Is equality compatible with the nuclear family? Alva Gotby proposes a radical politics of friendship
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Tuesday, August 1, 2023
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But it also disguises how much love is also work: a labour performed disproportionately by women.
Key Points:
- But it also disguises how much love is also work: a labour performed disproportionately by women.
- Review: They Call it Love: The Politics of Emotional Life – Alva Gotby (Verso) Gotby’s book is a fascinating account of how this makes women subordinate carers (or apologist secondary co-workers) within nuclear families.
- She crusades to unmask the “naturalness of feminine care” – and to expose care inequalities and incite political awareness.
- Love can thus be used to extract an ongoing, infinite amount of labour – a work relationship that may stretch over a whole lifetime.
Class and ‘emotional elites’
- Alternative forms of attachment have been discredited, while children’s emotional needs have expanded – so, the care required from mothers has intensified.
- Now, argues Gotby, working-class children destined for the service economy also need to learn and deploy emotional skills.
- Emotional elites include bosses, managers, owners – people with resources and privilege who can displace their emotional difficulties onto others.
- Read more:
What is emotional labour - and how do we get it wrong?
Invisible work, female anger
- Gotby argues that the capitalist economy relies on invisible reproductive work to survive.
- But for women, it reflects weakness, flaws and excessive emotion:
feminised workers are mainly made to absorb anger and frustration […] masculinity, on the other hand, works through the displacement of anger onto others. - feminised workers are mainly made to absorb anger and frustration […] masculinity, on the other hand, works through the displacement of anger onto others.
- She champions women’s use of anger to ignite solidarity against male backlash and aggression.
Abolish it all?
- She argues that getting men to do more childcare without challenging “the conflicting needs and contradictions within capitalism” will have limited effect.
- She even claims true equality is impossible within existing gendered categories:
Sexual difference already contains a construction of hierarchy, making “gender equality” a contradiction in terms. - This means “following black, indigenous, trans, and intersex feminists” and embracing the openness and pleasure of queer sexual identity.
A convincing call to arms?
- Conceiving of emotional care work as “capital”, which can be learned, allows for change.
- For example, men can learn caring skills in teaching and nursing work – albeit with greater difficulty, later in their lives.
- The ebb and flow of emotional capital allows for emotional winners and losers to emerge, beyond Gotby’s conventional male-oppressor and female-oppressed binary.
- Gotby’s strong critical feminist Marxist position risks inflexibility – and a degree of highly gendered structural determinism.
- Women’s agency to avoid or resist exploitation – and men’s agency to become involved in care work – is underplayed throughout the book.