Degree
BS (Social Sciences & Liberal Arts)
Faculty / School
School of Economics and Social Sciences (SESS)
Department
Department of Social Sciences & Liberal Arts
Date of Award
Spring 2026
Date of Submission
2026-07-24
Advisor
Dr. Shumaila Ahmed, Assistant Professor, Department of Social Sciences
Committee
Dr. Amir Hamza Marwan, Assistant Professor, Department of Social Sciences
Project Type
SSLA Culminating Experience
Access Type
Restricted Access
Keywords
Care Ethics, Emotion Work, Feeling Rules, Invisible Labour, Privileged Irresponsibility, Paternalism, Family Melodrama, Gendered Care
Abstract
Television acts as the primary stage where domestic lives intersect with our perceptions of the world, profoundly shaping how families view themselves. Family drama, in particular, does not merely reflect how households operate; rather, it teaches audiences what a good mother and a devoted father look like, and which of the two deserves to be thanked. Because these lessons reach us as felt emotion rather than as explicit argument, they become much harder to question. This study examines NBC's drama This Is Us (2016 to 2022), a show watched by millions over six seasons, to determine what it encodes about who supports a family and who receives credit for that work. The research employs a qualitative textual analysis of a purposive sample of episodes, combining narrative content analysis with symptomatic reading. This research is grounded in the theoretical frameworks of Joan Tronto's care ethics and Arlie Hochschild's account of emotion work. Tronto demonstrates how the person who makes key decisions receives recognition and reward, while the person who performs actual care labour receives little to no praise. Hochschild explains how individuals performing that labour learn to suppress their emotions until the work becomes unnoticeable, even to themselves. The analysis reveals that the show repeatedly minimizes the weight of the mother's ongoing labour and replaces it with the father's memorable gestures. It also finds that gender is not the only deciding factor, since race and family position also determine whose devotion reads as love and whose reads as service, and for this reason the study encourages viewers to approach such drama critically rather than as a mirror of life.
Pages
59
Recommended Citation
Hashimi, S. (2026). Naturalising Devotion: The Structural Invisibility of Care Labour in the American Family Drama This Is Us (2016–2022) (Unpublished undergraduate project). Institute of Business Administration, Pakistan. Retrieved from https://ir.iba.edu.pk/sslace/423
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