THEY CALL IT LOVE
WAGES FOR HOUSEWORK AND EMOTIONAL REPRODUCTION
ALVA GOTBY
A thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of the
requirements of the University of West London
for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy
September 2019
1
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Emotional Labour: A Feminist Perspective on the Exploitation of Reproductive Labour, Slides of Literature
The concept of emotional labour, arguing that it is an essential but often overlooked aspect of reproductive labour. The author discusses the historical materialist feminist perspective on emotional labour and its connection to unwaged and waged forms of work. The document also emphasizes the importance of understanding emotional labour as a subjective involvement that spans material, bodily, psychic, and social labour processes.
What you will learn
- What is emotional labour and how does it relate to reproductive labour?
- How has emotional labour been studied within Marxist feminist theory?
- What is the historical context of emotional labour within the context of waged and unwaged work?
- What are the implications of the concept of emotional labour for understanding contemporary gender relations?
- How does the gendered organization of unwaged emotional reproduction impact commercialized forms of emotional labour?
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THEY CALL IT LOVE
WAGES FOR HOUSEWORK AND EMOTIONAL REPRODUCTION
ALVA GOTBY
A thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of the
requirements of the University of West London
for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy
September 2019
Abstract
This thesis is a study of two sets of literature on capitalism, gender, and emotion. Firstly, it explores the writings of the Wages for Housework (WFH) movement – a network of Marxist feminist activist groups, founded in 1972, whose activity was centred on women’s reproductive labour. Secondly, this thesis draws on the body of writing on emotional labour. Coined by Arlie Hochschild in 1983, this term describes the work of producing emotional states in another person. While WFH were attentive to emotional aspects of reproductive labour, their writings mention emotional labour only in passing. Hochschild’s work concentrates on emotional labour in particular service occupations, but neglects broader issues of social reproduction. Synthesising these bodies of work, I introduce the concept of emotional reproduction, thus applying the WFH perspective to the theme introduced by Hochschild. Emotional reproduction denotes processes across waged and unwaged forms of labour, intended to enhance the relative emotional wellbeing of a recipient, to the extent that they are able to participate in waged labour. These processes often take place in the private sphere, and are constructed as a typically feminine activity. I argue for the importance of understanding these processes as a form of labour, which is integral to capitalist social reproduction. Through the notion of emotional reproduction, this thesis offers an account of gendered subjectivity. It highlights the construction of gendered and historically specific forms of skill, which are essential for emotional labour. I argue that the feminised skill for emotional labour tends to be exploited, in both waged labour and in many family arrangements. This labour, however, is simultaneously made invisible through the hegemonic understanding of subjectivity as personal autonomy, which obscures modes of emotional dependency.
Frequently cited works
- AR The arcane of reproduction: Housework, prostitution, labor and capital (Leopoldina Fortunati, 1995 [1981]).
- AWNP All work and no pay: Women, housework and the wages due (Wendy Edmond and Suzie Fleming [eds.], 1975).
- MH The managed heart: Commercialization of human feeling (Arlie Russell Hochschild, 2003a [1983]).
- NYWFHC The New York Wages for Housework committee 1972-1977: History, theory and documents (Silvia Federici and Arlen Austin [eds.], 2017).
- PWSC The power of women and the subversion of the community (Mariarosa Dalla Costa, 1972).
- RPZ Reproduction at point zero: Housework, reproduction, and feminist struggle (Silvia Federici, 2012).
- SRC Sex, race, and class: The perspective of winning (Selma James, 2012).
- WL The work of love: The role of unpaid housework as a condition of poverty and violence at the dawn of the 21st century (Giovanna Franca Dalla Costa, 2008 [1978]).
- WSC Women and the subversion of the community: A Mariarosa Dalla Costa reader (Mariarosa Dalla Costa, 2019).
Contents
- Acknowledgements................................................................................................................
- Introduction.............................................................................................................................
- Wages for Housework as method and perspective.........................................................
- Chapter outline............................................................................................................
- Wages for Housework as method and perspective.........................................................
- Chapter one: Wages for Housework and reproductive labour............................................
- Reproductive sites and the exploitation of work..............................................................
- Reproduction and value...............................................................................................
- Permanent reproduction crisis.........................................................................................
- Sex as work.................................................................................................................
- Reproductive antagonisms
- Wage struggles............................................................................................................
- Reproductive sites and the exploitation of work..............................................................
- Chapter two: Love as labour................................................................................................
- Affective labour, post-workerism, and gender.................................................................
- Emotional labour in feminist theory.................................................................................
- Subject and status.......................................................................................................
- Definitions of emotional labour....................................................................................
- Love and care..............................................................................................................
- Parenting and emotional reproduction......................................................................
- Emotional class reproduction
- Commercialising feeling
- Private and public
- Chapter three: Gendering work..........................................................................................
- Femininity as work function...........................................................................................
- Love, violence, and reproduction..............................................................................
- Gendered feeling: Hochschild on femininity
- Contradictory requirements: Contemporary labour and femininity................................
- Gender, flexibility, and emotional labour...................................................................
- Gendered skill............................................................................................................
- Femininity as work function...........................................................................................
- Chapter four: Wages for Housework and the strategy of refusal......................................
- Manifestos, form, subjectivity........................................................................................
- Emotional antagonisms.................................................................................................
- Sexual refusals..........................................................................................................
- Wages for refusal......................................................................................................
- Chapter five: Towards a different (re)production...............................................................
- Beyond equality.............................................................................................................
- Abolishing the family..................................................................................................
- Gender abolition........................................................................................................
- Queering emotional reproduction..................................................................................
- Moving beyond the family..........................................................................................
- New horizons of feeling.............................................................................................
- Beyond equality.............................................................................................................
- Conclusion.........................................................................................................................
- Bibliography.......................................................................................................................
My fellow Wages for Housework researchers Camille Barbagallo and Arlen Austin generously shared scanned archival material with me. More broadly, I am grateful to be writing in a time of a collective surge in interest in Marxist feminism and social reproduction. The constant publication of new material relevant to my work has been a valuable source of encouragement. Living in London, I have had access to a lively intellectual community for which I am very grateful, including numerous reading groups and other forms of collective research. In particular, I thank the participants of the Marx reading group and the Gender and Marxism reading group for sharing the joy of reading and discussion. I also thank all my activist comrades, who reminded me of life outside of academia, and my students, who reminded me of the value of learning and teaching. My family has supported me materially and emotionally throughout the years of working on this research. I thank my mother, Catharina Gotby, and my sibling, Vide Ohlsson Gotby, who have cared for me throughout my life and continue to do so today, even when I am far away from home. This thesis is dedicated to the memory of my father, Stefan Ohlsson, who passed away before I could complete this work, but who I know would have been so proud to have seen it finished. I am forever grateful for his love and support, and his interest in my research. I also thank the many people who cared for him during his illness. They too made this work possible.
Introduction
This thesis is a study of feminist writings on work, emotion, and reproduction. I draw on the writings of Wages for Housework (WFH), a Marxist feminist movement founded on the premise that work coded as feminine is a central but structurally disavowed and devalued aspect of capitalist societies. The WFH activists were interested in the political potential of reproductive labour – that is, the work that goes into maintaining and replacing the labour force, and ensuring the general wellbeing of people. This work includes both generational replacement, such as pregnancy and child care, and the daily work of cooking, cleaning, doing laundry, and caring for the sick, disabled, and elderly. It also includes the work of building communities and social relations. A less visible form of this labour is emotional care, for which women have been made largely responsible. The central claim of this thesis is that reproductive labour has a pivotal emotional aspect, which is essential for reproduction of the workforce and for producing modes of sociality and subjectivity. This work, as the WFH authors knew, includes the work of soothing children and providing company for the elderly, but also the work of providing emotional comfort for partners, family members, and friends, and maintaining intimate forms of sociality. This work is commonly known as “love.” The past few years have seen a revived interest in Marxist feminist thought and issues of social reproduction, across academic and activist communities.^1 Reproduction is being rediscovered as a central terrain of anti-capitalist struggle. Taking up the legacy of (^1) The large body of work developed around the concept of social reproduction testifies to this interest within the academic sector. See for example Bakker and Gill (2003), Luxton and Bezanson (2006), and Bhattacharya (2017). With regards to WFH, several essay collections have been published over the last decade, including James (2012), Federici (2012, 2018a, 2018b), and Dalla Costa (2019). However, Louise Toupin’s 2018 book and Christina Rousseau’s 2016 PhD thesis remain, to my knowledge, the only book-length secondary literature on WFH. These texts are more historical in nature and explore the experience of the participants in WFH, whereas my research is based on the theoretical and political perspective presented by WFH members in their writings.
which should be carried out with little or no monetary reward.^2 It is often relegated to the so-called private sphere, and as such it is disavowed and excluded in modern economic and political discourses. Decades of feminist writing and agitation has begun to undo some of this privatisation.^3 Yet reproduction is still construed as primarily the responsibility of “the family,” a social unit that is constructed 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 formal constraints on women’s independent existence have been removed. It makes women responsible for the wellbeing of others and undermines their financial and material independence, while simultaneously constructing them as the subjects most suitable for this work, thus perpetuating the existence of a gendered division of labour. This thesis pays particular attention to the emotional aspects of this process. While I argue that it is important to think about the connections between the material aspects of care and its emotional side, I will focus on what I call emotional reproduction. This term names the forms of work that go into maintaining people’s emotional wellbeing, and their ability and willingness to continue to engage in capitalist forms of labour, often despite the considerable emotional strain produced by this work. Here, I draw on the concept of emotional labour, and specifically the feminised kind of emotional labour that is oriented towards “affirming, enhancing, and celebrating the wellbeing and status of others” (MH 165). 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. I thus draw on a tradition of feminist writings on emotion initiated by sociologist Arlie Russel (^2) This is supported by numerous studies. See for example England, Budig, and Folbre (2001), Charmes (2015), and Folbre (2017). (^3) In what follows, I use the term “privatisation” to indicate how reproductive labour is constructed as an individual responsibility and relegated to the private sphere.
Hochschild’s classic 1983 book The managed heart: Commercialization of human feeling. In this text, Hochschild traces a shift in capitalist economies, in which the growing service economy relies on the increased commodification of our emotional capacities. She does this through a study of flight attendants, a traditionally feminised profession that not only involves serving food and drinks but perhaps most centrally functions to instil a sense of safety and emotional comfort in airline passengers. From this paradigmatic example, 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. Following Hochschild, there have been numerous empirical studies of emotion in a broad range of work, primarily within the disciplines of sociology and management studies.^4 Within Marxist feminist theory, however, there have been few sustained attempts to understand emotional labour as a particular aspect of reproductive labour.^5 In her 2011 essay “On affective labor,” WFH co-founder Silvia Federici suggests that emotional labour must be understood in the context of historical materialist feminist theories of reproductive labour, as well as the work of Hochschild. Neither in Federici’s essay nor elsewhere in the WFH literature, however, do we find a WFH theory of emotional labour. This thesis is an attempt to develop such a theory. In my use of the concept of emotional reproduction, I wish to both invoke and reconfigure Hochschild’s term emotional labour. By using this concept, I want to point to a broader process than that usually described in accounts of emotional labour, and to include activities that would normally not be considered work. These activities may nonetheless contribute to the general emotional wellbeing of people, and should thus be politicised within the conceptual framework of reproduction. Like social reproduction more (^4) Some examples include James (1989), Smith (1992), Hall (1993), Leidner (1993), Wharton (1993), Pierce (1996), Paules (1996), Taylor and Tyler (2000), Korczynski (2003), Bolton (2005), Brannan (2005), Dowling (2007), and Simpson (2007). (^5) Notable exceptions include Weeks (2007), Bromberg (2015), Oksala (2016), and Whitney (2018).
Housework (BWFWFH), which were autonomous from the main WFH groups but operated within the WFH network. I wish to pay more attention to aspects of the WFH writings, including sexuality and race, which are often written out of the standard narratives of the movement (Austin and Capper 2018: 447). Additionally, I look at the collectively authored manifestos, pamphlets and statements that the movement produced. While the writings of Federici, Dalla Costa,^6 James, and Fortunati continue to be central in my account of WFH, I want to emphasise the collective character of this movement rather than to conflate the WFH perspective with its best-known proponents. The movement drew its political and theoretical position from Dalla Costa’s essay “Women and the subversion of the community,” first drafted in 1970 and published (together with James’ essay “A woman’s place”) as the pamphlet Power of women and the subversion of the community in 1972.^7 In this essay, Dalla Costa laid the groundwork for an autonomous feminist movement, which she argued would have an essential position within the broader anti-capitalist left. With this text, Dalla Costa both drew upon and departed from the writings of the Italian workerist tradition. She had been a member of the workerist group Potere Operaio (Workers’ Power) up until then, and the WFH perspective was strongly inspired by workerist thought. But her text also marked a certain distance between the feminist movement and the workerists. Workerism – a school of thought that became prominent in the early 1960s – stemmed from a re-reading of Marx’s writings on the basis of the primacy of working-class activity. Its central figures included Mario Tronti, Raniero Panzieri, Romano Alquati, and Antonio Negri. Contrary to Marxisms that focused on capital as the cause of development, workerist theory staged a methodological inversion in which the activity of the workers was seen as the fundamental driver of (^6) Hereafter, the name Dalla Costa will refer to Mariarosa Dalla Costa unless otherwise specified. (^7) The authorship of “Women and the subversion of the community” is contested, and often both Dalla Costa and James are credited as its authors. In the 1973 and 1975 editions, the essay is signed by both of them. Additionally, James claims to have written several parts of it (SRC 43). Dalla Costa, however, argues that the essay was written by herself based on discussions with James and one other person (WSC 47-48). For a longer commentary on this issue, see Barbagallo (2016: 47-49).
change in capitalist society (Tronti 2019: 65). Through the workers’ inquiry, a method which encouraged workers to investigate their own working conditions, these writers aimed to develop a theory adequate to the task of locating potential sites of struggle and antagonism between workers and capital (Cleaver 1979, Wright 2002). For the members of WFH, however, this included not only the factory work explored by the workerists, but also all the (often unwaged) work that goes into reproducing labour power. They criticised the workerists for being overly concerned with locating the technologically advanced vanguard, without recognising the potential power held by supposedly “backward” sections of the working class, including those without formal employment. The WFH movement thus staged an important intervention into workerism, and leftist movements more broadly, which tended to conceive of “work” as that which happened in the factories (Cleaver 2019: xi, SRC 100, NYWFHC 229). Despite this critique of the workerists, however, the WFH writers continued to draw on workerist methods. They were interested in finding an account of capitalist society which emphasised the collective agency of those who are engaged in reproductive work. In this, they shared the workerist methodological move which, as Harry Cleaver writes, emphasised that every analysis must be two-sided, from the perspective of the workers as well as that of capital (1979: 64). What has been characterised as the “optimistic” character of workerism and its offshoots (Vishmidt 2015: 8), can thus instead be seen as an emphasis on the political usefulness of theory insofar as it helps us locate potential sites at which capitalism can be disrupted and workers can claim a more autonomous power. In this thesis, I draw on the conceptual methodology of the workerists, in order to locate possible sites of struggle. Federici uses the term “struggle concepts” – that is, concepts that name and produce antagonistic relations (NYWFHC 16). I share the WFH commitment to theory that is informed by the needs of political struggle and conceptual
what I think is useful for a contemporary feminist struggle, I have inevitably left out other possible readings, some of which would be more critical and perhaps more pessimistic, although not less “correct.” I am thus not interested in finding the most “accurate” reading of the group of texts under study in this thesis, but rather aim to read generously and sometimes against the grain of the texts themselves, in a way that I hope will be helpful for the collective project of constituting historical materialist feminist sites of resistance. In reading these texts as both theoretical statements and activist texts, my goal is to produce an account of emotional reproduction that gives a fuller view of social reproduction as a site of struggle. This method is consistent with the writings of WFH members themselves. Their aim was to produce theoretical and political concepts that could be utilised in their movement. For them, one of the key struggle concepts was that of work. While some Marxist feminists have opted to use the vaguer term “activity” to describe unwaged reproduction (Gonzalez and Neton 2013), I think it is important to use the concepts of work and labour across waged and unwaged spheres, both because of their analytical value and because they facilitate certain forms of struggle. The WFH project was fundamentally one of struggling against various forms of work. Following Kathi Weeks, I use work and labour interchangeably, thus not drawing a conceptual distinction that critiques work but maintains labour as a desirable activity, or places labour in the domain of the public or commercial and work in the private sphere (as Hochschild does in The managed heart ). Weeks points out that such distinctions risk preserving the moral valuation of work/labour that the antiwork political project strives to undo (2011: 15). As Marjorie DeVault argues, the current usage of the term work emerged from the spatial and temporal distinctions inherent in “masculine” work under capitalism, in which the work place is separated from the home, which is constructed as a sphere of leisure. For women, however, this
conceptual distinction is blurry, as the home is a sphere of both work and leisure, thus conflating the experiences of the two terms. Thus, DeVault suggests, the term work is not wholly adequate for describing the activities of reproduction (1991: 5-6). However, Weeks writes that “[w]hat counts as work, which forms of productive activity will be included and how each will be valued, are a matter of historical dispute” (2011: 14). Following Weeks’ approach, I think of the term work as a way of contesting the current organisation of activity, resources, and needs. At the risk of over-extending the concepts work and labour, I am interested in the political potentials of naming what is usually understood to be “leisure” as labour. This is because, as many Marxist feminists have pointed out, a woman’s work is never done (WL 46, Morton 1971). For the members of WFH, using the term work was an essential aspect of their politics, enabling us to “call work what is work so that eventually we might rediscover what is love and create our sexuality, which we have never known” (RPZ 20). Until then, however, it is necessary to name our love as labour. The concepts of work and labour have a multitude of definitions, often involving notions of effort and conscious activity, which is aimed at transforming a certain material. In trying to expand this definition, I want to challenge some pre-conceived notions of work. One important aspect of this is to question the association of work with active and conscious engagement with a material. What if we could think of work beyond the distinctions between activity and passivity? As the active has historically been considered a masculine principle, I ask whether such associations serve to make invisible much of the work that women have been tasked with. Similarly, the conflation of labour with conscious activity seems to value the mind over the body. As emotions are often constructed as passive states that come to inhabit a body, against the rational mind (Lupton 1998: 85-86), these associations of the terms labour and work seem to render the term emotional labour
disentangle emotional labour as a separate work process. Both reproduction and emotion are inherently expansive concepts, because of how the satisfaction of need span a whole range of activities. I thus argue against a priori distinctions between these terms and their opposites. Rather, I am interested in the political potentials of naming processes as work, and how such naming can transform our understanding of both those processes and the concept of work itself. The distinction between work and non-work is a political distinction that is open to challenge. In the 1970s, as more women started to enter the waged work force, the feminist movement also started naming various activities that women carry out in their homes as work. This allowed them to denaturalise domestic labour as well as point to the similarities between the tasks they performed within their waged work and the tasks they had been carrying out in their homes. For WFH, such denaturalisation and comparison were key benefits of their use of the term work. Their use of the term allowed for interventions into leftist discourses, and for the use of labour tactics in the sphere of unwaged work. It also created analytical space for the shifting terrain of what has been constituted as “women’s work,” where many tasks were increasingly performed for a wage. Hochschild, carrying out her fieldwork for The managed heart during the period WFH campaigners were most active, captured the process of women’s supposedly natural capacity for emotion being increasingly commodified in the growing (waged) service economy. She traced this backwards into the home, naming this capacity in its unwaged form as “emotion work.” However, she was mainly interested in what she saw as the problem of the commercialisation of a previously “private” capacity, which she thinks of in terms of the increasing management control of, and alienation from, our capacity for feeling (MH 19). Using the WFH method of applying the term work to critique the supposedly non-alienated sphere of the home, I question Hochschild’s distinction of
emotional labour and emotion work, which seems to posit emotion work as inherently freer. The term emotional labour, as I use it, is a conceptual and political tool for challenging the association of emotion with non-work and the spontaneous expression of our authentic selves. While writing this thesis, I became increasingly interested in our understandings of such selves. This text can also be read as a critique of certain understandings of subjectivity, in particular (neo)liberal understandings of the self as a sovereign, autonomous individual ruled by rational decision-making. This theme has been a concern for feminist theory for quite some time. Feminists have questioned the construction of (implicitly masculine) selfhood as independent, rational, “self-made” subjectivity.^9 In this thesis, I want to emphasise the emotional aspect of this construction, which I argue is based on the construction of its opposite – the feminised subject of emotional labour. Combined with an emphasis on the private sphere as the “proper” place for emotion under capitalism, such constructions serve to maintain notions of gender complementarity and heteronormative family forms. It is thus bound up with a particular construction of the social, which I argue is entangled with the material organisation of home and waged work. This focus on the construction of the subject and sociality also helps us understand our subjective investments in maintaining the current system – how we work to (re)produce a way of organising the world that fundamentally limits the satisfaction of our needs and the expansive potentials of our desires. Since the prime of WFH, women’s economic and social status has changed quite drastically. As Fordist governance has been widely replaced by post-Fordist economic organisation and a neoliberal state, the status of women’s labour has shifted, as has the notion of “women” as a collective subject. The writings of the WFH movement are of their time – seeking to intervene in feminist and leftist debates of the 1970s. Thus, in using (^9) See for instance Lloyd (1984), and Pateman (1988).