Love is essential work. Alva Gotby’s They Call It Love: The Politics of Emotional Life explores how this necessary, often unseen and unnamed labour, makes us and our communities feel better, or loved. She asserts that love props up all capitalist enterprise because love is, essentially, work. Simultaneously, Gotby powerfully, and persuasively, argues that the labour of love is at the heart of the anti-capitalist struggle. Yet, love is rarely problematised or taken seriously. Gotby’s contribution is timely and necessary, especially as she considers love from feminist and structural perspectives.
What emotions and feelings are and what they do, has previously been explored from a perspective that frames emotions as natural – an individual rather than structural endeavour. This narrative dominates in a neoliberal world where the impetus is on the individual, not the state, to do self-care. Strategies such as mindfulness are touted as the panacea to societal ills, which are often caused by capitalist co-optation and exploitation of care. In response, Gotby uses the idea of emotional labour, as defined by feminist sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild in 1983, as a springboard to a Marxist feminist analysis of love that considers the influences of capital, socioeconomic class and gender on love.
Gotby’s narrative masterfully outlines how emotions, feelings and their manifestations tend to be portrayed, and understood, as a feminine domain of expertise. Love belongs to the private sphere of women’s lives; it underpins acts of ever-caring mothers and wives, both at home and at work. As a consequence, love’s work is taken for granted, made invisible and undervalued. This labour is hierarchical in material and symbolic ways. Working class and migrant women (so-called Other women) do other emotional labour that has enabled women who are white, Western, heterosexual and middle class, to benefit from the emotional exploitation of the Other. Gotby brilliantly dismantles the silences and abuses surrounding this invisible work by naming it and showing its societal (and capital) worth.
So, what is this thing called love? Gotby shows with such clarity that it is caring for other people by cleaning, shopping, childbearing, childrearing, making others feel loved, taking away their pain and “bringing [them] some soup”, usually for free or significant underpayment. For Gotby, love is the social and emotional reproduction done in family homes, schools, care homes, neighbourhoods and on aeroplanes, in corporations and restaurants. Emotional reproduction is hard work and a feminist issue that requires serious examination, as well as recognition, for meaningful social change to happen.
Like all emotional spheres of life, this work is profoundly gendered in what is expected of whom, when and where. Cleverly, Gotby argues that emotional reproduction tends to be done by “feminised subjects”, meaning individuals who are placed in a feminine social position but aren’t necessarily women. She recognises that all emotions and feelings are socially constructed (though Gotby doesn’t deny that they have a biological basis) and, following gay activist and sociologist Jeffrey Weeks, makes one of her most compelling arguments: that we need to look beyond the individual, at a collective feminist subjectivity to reimagine how we do emotional reproduction.
Gotby’s stance is radical, as she dares to reimagine how we live, work and love. Her call for abolishing gender and the family, and queering emotional reproduction is particularly poignant. Throughout the book, Gotby delineates how these fundamentally exploitative structures hurt people inside and outside the home. My work as a feminist scholar researching domestic violence and families means this part of the book resonates with me. Gendered emotional reproduction enables abuse and violence to thrive, often under the guise of love. The chapter, “A Different Feeling” gives the reader the most hope, as Gotby shows us that we can love differently.
They Call It Love: The Politics of Emotional Life is a beautifully written and engaging book that introduces complex ideas and explains them incredibly well. Alva Gotby links to, and builds on, the points she presented in previous chapters, making her material accessible to a wide range of audiences. I can’t wait to incorporate it into my social work teaching from both organisational and practice perspectives. Moreover, it would be a welcome addition to the curricula of business schools and companies invested in corporate social responsibility, diversity and inclusion. But this might be too big an ask, as Gotby’s book is not for the faint-hearted.