They Call It Love: The Politics of Emotional Life

Introduction

How do you know you are loved? How do you know someone cares for you? Think about the small gestures of love – all the little things that have made you feel cared for. Think about the times that felt nice, when you experienced the emotional warmth of being with other people. Who was creating that feeling? Who was working to make you feel safe, loved, and supported?

The work of caring for people is an essential but disavowed and devalued aspect of capitalist societies. Without the labour of ensuring that most people feel well enough to keep going to work, capitalism could not function. Capitalist society produces a lot of suffering, but many people work hard to alleviate one another’s pain, stress, and boredom. At the same time, this work creates emotional attachments not only to other people but to the world as we know it.

This book is about the politics of reproductive labour – that is, the work that goes into maintaining and replacing the labour force and ensuring people’s wellbeing. This work includes both generational replacement, such as pregnancy and childcare, and the daily work of cooking, cleaning, doing laundry, and caring for the sick, disabled, and elderly. These forms of work are often referred to as social reproduction. A less visible form of reproduction is emotional support – comforting those who feel angry or sad, cheering up a family member or friend, or creating a general spirit of niceness at home or at work. It also involves the work of building and maintaining communities and social relations. Emotion is essential for the reproduction of the workforce and for producing forms of sociality and subjectivity. Reproductive labour has an important emotional aspect – the work of soothing children, providing company for the elderly, and maintaining intimate forms of sociality. This work is commonly known as ‘love’.

Emotion forms an integral part of social reproduction more broadly – it is a key part of reproductive work. Therefore, I propose that we call this work ‘emotional reproduction’. Emotional reproduction is not something we usually think about or notice. It is the everyday work that we do for our family members, friends, co-workers, and others – cheering up those who are feeling sad or lonely, creating emotional warmth. There is an assumption in our society that healthy adults can care for themselves and that only children and people with a mental illness need emotional support. But we are all dependent on one another. Adults as well as children need emotional care. And not only those with a mental illness need support from others – all of us do. While therapy is perhaps the most obvious example of this labour of emotional support, I am mainly interested in the unseen everyday effort that goes into keeping most of us relatively emotionally healthy, and maybe even happy.

We work under conditions not of our own choosing. Most people have to work in order to meet their own needs and the needs of the people they are close to. Our working conditions are not the result of individual agency but rather stem from the social organisation of production and reproduction – a system in which people’s needs are met within various relations of power. These needs are partly grounded in the biological life of human organisms, such as our need for food and shelter. But they can only be met in historically specific ways, which are also determined by our social position. For example, our need for shelter can be met by a tent or a suburban one-family house. The constitution of various ways to meet our needs also gives rise to new needs. The growth of the suburbs, for instance, also created a need for cars to take people to and from their workplaces. What constitutes a need varies according to the classed, racialised, and gendered assignment of people to various categories in society. This book explores the construction of emotional needs and the material and subjective organisation of the labour that is necessary to meet them.

Women have been made largely responsible for the work of creating good feeling. In the past few years, there has been a revived interest in Marxist feminist thought and issues of social reproduction in both academia and activist groups. Marxism posits that capitalist society is characterised by the exploitation of the working class, whose work produces more value for the capitalist class than they receive back in the form of wages. Marxist feminism expands this understanding of capitalism to include that which has been coded as women’s work – often done for free and out of love. With the recent revival of these theories, reproduction is being rediscovered as a central terrain of anti-capitalist struggle. Taking up the legacy of Marxist feminist writings from the late 1960s to the early 1980s, this new wave of research and organising aims to bring theories of reproductive labour into debates on the contemporary organisation of work. This means looking beyond women’s unwaged domestic labour, the focus of much of the theoretical writings from the 1970s, to include various forms of waged employment in the reproductive sphere, such as childcare, nursing, and waged domestic labour.

Reproduction is an expansive field that contains the totality of the activities that sustain the lives of people under capitalism and maintain their capacity to work. Reproduction occupies a contradictory position in capitalist economies. It is necessary for the continued functioning of capitalist value production yet simultaneously devalued; geared towards the preservation of people’s capacity to labour yet often excluded from the waged workplace and the formal economy. It spans people’s unwaged work in their homes, commodified services, and some types of work associated with the public sector. Across these very different parts of the landscape of contemporary capitalism, people are working, with or without a wage, to ensure the relative wellbeing of other people.

The capitalist economy is dependent on people doing this work of caring for each other either for free or for the low wages associated with reproductive service work. This work is often understood as unskilled, naturally feminine, and therefore a woman’s duty, which should be carried out with little or no monetary reward. As Sarah Jaffe writes, ‘Our willingness to accede that women’s work is love, that love is its own reward, not to be sullied with money, creates profit for capital.’¹ Love’s work is often relegated to the so-called private sphere of the home, and thus it is disavowed in modern political discourses. While incredibly common and mundane as a type of work, this activity has often been made invisible in economic and political analysis, including Marxist writings and organising. The task of the Marxist feminist tradition is to make this work visible in order to struggle against its current organisation. Decades of feminist writing and agitation have begun to undo some of the privatisation of reproduction – the process through which reproductive labour becomes an individual responsibility relegated to the private sphere. A shift in capitalist economies meant that much of reproduction now takes place outside the home. But reproduction is still understood as primarily the responsibility of the family, a social unit seen as the opposite of the capitalist sphere of work – our haven in a heartless world. Such privatisation of the burden and cost of reproductive work as well as the construction of a low-waged service economy serve to maintain women’s subordinate position in a supposedly post-feminist era in which most legal constraints on women’s independent existence have been removed. The privatisation of care makes women responsible for the wellbeing of others and undermines their financial and material independence while simultaneously constructing them as the people most suitable for this work and perpetuating the existence of a gendered division of labour.

Emotional reproduction includes the forms of work that go into maintaining people’s emotional wellbeing and their ability and willingness to continue to engage in capitalist productive labour, often despite the considerable emotional strain produced by this work. Thinking about emotion across waged and unwaged sectors, I want to emphasise the work that goes into sustaining some degree of emotional wellbeing in people, such as comforting a loved one or making small talk with a lonely relative. Emotional reproduction is a broad term which denotes the work of creating not only certain feelings but the desires, needs, subjectivities, and forms of sociality that are both cause and effect of such labour. It is the formation of specific needs and the ways in which those needs are satisfied. Emotional reproduction creates a feeling of investment in the world as it is. We have emotional attachments to a particular notion of the good life – a normative way of life which seems to promise comfort and happiness. Our lives under capitalism are in many ways disappointing and continually create negative feelings such as stress, resentment, depression, and loneliness. But we all have an attachment to particular ideas of what a good life should look like – one that often includes the very sources of harm. We often continue to aspire to these ideals of the good life, even when they continually let us down.

When thinking about emotional reproduction, I draw on the concept of emotional labour, a term coined by sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild in her 1983 book The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling. Hochschild traces a shift in capitalist economies in which the growing service economy relies on the increased commodification of our emotional capacities. Commodification is the process through which an object or a service becomes something that can be bought and sold on the market. Hochschild’s theory is based on a study of flight attendants, a traditionally feminised profession that involves not only serving food and drinks but also creating a sense of safety and emotional comfort in airline passengers. Feminised forms of emotional labour are oriented towards ‘affirming, enhancing, and celebrating the wellbeing and status of others’.² From the example of flight attendants, Hochschild draws out a theory of the importance of emotion across a number of service jobs which are increasingly central in capitalist economies in Europe and North America.

Emotional labour has been commodified – it has been turned into a service that can be bought and sold. Following Hochschild, a number of researchers have studied the commodification of emotional labour in contemporary capitalism. But rather than seeing emotional labour as a phenomenon emerging with the growing service economy, I trace a longer history of emotional reproduction as part of both waged and unwaged forms of reproductive labour. The commodification of emotional labour has made such labour more visible, but it did not create it. By using the concept of emotional reproduction, I want to point to a broader process than the one usually described in sociological studies of emotional labour and include activities that would normally not be considered work. These activities may nonetheless contribute to the emotional wellbeing of people, and should be politicised within the framework of reproduction. Like social reproduction more broadly, emotional reproduction operates across spheres of unwaged and waged work.

The point of this book is not to deny the need for emotional reproduction or call for its complete rejection. It is not a call to abandon forms of labour associated with femininity, or to grant women access to more masculine types of subjectivity. Fully rejecting the feminised work of care would be both impossible and undesirable. Rather, refusal of emotional reproduction refers to a mode of resistance that goes beyond the binary construction of gendered subjectivity, seeking to repurpose emotions, needs, and desires in order to find new ways of being together. This form of refusal might draw on potentials existing in the present, including aspects of traditionally feminine subjectivity, but in ways that do not support the reproduction of the present.

This relies on the denaturalisation of femininity – regarding it as an acquired capacity rather than something inherent in particular subjects. In this way, we can also begin to consider emotion not as a merely spontaneous or natural state but as a type of skilful work. The concept of emotional labour helps us rethink both emotion, often regarded as passive, and labour, which tends to be constructed as conscious activity. Emotion is not a passive psychological state. But neither must something be fully conscious or active for it to be usefully considered as labour. To labour is to do something, but that something might not always be recognisable as activity. And while what we may legitimately call labour might always involve a product of some kind, this product will not always be recognisable as a ‘thing’ separate from its producer. Emotional labour is difficult to think about since the better it is done, the more it appears as non-work, both for the labourer and for the recipient of emotional care. All labour may involve effort on the side of the labourer, yet such exertion might appear as merely a natural expression of the labouring subject. In emotional labour processes in particular, the result of the work is often invisible as a product and comes to appear as an aspect of the personality of the worker. As Sophie Lewis argues, in these forms of labour, ‘a feminized person’s body is typically being further feminized: it is working very, very hard at having the appearance of not working at all’.³ Our labour practices therefore become aspects of what we experience as our authentic selves. In its seeming passivity, emotional labour is similar to other feminised forms of work. It is ironic that the labour associated with femininity is often seen as passive and that femininity is associated with receptivity, as women do much of the work of reproducing people.

Some of the discomfort with the term emotional labour, as well as its popularity inside and outside academic discourse, probably stems from this seeming conceptual mismatch between emotion and labour. The concept’s impropriety makes it both expansive and confusing, placing all sorts of phenomena under its banner. But this expansiveness is part of the nature of emotional labour, and it is important to theorise it despite its elusiveness. Otherwise, we leave emotion unexamined, falling back on more common-sense notions of emotion as natural, intimate, non-social, and spontaneous.

I want to situate emotional labour within Marxist feminist theories of reproduction, in particular the theory and strategy developed by the Wages for Housework movement. Wages for Housework was founded in 1972 by a group of Italian, British, French, and American feminists, and their activism sought to highlight all the work that goes into caring for people – work primarily done by women. I draw on the theoretical contributions by Wages for Housework writers such as Silvia Federici, Mariarosa Dalla Costa, Giovanna Franca Dalla Costa, Leopoldina Fortunati, Wilmette Brown, Ruth Hall, and Selma James. Their writings emphasised the essential character of housework, and reproductive work more broadly, to the smooth functioning of capitalist societies. The Wages for Housework writers and activists asserted that the sphere of reproduction is politically important and that the people engaged in this work occupy a central position in anti-capitalist struggles. They described this work as both indispensable to the reproduction of capital and a potential site of its disruption. The central demand of the movement was for the capitalist state to pay a wage for currently unwaged or low-waged forms of reproductive labour. In this way, they hoped to show that capitalism cannot be profitable if all reproductive work is paid. Their analysis started from the position of working-class housewives in European and North American countries, but it included a range of people who perform some form of reproductive labour – waitresses, sex workers, nannies, secretaries, and other feminised workers. They also paid attention to the interconnections of gender, race, class, and sexuality in the sphere of reproduction. Wages Due Lesbians and Black Women for Wages for Housework were autonomous groups organising as part of the Wages for Housework movement, which contributed to an integrated analysis of different forms of exploitation and oppression under capitalism.

Since the prime of 1970s Marxist feminism, women’s economic and social position has changed. After the post-war period ended, the status of women’s labour has shifted, as has the notion of ‘women’ as a collective subject. I use the term neoliberalism to capture the current political moment, where states and capital have sought to deregulate labour markets and privatise previously state-owned resources and institutions. A decline in real wages led to dual-income families and women’s increased participation in waged labour. Neoliberalism also brought with it a shift to a service economy. Before this, in the post-war period, European and North American capitalism was still oriented around industrial production, and reproductive labour mostly took place in the home. This periodisation can easily become too simplified, and the term neoliberalism has been used to describe all kinds of phenomena. But there are significant differences between women’s position before the mid-1970s and their position today. The writings of the Wages for Housework movement, and other Marxist feminist texts and movements from the same period, were