Caring and loving teachers online: personality in the feminized labour of Filipina English Language teachers

Abstract

What kind of people are language teachers? In this article we address this question by examining commercial forms of language teaching in which personality functions in the evaluation of particular teachers as “good” or “suitable” for particular learners. We relate commercial forms of the online teaching of English to global political economic changes in which affective labour in service work, and the feminization of labour, have involved new gendered relations between the global North and South in recent decades. We focus on the emergence of particular forms of commercial online English teaching that bring Filipina teacher labour into relation with Japanese learners as customers. We relate the affective nature of the labour Filipina teachers are expected to perform, in terms of being teachers who are kind, cheerful, always smiling, and able to produce a feeling of ease or relaxation in their learner-customers, to the feminization of labour in service industries more broadly. We present the feminized affective labour of Filipina teachers of English, as an illustration of the partiality and situatedness of discourses of personality in online platforms and customer reviews. Here, personality becomes salient for teachers within particular gendered and racialised relations, where personality serves a substitutionary role in compensating for professional skill, knowledge or nativeness. As such, discourses of personality draw on patriarchal notions of women as “naturally caring” or “working out of love” which permeate low paid and precarious forms of language teaching. We conclude by discussing future directions and issues for work which examines the object of teachers’ care or love – caring or loving for who or what?