They Call It Love: The Politics of Emotional Life

They Call It Love:
The Politics of Emotional Life
by Alva Gotby

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.

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.