Alva Gotby’s They Call It Love: The Politics of Emotional Life is the latest contribution to a growing series of Verso books on the topic of Social Reproduction Theory, in which Gotby explores the concept of emotional reproduction. She defines this as, on the one hand, the work of generating certain feelings in those around us, and, on the other, the work of maintaining the social norms that are both “cause and effect” of emotional labour as we know it.
Family
The nuclear family, Gotby explains, remains the “proper place of intense feeling”; the source of emotional well-being and where we’re taught to seek comfort and support. Despite the fact that families can also cause pain and trauma, much is invested ideologically into painting the family in this way. This is what Gotby calls “the ideology of love”. Finding romantic love and building a stable, nuclear family are seen to be central to contemporary ideals of the “good life”, and failure to meet these norms leads to feelings of social exclusion and personal failure.
Positive or negative emotions are shaped by normative values and she emphasises the need to “de-naturalise” these feelings. The ideologies of love and the family ought to be engaged with critically, rather than assumed to be an innate part of human nature.
Gender
Within the heterosexual family, Gotby continues, women are expected to contribute more to the emotional well-being of their partners and families. There is the expectation that they will put the emotional needs of others ahead of their own. Motherhood, especially, is treated as an emotionally unique experience and the failure to experience positive emotions when raising children is seen as a failure of womanhood.
Gotby calls this “emotional privatisation”, whereby emotional labour is seen as the preserve of particular people. Men, in this context, get emotionally de-skilled and are “given license to act as solitary individuals”. They undertake “masculine labour” instead and their self-worth tends to be based on their own achievements, rather than on their relationships with others.
Extractive
As such, positive feelings move upwards in social hierarchies. Working-class people are raised to be pliant and gracious to those they work for. Women are raised to serve the emotional needs of men. And this social framework exists to maintain the capitalist system: to keep the sexual division of labour and the division between public and private spheres intact.
Emotional labour is thus presented as extractive; as something that costs us at the bottom of the social hierarchy. No doubt there’s an element of truth to this, but the overall message of Gotby’s book is bleak. No matter whether you find pleasure or fulfillment in loving or supporting your friends or family — you are being duped.
Struggle concepts
Gotby draws on Silvia Federici’s notion of “struggle concepts”: “concepts that name and produce antagonistic relations.” The basic premise is that we ought to raise demands such as wages for housework or call for the refusal of — in this instance — emotional labour, not because these are realistic but to “make visible” the social underpinnings of capitalism and raise a politics that is generally disruptive. “Emotional reproduction is a struggle concept”, she says, “through which we can view our emotional lives as inherently political.”
The positive proposals she makes for changing the world are extremely limited. She argues for the repurposing of our emotions. Positive emotions, she says, shouldn’t be seen as the only emotions of worth. Rather, emotions like anger and frustration, when wielded collectively, are “feminist emotions” necessary to movement-building. She’s not wrong, but as the sole demand of her readers, it’s not especially groundbreaking.
• Workers’ Liberty’s South London socialist feminist reading group, held monthly, discussed They Call It Love for its April meeting. For the details of the next meeting contact office@workersliberty.org