They Call It Love

Description

“A fascinating and exhaustive explanation as to why emotions are a political issue.”
–Brit Dawson, AnOther Magazine

The work of love is a feminist problem, and it demands feminist solutions

Comforting a family member or friend, soothing children, providing company for the elderly, ensuring that people feel well enough to work; this is all essential labour. Without it, capitalism would cease to function. They Call It Love investigates the work that makes a haven in a heartless world, examining who performs this labor, how it is organised, and how it might change. In this groundbreaking book, Alva Gotby calls this work “emotional reproduction,” unveiling its inherently political nature. It not only ensures people’s well-being but creates sentimental attachments to social hierarchy and the status quo. Drawing on the thought of the feminist movement Wages for Housework, Gotby demonstrates that emotion is a key element of capitalist reproduction. To improve the way we relate to one another will require a radical restructuring of society.Introduction

Chapter 1: Emotional Reproduction
Chapter 2: The Political Economy of Love
Chapter 3: Gendering Work
Chapter 4: Feminist Emotions
Chapter 5: A Different Feeling

Notes“Intellectually nourished my thinking and language on gender.”
—Raymond Antrobus, Best Books of 2023, Granta

“A fascinating and exhaustive explanation as to why emotions are a political issue.”
—Brit Dawson, AnOther Magazine

“They Call It Love shines a light on the invisible labour involved in love, examining who is responsible for performing it, how it can blossom, and why we do it.”
—Adele Walton, Dazed

“Gotby makes clear our emotional lives are inherently political. Her analysis of the politics of reproductive labour is a cogent criticism of the bourgeois capitalist logics of feeling, of the free labour of intimacy and of normative femininity.”
—Adele Cassigneul, Mai

“Gotby’s narrative masterfully outlines how emotions, feelings and their manifestations tend to be portrayed, and understood, as a feminine domain of expertise … Gotby brilliantly dismantles the silences and abuses surrounding this invisible work by naming it and showing its societal (and capital) worth”
—Patrycja Sosnowska-Buxton, Sociological Review

“They Call It Love is a very fine book – one that balances polemical force with careful and rigorous research. In advancing its account of emotional reproduction, it brings together existing bodies of work on unwaged social reproduction and remunerated emotional labour to great effect, shining a light upon a too often overlooked (and heavily gendered) form of work. It is sharp, thoughtful, and well-written, and represents a substantial scholarly achievement. Alva Gotby is a writer and thinker to watch out for.”
—Helen Hester, author of Xenofeminism, co-author of After Work

“This thorough book sheds new light on the critics of the political economy on emotional life. It is a welcome addition to the studies on the social meaning of the immaterial production that takes place in the domestic sphere. The Call It Love is a fascinating insider’s account of the hidden, economic dimension of our emotional lives whose subject matter will make for passionate arguments and conversations among feminists and scholars in general.”
—Leopoldina Fortunati, author of The Arcane of Reproduction

“Gotby’s book importantly attempts to underscore and theorise the role of emotions within social reproduction theory. Her concept of ’emotional reproduction’ is a reminder that fife-making work is not devoid of affect.”
—Sara Farris, author of In the Name of Women’s Rights

“They Call It Love is a call to attention: Alva Gotby astutely maps the work of emotional support and care that is done day in and day out and across everyday life. Gotby not only insists that more value be attributed to emotional reproduction, but makes a sophisticated and compelling case for a radical repurposing of emotions, needs, and desires in the struggle for change – a struggle that is necessarily also a struggle for new ways of being together.”
—Emma Dowling, author of The Care CrisisAlva Gotby holds a PhD in Media Studies from the University of West London and an MA in Philosophy and Contemporary Critical Theory from the Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy, Kingston University. Her writing has been published in MaI: Feminism and Visual Culture, Blindfield: A Journal of Cultural Inquiry, and Feminist Review, as well as in outlets in Sweden, Norway and Denmark. She frequently speaks at conferences related to Marxism, feminism and queer politics.How do you know you are loved? How do you know some- one 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 suff ering, 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 creat- ing 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 eff ort 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 specifi c 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 vari- ous categories in society. This book explores the construction  of emotional needs and the material and subjective organisa- tion 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 capital- ism and maintain their capacity to work. Reproduction occu- pies 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, commodifi ed services, and some types of work associated with the public sector. Across these very diff erent parts of the landscape of contem- porary capitalism, people are working, with or without a wage, to ensure the relative wellbeing of other people.GB

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