Governance in layers: how female street-level bureaucrats reshape state power through emotional labor

Abstract This article draws on multisited ethnographic fieldwork conducted from 2021 to 2024 across six Chinese cities, encompassing twenty-eight semi-structured interviews, sixteen roundtable discussions with seventy-five participants, and over 300 hours of direct observations and covert site visits. Building on street-level bureaucracy theory, the study recasts emotional labor as a latent engine of governance rather than a mere coping mechanism. Specifically focusing on female street-level bureaucrats (SLBs), it examines how they navigate state directives, absorb community tensions, and deploy institutionally mandated empathy. Findings illustrate that female SLBs’ emotional labor defuses conflicts, nurtures short-term stability, and projects a caring image of the state, albeit often at the expense of their own professional advancement and well-being. Moreover, by highlighting the gendered expectations embedded in frontline governance, the study reveals a paradoxical reliance on “invisible” emotional labor, which can reinforce structural inequities and an overdependence on personal agency. The analysis suggests that recognizing emotional labor’s integral role—and its corresponding vulnerabilities—is vital to improving public service design. The article concludes by calling for institutional reforms to provide formal recognition of emotional labor, ensuring it is not perpetually relegated to an uncredited or feminized domain of governance.