Fear of contamination is central to our thinking about ‘dirty work’, that is, tasks and occupations that carry a stigma due to being perceived as having degrading, disgusting, or immoral qualities. However, most existing literature focuses on the symbolic dimension of taint, particularly, dirty workers’ cognitive, ideological tactics to counter taint. While contamination has more material consequences, the processes through which it is experienced and contained in dirty work have not yet been well-explicated. Drawing on an ethnographic study of work in two Danish prisons, this article offers an opportunity to see behind the walls and gain insight into the extreme emotional dirty work of prison officers as they face burdensome emotional encounters with manipulative and intimidating inmates. As society’s agent in the containment of inmates’ emotional dirt, officers, as emotional labourers, risk contamination if they give into inmates’ pressure and manipulation and do them illicit favours. I use embodied phenomenology as an original and fertile approach to deepen the understanding of how contamination occurs in emotional dirty work and the bodily responses that workers engage in to resist it. Drawing on these findings, I extend our understanding of emotional dirty work.

对污染的恐惧对于我们关于“肮脏的工作”的思考至关重要，也就是说，由于被认为具有侮辱性，恶心或不道德的品质而承担污名的任务和职业。然而，大多数现有文献集中在污点的象征意义上，尤其是肮脏的工人为抵制污点而采取的认知，意识形态策略。尽管污染会带来更多的物质后果，但污染工作经历并包含在肮脏工作中的过程尚未得到充分说明。本文以对两个丹麦监狱的工作进行人种学研究为基础，这篇文章提供了一个机会，使他们有机会在幕后一窥，并深入了解监狱官在与操纵性和胁迫性囚犯进行繁重的情感接触时所经历的极端情绪化的肮脏工作。作为遏制囚犯情感污垢的社会推动者，作为情感劳动者的军官如果对囚犯施加压力和操纵，并给他们带来非法好处，就有遭受污染的风险。我将体现的现象学作为一种原始而肥沃的方法来加深对情感肮脏工作中污染如何发生以及工人为抵制它而进行的身体反应的理解。利用这些发现，我扩展了对情感肮脏工作的理解。