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They Call It Love:The Politics of Emotional Life
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The work of love is a feminist problem, and it demands feminist solutions
They Call It Love investigates the work that makes a haven in a heartless world, examining who performs this labour, how it is organised, and how it might change. Drawing on the thought of the feminist movement Wages for Housework, Gotby demonstrates that emotion is a key element in the reproduction of society and its norms. Addressing the problem of love's labour requires nothing less than a radical restructuring of society.
Reviews
A fascinating and exhaustive explanation as to why emotions are a political issue.
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.
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.
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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
, 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.
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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.
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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.
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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.