Is equality compatible with the nuclear family? Alva Gotby proposes a radical politics of friendship

• 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.