Emotional Reproduction
"It is mostly through intimate relationships that we reproduce ourselves emotionally, and that we create our sense of authentic subjectivity. But these relationships are often in themselves a source of pain and frustration." - Alva Gotby
The family is often reported to be ‘in crisis’, and people appear to be increasingly atomised and isolated. Yet family relationships remain emotionally charged, even as family is seemingly less central in our lives. This is because capitalism prevents many other forms of sociality. While capitalism is sometimes understood as a system leading to increasingly fleeting and meaningless social encounters, bourgeois society has in fact brought with it a culture in which emotion is paramount, but where only a few key relationships become crucial for one’s emotional life. The family remains the ‘proper’ place of intense feeling, and the most important source of emotional wellbeing, but it also continually produces pain, trauma, and disappointment, as well as investment in ideologies of love and labour.
It is mostly through intimate relationships that we reproduce ourselves emotionally, and that we create our sense of authentic subjectivity. But these relationships are often in themselves a source of pain and frustration. They routinely fail to live up to what Sara Ahmed calls ‘the promise of happiness’ – the idea that certain life paths will ensure good feeling. Romantic relationships, supposedly one of the most important ways to achieve emotional satisfaction, often cause distress and bad feelings. Yet we keep hoping that one day, if we just find the right person, we will have satisfying romantic lives – a true love that will last forever. Love has had a central position in modern and contemporary ideals of the good life. Not finding love is often experienced as a failure and a sign of personal lack. For women especially, romance is equated with personal worth. The family itself, as an ideal form of sociality, remains at the heart of what we think of as the good life. We hope that if we can just build a family of our own, we will finally be happy.
These emotional investments in a particular form of sociality, as well as the labour that goes into creating good feelings within those relationships, is what I call emotional reproduction. Emotional reproduction is not only a form of labour; it is also a system of social relations and ideologies which form the framework for where and how that labour takes place. Emotional reproduction is both cause and effect of our emotional investment in the ideology of family and romance. The term highlights the essential nature of emotional labour for the reproduction of labour power and capitalist social relations. While emotional labour is a specific type of labour, it cannot be understood outside the context of reproductive labour more broadly. Emotional reproduction today spans the divisions between public and private spheres and waged and unwaged work. But I am particularly interested in the intimate work of producing emotional satisfaction within family and romantic relationships.
Emotion is elusive. It is not an object which we can easily identify and separate from other phenomena. Rather, in Alison Jaggar’s words, it describes a form of habit or a way of engaging with the world which escapes simple dichotomies of activity and passivity. Emotions presume language and social order, and they are closely linked to social values and modes of evaluation. Emotions such as anger or shame imply a social judgement of some kind, as do feelings of happiness and attachment. These social values have to be learnt. Feelings are rule-bound processes – they are not spontaneous eruptions but rather profoundly social phenomena which are learnt and managed by the subject. While often understood as something internal, a psychological state within the subject, emotion signals the subject’s involvement with the world. Emotions are not passive states that we simply endure, but neither are they things a subject can fully control or will into being. They form part of the very constitution of the subject itself, and are fundamental to constituting the subject as a social being. Emotion, then, should be conceptualised not as coming from within the subject, but rather as a form of interaction between the subject and the social, through which the subject becomes involved in the social world. This includes relations of power, which can become internalised through emotional processes. We learn to feel that existing power relations are natural and good, and that social change is wrong, unnatural, and frightening.
We often think of capitalism as a system devoid of feeling – driven either by rationality or hunger for profit, depending on our perspective. But this understanding of capitalism cannot account for the gendered work of producing good feeling. Capitalism depends on emotional reproduction. Emotion and sociality form crucial aspects of how we stay alive and sometimes even thrive. Workers often cannot expect emotional wellbeing or satisfaction from their own work, but emotional reproduction seeks to make up for the hurt, boredom, and stress of life under capitalism.
I use the term emotional labour to mean interactive work that produces emotional effects in another person. This work includes constituting and reproducing emotional bonds. Emotional labour always impacts the labouring subject as well as the recipient of emotional labour – for example, these subjects reproduce gendered identities through the relation of labour. There is therefore a connection between emotional management of the self and that of others. Emotion is a process in which acts of expressing, suppressing, and shaping feeling have to be constantly repeated and managed and are bound to the construction of particular forms of subjectivity. The term emotional labour, then, describes this work of managing the emotions of oneself and others.
Emotional labour is often presented as the opposite of our genuine and authentic selves. There is a tendency in the literature on emotional labour to take something like a ‘real’ or nonmanaged feeling as the ideal. But while subjective interiority appears as given and natural, we do not need to rely on notions of authentic subjectivity in order to critique emotional labour. As Kathi Weeks suggests, labour practices have an ontologizing effect – they make a subject come into being. The subject comes to appear as a stable entity through memory, desire, and habit. These things become interiorised through skilful repetitions of certain forms of work. The subject comes to experience its socially constituted self as authentic and pre-social. This is especially the case for emotional labour.
A focus on the link between emotion management of the self and the management of other people’s emotions shows how emotion is not only cognitive and immaterial but also part of embodied practice. As Arlie Russell Hochschild writes, emotional labour involves a ‘publicly observable facial and bodily display’. But emotional labour is embodied not only in the sense of using the body as a tool for communicating emotion, but also because emotion itself involves bodily as well as cognitive dispositions. It is not only a mental practice; it is something that involves the body. We feel emotions in our bodies – from the tension of anger or anxiety to the warmth of joy. This challenges modern dichotomies of body and mind, as well as those of activity and passivity.
We often understand our feelings as expressions of an inner truth. But the subject experiencing emotion need not be understood as a pre-social or authentic self. Instead, this subject should be seen within a specific historical context and as produced by particular processes of labour. The conventional, rule-bound aspects of emotion can tell us something about the historical constitution of the subject of emotional labour. Raymond Williams’s phrase ‘structure of feeling’ reminds us that feeling is not random or spontaneous but tied to various historical processes. As Williams writes, structures of feeling are not recognised as such; instead, they are ‘taken to be private, idiosyncratic, and even isolating, but which in analysis . . . has its emergent, connecting, and dominant characteristics, indeed its specific hierarchies’. There is no need to posit emotion as the source of our core identity. We use emotion to locate our supposedly authentic selves, but emotion is subjected to various forms of management. Hochschild writes that ‘we make up an idea of our “real self”, an inner jewel that remains our unique possession’. Our authentic selves are themselves the result of historically specific practices, including labour processes.
Emotion has an important role to play in shoring up our sense of identity and subjectivity. Subjectivity under capitalism is fundamentally bound to hierarchy. The notion of a coherent subject who is the master of his own capacities is tied to various forms of material and social inequality, as this form of subjectivity is more available to bourgeois white men. However, these inequalities become invisible in the making of the sovereign subject, as it depends precisely on the erasure of the social. Emotional reproduction is central in the production of both subjectivity and status – through responsibility for producing emotional wellbeing, what forms of subjectivity result from those labour practices, and what emotions are deemed appropriate and rational.
The subject as we know it is the result of a historical process related to changes in social relations at the inception of capitalism. As Cinzia Arruzza puts it, ‘A robust notion of the privacy of affects as characterizing what it means to be a unique individual arises with capitalism and modernity.’ Historian Lawrence Stone calls this ‘affective individualism’ – the idea of an individual with a private and affective interior life, which focuses on the individual’s emotional self-expression.9 In the medieval period, the self was conceptualised as ‘far less contained, privatized and controlled’ than it is today.10 The notion of the emotionally bounded individual is tied to capitalist-colonial systems of power as well as gendered forms of labour. Social relations of power and hierarchy are therefore implicit in our intimate understandings of ourselves. The fact that many modern theorists have criticised this notion of a coherent, sovereign subject has not led to its disappearance, because we cannot simply do away with this understanding of the self intellectually – it is implicated in real social relations of capitalism, in particular ones related to gender, race, and labour.
According to Arruzza, our sense of ourselves as ontologically pre-given subjects exists in contradiction with another process in capitalist society, in which emotions come to appear as things detachable from their subjects and separate from their social context. This is part of a general process of the commodification of things and services. This means that two seemingly contradictory developments – the understanding of the self as authentic and pre-social and the view that emotions are detachable from the subject – are both part of a modern, capitalist understanding of the subject. This process is particularly noticeable in commodified forms of emotional labour which draw on supposedly intimate feelings in ways that people might experience as alienating. Our ability to smile and create a warm and caring atmosphere becomes a thing that can be sold on the labour market. We can understand this conflict between the real self and reified emotion as an interiorized version of the dichotomy between private and public in capitalist society. This dichotomy is historically constructed and unstable, but it produces real social eff ects. Subjective interiority is constructed through a process in which emotions become expressions of an authentic self while simultaneously emerging as highly malleable material for labour – feelings we can work on, manage, and control.
—excerpted from They Call It Love: The Politics of Emotional Life by Alva Gotby (30% off as part of our Valentine's Day reading - ends February 16th).
This excerpt is part of a series of essays for Valentine's week, looking at love, desire and relationships at the intersection of capitalism, the state, and politics. Read everything here.
The work of love is a feminist problem, and it demands feminist solutions.