Feeling Rules and Domestic Emotion Work Under Chronic Water Scarcity
Year: 2026
Type: article
Abstract: What happens to emotional life when running water fails not for a day but for a decade? Drawing on 20 semi-structured interviews in a rural Romanian commune that went more than ten years without a functioning public water supply, and where a new network now reaches only part of the settlement, we examine how the emotional demands of chronic water scarcity are socially organised. We identify four recurrent patterns, which we analyse as feeling rules: shame before visiting outsiders, worry tied to falling household reserves, hope maintained in public, and resignation expressed in contained, formulaic terms. The four carry unequal normative warrant, which we assess explicitly. We propose the concept of infrastructural emotion work, the unpaid emotion work generated by the sustained failure of systems socially expected to function, and identify formulaic emotional display as one of its mechanisms, in which a conventional phrase provides an interactionally acceptable response while foreclosing elaboration. We argue that these expectations are socio-materially generated rather than culturally prescribed alone, and that the resulting burdens are unevenly distributed by gender. Where infrastructure is unreliable, households assemble an emotional infrastructure of their own.
Source: Social Sciences
Institutions: University of Bucharest, Technical University of Moldova
Language: English
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: gold
Estimated APC paid: $2,172
OpenAlex ID: W7204148288