
centers. To be sure, retrospective interview data cannot speak to the everyday routines,
interactions, and workings of the centers. However, the focus here is how feeling rules,
designed and enforced on the basis of race and sexual orientation, operate in shaping
what staff believe they can feel, how those feelings are to be expressed in the context of
their work, and how those rules shape the work White staff and staff of color believe they
can do in relation to diversity. In this case, interviews provide the most appropriate
method, by providing data filtered through the perceptive views (Creswell 2014) of the
staff who must navigate how emotional labor is structured.

Why University LGBTQ Resource Centers?

At the time of data collection, 263 college and universities in the United States housed an
LGBTQ resource center (Consortium of LGBTQ Higher Education 2018). LGBTQ
centers provide an exaggerated case to analyze how sexual orientation functions within
an organization, since sexual orientation is highly visible in the work and large numbers
of LGBTQ individuals are employed. Other exaggerated cases exist, but the context of a
university is promising for a few reasons. Universities are a heteronormative system
(Acker 1990) and a corporatized institution (Mills 2012). Student affairs professionals
provide services aimed at improving the well-being of students, increasing retention and

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 Stephanie M. Ortiz and Chad R. Mandala

raising rankings, while also undertaking expert service work, using their expertise and
authority to serve students as customers. Within corporate models adopted by univer-
sities, administrators are also concerned with regulating interactions with students to
maintain the institution’s ranking (Johnson 2020; Mills 2012). LGBTQ resource centers
provide a site to examine emotional labor on the basis of sexual orientation, with goals
that align with universities’ diversity initiatives.

Participant Recruitment
Our recruitment materials specified that we were focused on examining how staff
members within university LGBTQ centers manage their emotions while at work.
Once IRB approval was received, we posted the recruitment flyer within closed groups
on Facebook for student affairs professionals and LGBTQ individuals working within
student affairs. Both groups are popular with an active membership; the student affairs
Facebook group has over 30,000 members, with over twenty new posts a day, while the
LGBTQ student affairs group has 3200 members, with around ten posts a week. Typical
posts within these groups include research opportunities, job postings, calls for papers, as
well as resources for emotional and social support regarding issues such as emotional
labor. Members of these groups might have been more willing to discuss their emotional
labor because such topics were discussed within these groups. As a means of incentiv-
izing participation, we offered individuals a twenty-five dollar Amazon gift card. For
participants to be included within the study, they had to identify as being fluent in
English, at least eighteen years old, and currently employed in a university LGBTQ
center full time. Overall, seventeen interviews were conducted, recorded, and subse-
quently transcribed with staff from fourteen universities. Respondent demographics,
including years of experience working full time in a LGBTQ center, are displayed in
Table 1. We interviewed center directors, assistant directors, and various coordinators.
Among these universities were private ivy league colleges; public state universities; large,
public, flagship universities; and elite, liberal arts colleges. Universities were located in
the Pacific Northwest, Northeast, South, Midwest, Mid-Atlantic, and Southwest United
States. There were no religiously-affiliated schools or historically-Black colleges in our
sample. While diversity work may be organized differently at such institutions, most
LGBTQ centers are at predominately White and non-religious institutions. Future
studies should address how diversity work around sexual orientation operates within
other types of institutions.

Data Collection
Interviews were conducted via telephone or video-conferencing platform. We note no
substantive difference in the length of the interview or the degree of rapport established
with respondents based on interview format. The interviews lasted for ninety minutes,
with the exception of one interview lasting sixty minutes. Respondents were asked about
their official job descriptions and day-to-day tasks; the characteristics of their LGBTQ
center and university; the overall emotional climate in their workplace; how they
minimized, produced, and managed their emotions as well as the emotions of others;
and the dynamics of supervisors, senior administrators, coworkers, and students in these
processes. The sample provided enough data to reach thematic saturation with regard to
the general nature of emotional labor within the context of LGBTQ centers. That is to
say that respondents noted the same feeling rules, perceived consequences of not
following the rules, and the perception of how stereotypes and cultural tropes around
sexual orientation shaped the emotional expectations of their work, and how their

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 Feeling Rules and Diversity Regimes

Table 1. Self-Reported Respondent Demographics

Sexual Years of
Pseudonym Race Orientation Gender Experience

Scottie White gay cisgender man 2

Esmeralda Black lesbian cisgender woman 2
Ashley White queer cisgender woman 6
Q South Asian queer non-binary 3
Eli Latino and White queer cisgender man 5
Beyonce Mexican American lesbian non-binary 2
Abby White queer cisgender woman 9
Celine White queer cisgender woman 17
Cameron Black bisexual genderfluid woman 3.5
Ruby White queer cisgender woman 3
Aaron White queer transgender man 4
Hillary White queer cisgender woman 6
Andrew White queer transgender man 18
Jason White gay cisgender man 7
Jessica White bisexual cisgender woman 2
Ray African American heterosexual cisgender woman 3
Marvin Asian gay cisgender man 5

emotional labor was assessed by colleagues, supervisors, and administrators. Saturation

was also met within both the White (n=10) and people of color (n=7) groups, which as
John W. Creswell (2014) notes, is possible between two to ten respondents. To be sure,
people of color are not a monolithic group, and we do not seek to erase the differences in
how racism may shape the emotional labor of different racial groups. The tropes of
angry Black women (Collins 2002; Durr and Wingfield, 2011), quiet, timid Asians (Lee
1999), and fiery Latinx people (Berg 2002) are cultural scripts against which the
emotions of people of color are measured (Ahmed 2010), and may shape feeling rules.
However, the purpose is to demonstrate how Whites’ emotions become the baseline for
feeling rules within diversity regimes, perceived as rational and effective for the work of
LGBTQ centers, and not how each racial group experiences feeling rules per se. While
this sample does not provide sufficient cases to be considered generalizable, we find it
provides important insights into how sexual orientation and race inform emotional labor
and feeling rules within a professional workspace increasingly marked as a resource
across universities.

Analysis
In developing our coding schema, we utilized Robert Bogdan and Sari Knapp Biklen’s
(2007) coding families, which oriented our analysis toward how respondents defined and
understood their work environment, relationships, role, and the relationship among
them. We focused on exploring which feeling rules were at play in LGBTQ centers;
identifying how employees are socialized into understanding the benefits and conse-
quences of compliance; and how respondents perceived their sexual orientation and race
shape those interactions.

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 Stephanie M. Ortiz and Chad R. Mandala

In an effort to protect the identities of our respondents, we do not provide position

titles or institutional location, and all of the names are pseudonyms selected by the
respondents. We found no discernible difference in the perspective of respondents with
regard to the feeling rules they identified based on years of experience, position title,
institution type or size, or geographic location. That is to say that a Center Director
from a public university in the Pacific Northwest noted similar experiences, expressed
similar feelings, and identified similar patterns in the racialized nature of their emotional
labor, as a Student Development Coordinator at a private university in the deep South.
We suspect that staff described feeling rules similarly, despite different organizational
characteristics (such as university size, funding, leadership, or supervisor identity) because
the key characteristic to impact emotional labor, including the design of feeling rules, is an
organization’s goals (Hochschild 2012) which are consistent across institution. Due to
space constraints, the analysis of cisnormativity and how gender identities outside the
gender binary impacted the experience of employees can be found in a subsequent paper.

Sadness, Trauma, and “The Unhappy Queer”: Sexual Orientation and Feeling
Rules
Work in an LGBTQ center is deeply personal and political. Daily tasks for staff in this
study included advocating for gender neutral bathrooms and pushing for official
university documents to reflect students’ pronouns; helping students cope after a fellow
student committed suicide or was harmed; providing students crisis support after high-
profile hate crimes; and educating the campus community about the overall implications
of homophobia and the needs of students. While not a comparative study of heterosexual
and LGBTQ staff, our findings still explore the way sexual orientation shaped expect-
ations of how respondents were expected to feel while performing this work. One of
the ways heteronormativity functions is by positioning heterosexuality as the norm.
LGBTQ resource centers as queer spaces are still nested within a broader heteronorma-
tive institution of a university (Ferguson 2012). Expectations for emotions become focused
on queer emotionality, but this is filtered through the lens of the “unhappy queer” trope.
The unhappy queer trope is a cultural representation of LGBTQ identities as the
embodiment of unhappiness, shame, deficit, and even as the culmination of parents’
failures (Ahmed 2010). This notion of LGBTQ people as tangled in self-pity, terror,
grief, and loss, represents LGBTQ identities as a purposeful deviation from the “promised
happiness” of heterosexuality (Ahmed 2010). The unhappy queer trope structures
emotionality in two ways: staff are expected to counter this preconceived sense of grief
and sadness through intense positivity and joy, while also tapping into the assumed
inherent pain of queerness during trainings to evoke empathy from workshop attend-
ees, what we refer to as performing trauma.
All respondents described performing happiness and pleasantness over and above
heterosexual employees and LGBTQ employees working in other divisions of the
university. Combatting the unhappy queer trope involved managing their own sadness
from explicitly negative interactions with supervisors and administrators, and anger
towards a homophobic campus climate. As Jason, a White, gay cisgender man explained:

I show joy and positivity… maybe I do play into the peppy, happy gay person
stereotype… but it benefits the students and impacts the narrative about my center.
People are like “oh, that’s a good space!” I pick to be happy… I still feel those bad
feelings, but I’d rather pick a good mood. I don’t wanna spiral into dark spaces; you
can’t act like everyone is out to get you. Sometimes there is queer inequity, but I pick
to be happy!

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 Feeling Rules and Diversity Regimes

Respondents also managed their sadness from consistently distressing encounters

with students who were emotionally, financially, or socially suffering due to ongoing
homophobia at the university. Key in managing this emotion was maintaining a positive
demeanor, often in fear of being fired and therefore unable to help students. As Cameron,
a Black, bisexual genderfluid person told us:

I worry about being too much, too Black, too bi[sexual], too genderfluid for other
people. I’m often afraid of being perceived of being angry, or not thoughtful, or too
negative. I think that revolves around how being liked means I’m safe. If I don’t
make people mad, I can survive here. It’s like it’s replicating all of these systems I
don’t agree with and am trying to move out of, while at the same time help students
and others I serve navigate that. It feels lonely… there is a lot of capacity for pain.

Second, all respondents described needing to produce and perform trauma in training
settings and formal meetings with university administrators, faculty, and staff. This
entailed using dark and deeply personal traumatic experiences from throughout their
own life and the lives of students to gain support and foster empathy from others. As
Aaron, a White, queer transgender man shared: “I have a story I almost always share in
workshops. My best friend has a tattoo of the word human because he’s afraid that if
someone saw his transness before his humanity, they wouldn’t save his life.” Respond-
ents found that empirical data alone rarely convinced faculty, staff, and administrators
that substantive changes were needed on behalf of LGBTQ students. As Beyonce, a
Mexican American, lesbian non-binary person told us:

My job requires justifying the need for LGBT education among faculty and staff,
convincing them it’s in their best interest to be educated about these issues so they share
it with their departments. To be effective, I have to elicit empathy. So, I share stories
about students who struggle, and what being marginalized feels like. I have to prove a
certain level of trauma can and has happened before faculty and staff can see why having
education about issues would help. I relive my trauma in those sessions, and even
students do it to make the point. You have to be really explicit about the harm it does.

Likewise Jessica, a White, bisexual cisgender woman, told us that while she can “bring
up statistics” to educate others, she ultimately needs “people to understand the trauma
of it all.” Jessica uses roleplaying exercises to try to get others to feel invalid and
misunderstood, like LGBTQ students might feel. While the literature suggests that
such expert (assumed heterosexual) service workers gain more training and have more
institutional support for their emotional labor (Wharton 2009), this was not the case for
respondents. That is, respondents never received training to prepare them for perform-
ing trauma or for managing the vicarious trauma caused by trainings and working with
students. Instead, respondents were often left to process these experiences with partners
and friends outside of their work environment. We found important distinctions in how
the staff of color and White employees described experiencing these rules. Across race
and gender, people of color describe similar emotional expectations at work, that along
with White respondents’ narratives, demonstrate the racialized nature of feeling rules
that would otherwise be singularly linked to sexual orientation.

White Anger and Enthusiasm for the Feeling Rules

Despite the everyday issues and catastrophes that arose at work, including students’
health crises, sexual assaults, and suicide, all staff perceived expressing misery or

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 Stephanie M. Ortiz and Chad R. Mandala

negativity as coming at a professional cost. To do so would threaten their ability to

advocate for students and for their centers, as “happy-talk” maintains the comfortable
tension of diversity discourses, where difference can be discussed separate from struc-
tural inequalities (Bell and Hartmann, 2007). Indeed, a happy, positive demeanor was
deemed necessary for maintaining relationships with staff and administrators who could
work with them in the future to secure funds and influence policy decisions that centers
did not have the ability to control themselves. Whites, however, discussed how they
could be angry, within certain limits, because it signified passion for work. Expressing
anger was a strategy that they believed benefited their students and their own reputation
as hardworking, professional staff. As Scottie, a White, gay cisgender man said:

I don’t burn bridges or have righteous anger, but I use anger strategically. The
expectation is that I’m hyper-outgoing and positive and passionate. If I’m in a
meeting with other staff or even with an administrator, I can use anger to promote
awareness that real people are impacted by institutions and policies.

Like other White respondents, Scottie described his anger as directed at the fact that
inequality existed; this anger was used to bring an awareness of inequality to adminis-
trators and workshop participants, but was not directed toward the university as an
institution responsible for that inequality or as one whose interventions were ineffective.
Hillary, a queer cisgender White woman also noted,

I can’t be outraged after a taxing or an emotionally draining day… but being angry
in trainings can work to make others feel angry at injustice… during workshops, I’ll
show statistics about outcomes for different students and I’ll make it known that we
should be angry at the small number of queer students and students of color.

White staff consider having passion for their work, in the form of following the feeling
rules, as a useful skill in mobilizing others to care about issues their students generally
face. White staff were aware that people of color were often not represented in meetings,
so they described using their voices and position to advocate for students of color.
Andrew, a White queer transgender man, shared: “I have White privilege, so it gives me
the ability to not always silence my emotions. I’m in spaces where people of color aren’t,
so I feel the need to speak up.” Indeed, respondents frame White privilege as a form of
access to emotional expression, which they undertake as an obligation to “speak up”
about issues of “race.” As Jessica noted: “My racial identity isn’t under attack, so I have a
lot of capacity to talk to other people and be angry about race.” Displaying anger at
“race” meant being angry that students of color experienced racism in general, but never
within the university.
White anger did not manifest as addressing racism that staff or students encoun-
tered at the university, which we see as key to understanding the differential enforce-
ment of feeling rules. Many White staff noted that racism frequently occurred during
training sessions when a White participant would say something offensive about people
of color, but none shared a story of intervening. Abby, a queer cisgender White woman,
told us that anger needed to be negotiated carefully when interacting with educational
training participants who might say overtly racist comments:

If some participants are abrasive or harmful, I have to deal with the person who is
being impacted. So the desired outcome is diffusing, I have to be able to continue the
workshop in an educationally productive environment, and manage the person who
is feeling harmed, make them feel seen and heard. But I also have to provide support

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for the person who caused harm, I have to help them realize what’s happening.
People are still learning, you know, it’s a process. They’re not intentionally harming
someone so I can’t be angry with them, even when I feel angry. [Interviewer: What
would happen if you didn’t diffuse the situation? What if you expressed your anger?] Oh,
I would lose participants. They would leave or mentally check out. It’s really
important for people to have positive experiences, then they encourage others to
come to our workshops, and we can show a sustained need for our programming.
Otherwise, we’d lose credibility and positive recommendations, and that could be
enough evidence to the administrator that our center doesn’t need these programs,
or even my position. So I need to be really objective with how I address race.

Abby described maintaining a positive experience for attendees as critical for

her program’s and center’s success, without expressing concern for the possibility
that racism left unchecked would lead attendees of color to experience her program
negatively. Whites’ knowledge of their perceived objectivity toward “race” is therefore
not to be confused with addressing racism; no White respondent provided an example of
how they ever expressed anger toward racism in trainings or to their supervisors, or
advocated on behalf of students or workshop attendees experiencing racism. On the
contrary, as Hillary explained, “I don’t challenge people’s biases about race. [Interviewer:
Why not?] I need people to trust me. I can’t be threatening.” Drawing attention to race as
a signifier of difference or form of inequality outside the university, while not attending
to the racism students and staff of color experience in-house, functions as an effective
performance of a commitment to diversity (Thomas 2018) precisely because it does not
address inequality. In fact, some White respondents also reported tempering students’
anger about racism, framing this as an aspect of their job. As Aaron told us: “A lot of what
I do is de-escalate students. I’m moving them away from being angry reactionaries.”
Similarly, Jason shared:

I’m all for folks being angry. Sometimes you can be angry and we can hold space for
that, but if you want something done, here are ways to go about that. I tell students
“you can’t let that come out when you talk to people, or else they’ll know you’re
pissed. We can talk and theorize about why you’re angry, but we have to shift that to
discursive practices.” I don’t tell them not to feel angry, but I help them manifest it
into more calm, effective strategies where they can talk to people.

Anger has already been identified as an emotion that White professionals can express
without significant repercussions (Wingfield 2010); we expand on this work by further
demonstrating that the content of anger is important in feeling rules enforcement.
Within our study, White respondents could express anger at “race” as an abstract
signifier of inequality out there in society, which just happened to impact students of color.
Such a display is organizationally acceptable because it does not make demands on how
the university would need to address that racism. This is because White staff’s anger is
not directed toward the university as an institution conducive to racial oppression, even
when students believe that is the case. This was even true for White center directors,
who theoretically have more organizational power to address racism yet still choose to
adhere to the feeling rules.
White respondents never voiced concern, critique, or an awareness for how their
work allowed the university to maintain a façade. Instead, White staff are enthusiastic
about following feeling rules, and do not ever suggest there might be something
structurally wrong or ineffective with the rules themselves. To be sure, they were all
exhausted, and most were quite sad in sharing their experiences and their fears of losing

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 Stephanie M. Ortiz and Chad R. Mandala

university support for the center. Their concern for the life-altering impact that would
have on students was palpable. At the same time, they all believed they could thrive by
following the rules, receiving professional development opportunities, awards, and
promotions; thus, the feeling rules have served a key purpose of stifling critiques and
maintaining business as usual. As Ashley, a White, queer cisgender woman, said “It’s
about positivity and blind adoration for the university. I’m not going to be a Debbie
downer. [Interviewer: Why?] Well, who gets end of career awards?” While all White
respondents discussed the potential harm to students in not following rules, the people
who White staff saw fired for not following these feeling rules were all staff of color.
In combating the unhappy queer trope to protect their centers, White staff may
inadvertently reinforce White emotionality as the justification for racialized feeling
rules. Ethnographic data would confirm how this White emotionality shaped the center,
outcomes, and students more broadly, however, what is of interest here is how staff
understand the feeling rules, especially the enforcement of those rules, and the rewards
and consequences of disregarding those rules. White staff corroborate the narratives of
staff of color, who perceive there to be a constant comparison to White queer staff’s
emotionality, which acts as a proxy for professionalism. To be sure, organizations have
distinct cultures and differentially distribute resources to begin with. But as Ray (2019)
argues, race itself becomes a set of rules, where Whiteness is deemed a credential that
people of color cannot access.

“That’s not me, I’m not positive all the time!”: Critiques of White
Homonormativity
Every staff member of color discussed Whiteness as shaping feeling rules, highlighting
White enthusiasm for the rules and the ways Whites could be angry and passionate. Staff
of color simultaneously found that their anger and passion, typically directed at racism in
the university or center, was not an acceptable way to express emotions. Beyonce shared
the following:

My supervisor [a White man] is a self-proclaimed diva. He walks in and is loud; he

just explodes sometimes and people think its passion…. He makes comments about
me in public, that a Mexican butch should be less emotional because it frightens
the neighbors.

Beyonce describes the audacious nature of Whiteness in how their supervisor both
expresses emotions, but also so openly comments on the potential costs of Beyonce’s
emotionality to their center. While the supervisor engages in dramatic diva behaviors,
he makes it clear that Beyonce’s explosive anger and passion would be threatening to
other staff. This enthusiastic, loud, and assertive diva behavior was also something
others found they were measured against. Eli, a multiracial, gay cisgender man told us
that: “People expect me to be out there, extrovert, happy, positive, Drag Race, yassss
queen all the time! It’s a manifestation of what people assume the community to be. But
that’s a White community, and that’s not me at all.” Eli described aspects of gay culture
that have crossed over into the mainstream lexicon due to a popular TV show featuring
drag queens, and the homonormative assumption of the gay community as a mono-
lithic, happy, sassy group of White men. These cultural tropes create emotional
expectations for staff of color to be especially happy and positive at work.
Adia Harvey Wingfield (2010) has shown that Black professionals are expected
to adhere to the feeling rules that are equally applied to all staff—though they find it
difficult to do so because of racism experienced on the job. Black professionals are also

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held to different emotional standards than White colleagues. Staff of color are thus put
in a catch-22. While they are expected to display positivity, excitement, and passion for
their work through anger at inequality in the abstract (a feeling rule applied to all staff),
they find it difficult to do so because (1) White homonormativity is alienating and
(2) they are not angry at race in the abstract, but rather at systemic inequality reproduced
within the university setting. At the same time, they cannot express passion through their
anger at racism. Marvin, an Asian gay cisgender man, captured this predicament:

When everything is good, I have to be this cheerleader. I have to pull people

together and evoke empathy and support for the center by being really positive. But
when it’s bad I have to be impartial and professional. I produce fake smiles and fake
not showing frustrations, even when administrators are saying racist things… You
just have to keep going. I don’t wanna be the angry person in the room when nobody
else says anything. We all notice it; we share glances like “yea that was definitely
problematic.” But I don’t wanna be the one to call someone out… Once, a colleague
was talking about an area and used the word “ghetto,” so I was like “What do you
mean ghetto?” I wasn’t jumping on him, I tried to calm myself and ask questions
without sounding aggressive. But I was still told I was aggressive by other White
colleagues. My supervisor—they’re super validating and supportive—but they
agreed and told me it should have been a private conversation.

Racialized and sexual orientation-based feeling rules provide the formalized standards
of what staff are expected to feel and what they are allowed to feel. As LGBTQ staff, they
are expected to counter the unhappy queer trope by being enthusiastic and happy, but
when this passion slips into an “explosive” domain of anger—and anger at systemic
racism within the university, more specifically—staff of color are marked as intimidating
and aggressive, which threatens their ability to maintain positive relationships necessary
to supporting their centers.
Staff of color therefore find they cannot discuss racism in their work if they are to
remain professional. As Eli later noted:

I hold on to so much anger about the racism facing my students that I can’t
articulate. White colleagues can be really self-absorbed and their emotions are
always more tolerated than mine. I know they’re holding onto trauma and feeling
lonely and angry about things here, but that doesn’t provide me space to talk about
my anger about how queer students of color suffer here. I have to be stoic, but also
light and positive, if I’m going to maintain relationships with colleagues.

Eli and others described how colleagues, supervisors, and administrators frequently
provided White staff the opportunity to express anger and have social support in meetings
or informally around the center, which they did not find extended to themselves, especially
with regard to feelings of anger and issues of racism. Staff found that even addressing
racism without anger was still invalidated or dismissed. Esmeralda explained:

I don’t have high expectations with White people when dealing with racism. They
throw around intersectionality, but they’re ignorant as to what it means. I’ve tried to
discuss how I myself and students are mistreated due to our identities, and my
supervisor said it wasn’t about race. I’m just not surprised anymore. They lack
follow through and commitment to issues, but want to be the ones to get credit for
standing up in spaces when it comes to racism.

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Esmeralda offers an important counter narrative to White staff’s explanations for

their passionate anger toward race and their mobilization of White privilege. Staff of
color report that White supervisors frequently minimized their concerns of racism
toward staff and LGBTQ students of color. Passionate White staff could “take credit”
for bringing race to the fore, but staff of color drawing attention to racism the university
was responsible for was dismissed by the same White staff who publicly prided
themselves on acknowledging intersectionality. Cameron also found that talking about
racism might be viewed as distracting from the mission of supporting LGBTQ students
first, noting: “when students are racist toward me, or students seek support because
they’re experiencing hate speech, those issues are not understood by my supervisor as
relevant to our center. I’m left to absorb that emotional impact.” This contributes to the
alienation staff of color feel at work on the basis of racialized feeling rules, but White
staff and centers’ usage of intersectionality as an abstract, catch-all term for diverse
identities also functions to support diversity regimes. Staff of color often described
intersectionality as praxis aimed at addressing multiple forms of oppression but noted
this was deemed antithetical to the goals of their centers. Such efforts would involve
community organizing and supporting students’ protests, as well as collaborating across
cultural and identity centers beyond competing for funds with other units. Diversity
regimes do not support such initiatives; in fact, they rely on silos of units who have little
formal integration (Thomas 2020) and, as respondents suggest, do not consider the
multiple, simultaneous needs of LGBTQ students and staff of color.
While White emotionality contributed to the perception of staff of color as
inherently angry, respondents also described how they were often viewed as “radical.”
Radical meant pushing for initiatives that would fundamentally shift the resources
within their universities, which was viewed as unfavorable by supervisors and adminis-
trators. As Q, a South Asian, queer nonbinary person explained:

There’s no way that I’ll never not be perceived as radical. I’m a person of color
having reactions to very political and personal injustices and calling for real
substantive changes. I can’t have reactions that aren’t seen as taking things too
personally or too radical.

Respondents noted that “radical” was a stigmatizing label that implied an aversion
to teamwork and collaboration, the foundation of professionalism in student affairs.
Q described one such situation:

I had an administrator ask why another coworker was so aggressive and hostile in
a meeting, and suggested formal processes be set in motion for my supervisor
to address it. He clearly didn’t want to work with the person anymore. So, I’m
constantly having to project this calm, accommodating, you-can-say-anything-
and-it-will-be-fine attitude, unless I want to be reprimanded like that.

Respondents explained that supporting “aggressive activism,” which would threaten the
slow and steady, but ultimately “non-effective,” bureaucratic processes, were grounds for
being labeled as radical. Radical staff members of color, as all respondents learned through
their years of experience, were routinely denied promotions, pushed out of their positions,
and fired. Staff of color believe they are inherently at risk of being perceived as radical due
to their race, which placed additional pressure on them to subdue feelings of anger and
even passion for social change. For some, alleviating guilt or otherwise helping White
supervisors and administrators feel like “good allies,” and managing abuse from White
students was also a prominent feature of their emotional labor. As Cameron discussed:

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An administrator once misgendered a student, and she and I had already had a few
interactions where she used insensitive language or implied that students of color
were deficient. I was really angry but I couldn’t show it. She just kept on, wanting me
to talk her down and tell her she was ok.

Staff of color ultimately found that they were expected to perform a quiet, subdued
passion for the daily, mundane tasks of work, which included emotional caretaking for
their center.
As staff responsible for planning, coordinating, and implementing their universities’
diversity initiatives, all respondents navigated the same terrain of diversity regimes. Staff
of color were hyperaware of how their respective university and center staged difference
(Thomas 2018). Staff of color understood that their strategic deployment within their
centers provided a façade for the university and for diversity work. That is, staff of color,
but not Whites, believed that the work that they did was a performance of racial
inclusiveness for the sake of the university’s impression management, staged for White
colleagues, supervisors and administrators. White respondents did not view their roles as
part of their university’s performance of equity work. While Whites believed following
the rules was how they could thrive, staff of color felt they were operating in a broken
system, and at best, they could survive and help students survive the university. As
Marvin explained:

[…] I assert myself in situations when something is racist. Then I’m called aggressive
and unprofessional. It’s certainly all whitewashed and colonized and ineffective. I’m
only so careful because I think about the gay men of color who I support, and how
hard it is for them… how they’re rejected because of their race. And how I’m able to
show them it’s possible to be happy. Who else can do that work?

Marvin, like other staff of color, feels immediately disciplined for his expression of
emotion in the form of stigmas directed toward his professional identity, stigmas which
come at a professional cost. In this occupation, behavior labeled as aggressive is viewed
as being unprofessional—an indicator that a staff member is not fit to work on a team.
These behaviors may be viewed as detrimental to efforts of accessing resources for
students, which staff fear will lead to termination. Yet Marvin, like all staff of color,
continue doing this work because they believe LGBTQ students of color need positive
representation and support.

CONCLUSION

We have argued that emotional labor is central to how racial inequality is perpetuated
within organizations whose goals are aimed at diversity. In merging the work of scholars
of sexuality, race, diversity work, and organizations, we explore how organizational
inequality is possible through the formalization of feeling rules, which rely on race- and
sexual orientation-based tropes around emotionality. We expanded on the emotional
labor and diversity work literatures by showing that feeling rules are not just enforced
differently based on race, but also that their enforcement underpins racial inequality
within organizations, including ones that claim to be committed to equality. Whiteness
is central to the design, enforcement, and adherence to these rules, which contribute
to the ineffectiveness of diversity efforts and thus have organizational consequences
according to respondents: Whites are able to advance in their positions, staff of color fear

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 Stephanie M. Ortiz and Chad R. Mandala

the termination they witness of other “radical” staff, and racism within centers and
universities is left unacknowledged.
Respondents of color understood their strategic deployment within their centers
and universities as providing a façade for diversity work. White respondents viewed their
White privilege as providing them with the opportunity to advocate for students of
color, but did not consider how the limited capacity to make structural changes to
radically improve students’ experiences at the university paired with their privilege to
“speak up,” and shaped the experiences of staff of color in important ways. White
cisgender respondents, emotionally exhausted and unsupported by administrators, did
not consider feeling rules mechanisms through which structural inequality persisted.
Instead, they were enthusiastic diversity workers, following the feeling rules because
they believed it would benefit themselves and students. This enthusiasm for perform-
ing the feeling rules allowed White respondents to thrive in their work, but it also
established the benchmark for evaluation that staff of color must measure up to. To
be clear, the organizational arrangements are what allow White staff to insist that
following these rules was in part a way to succeed at their work, which was to support
students; the differential enforcement of those feeling rules obscures the harm staff of
color experience and the inability to craft radical interventions that would hold the
university accountable.
Diversity regimes rely on the emotional performances of all diversity workers, who
must stifle anger and perform trauma and positivity. Staff are responsible for performing
a commitment to diversity, while being careful to not suggest programming that would
shift resources on the basis of marginalized identities, or interrupt or address racism
when they witness or experience it. As Arlie R. Hochschild (2012) argues, organizations
design feeling rules to remove emotions that would threaten the routinized, efficient
interactions they rely upon. Addressing racism, especially alongside homophobia, is
threatening to the ideology of diversity that centers Whiteness and objectifies people of
color as merely counts or representative of ideals of diversity (Mayorga-Gallo 2019).
This is not just an issue in LGBTQ centers; critiques of racism and interventions from
students of color and staff across other units of the university are strategically derailed
through discursive practices and organizational decisions (Johnson 2020; Thomas
2018). What we add to this important work is a consideration of how universities are
able to preserve these arrangements by linking cultural tropes of homosexuality (Ahmed
2010) and racialized schemas of emotionality (Ray 2019) to rules about how to feel and
express feelings at work. The exertion of power over employees’ emotions is an aspect of
the emotional economy, wherein people of color are alienated from their most intimate
feelings and disciplined to compartmentalize their identities in service of the White,
heteronormative neoliberal university (Ferguson 2012). Feeling rules are thus part of
how complex inequalities continue in centers and universities claiming to work in the
name of equality, and may reproduce a racially stratified labor market over time through
promotions, opportunities, and wage penalties. Future studies should trace the long-
term organizational consequences of emotional labor within diversity work, especially in
the wake of uprisings which have forced universities to engage in public impression
management. The creation of initiatives and even increased funding of such centers are
not likely to make a significant, meaningful impact within universities if the emotional
labor of diversity workers remains designed around inaction, when feeling rules are
designed to limit center staff’s capacity to address the inequality they were hired and
trained to alleviate.

Corresponding author: Stephanie M. Ortiz. Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology. Florida
Atlantic University. 253 Culture & Society Building. Boca Raton, Florida 33431. E-mail: Ortizs@fau.edu.

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364 DU BOIS REVIEW: SOCIAL SCIENCE RESEARCH ON RACE 18:2, 2021

https://doi.org/10.1017/S1742058X21000096 Published online by Cambridge University Press