Love, Care and Solidarity: What Is and Is Not Commodifiable

The Sociological Review, 2007

This paper examines the nature of love labouring and explores how it can be distinguished from other forms of care work. It provides a three fold taxonomy for analysing other-centred work, distinguishing between work required to maintain primary care relations (love labour), secondary care relations (general care work) and tertiary care relations (solidarity work). A central theme of the paper is that primary care relations are not sustainable over time without love labour; that the realization of love, as opposed to the declaration of love, requires work. Drawing on a wide range of theoretical and empirical sources, including a study of caring undertaken by the author, the paper argues that there is mutuality, commitment, trust and responsibility at the heart of love labouring that makes it distinct from general care work and solidarity work. It sets out reasons why it is not possible to commodify the feelings, intentions and commitments of love labourers to supply them on a paid basis.

In this paper, I discuss the idea of democratic love from the perspective of gender equality. More precisely, I argue that a particular form of gender inequality, namely a gender-specific division of care labour, jeopardizes democratic love. In the first two sections of the article, I introduce Anthony Giddens’ original idea of a “democratization of the personal” and show how Axel Honneth has developed it by relying on the Hegelian notion of social freedom. In the third section, I discuss how the problem of care work affects democratic love relationships and depict the solution to this problem advocated by recognition theory, namely economic recognition. After having reconstructed some possible affinities between socialist-feminist arguments and Honneth’s suggestions, as well as criticisms against them, I outline another recognition-theoretic strategy for recognizing care work. I argue that the recognition paradigm conveys a view of love relationship as inherently implying a caring recognition of human beings’ dependencies and vulnerabilities. I conclude by hinting at the idea that caring recognition may be extended beyond the social sphere of love, as constituent of social relations in general.

Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy, 2002

Love's Labor explores the relations that dependency work fosters between women and between men and women, and argues that dependency is not exceptional but integral to human life. The commentaries point to more facets ofdependency such as the importance (and limitation) of personal narrutive in philosophizing dependency (Ruddick); the role of spirituality that Gottlieb addresses with regard to his disabled daughter; and the application of the theory to the situation of elderly women (Tong).

Feminist Formations, 2021

This article analyzes the discourses of the care crisis and its implications for how we understand the practices of care. Contemporary efforts to revalue "care" in some activist and scholarly circles mark a shift away from Fordist demands of workers' rights simply because one works to a neoliberal model of justifying rights because of a worker's emotional investment in their labor. The care discourse premises the collective social good on ensuring that the more privileged are well cared for while making the needs of the less privileged contingent on the well-being of the better off. This article argues that a Black feminist analysis and the language of social reproduction are better frameworks for understanding the labor of care in the context of neoliberal social and economic relations. I draw on my research on domestic worker activists in the 1970s who resisted characterizations of their work as care or love, terms they associated with the framework of "one of the family," which was a basis for underpayment and exploitation. Instead, they demanded equal labor rights and insisted that their work be treated the same as all other forms of labor. I conclude by pointing to models of collective care, justice healing, and radical care as one possible way forward.

Essay included in the volume Objects of Feminism, edited by Maija Timonen and Josefine Wikström

Caring labor has long been considered ''women's work'' in economics. It is a problematic concept because its affective dimension means that it does not fit neatly into the category of work, and dominant gender ideology constructs it as a ''labor of love.'' The problem, according to feminist economists, is that the nature of care and the dependency of those receiving care imply that caregivers must genuinely care about those to whom their well-being is entrusted. From a global political economy perspective, the problem is that migrant populations*disenfranchised and disposable*provide much of the care work that the more prosperous world depends on. The feminist economics work on care frames it in terms of households and markets, which leaves in place its racialized, feminized, and heteronormative connotations. This paper argues for using a queer/global political economy lens that focuses on care work as sites of biopolitics. This analytic move allows feminist scholars to examine its affective dimension without reinscribing it as women's work.

Anthropology of Work Review, 2017

This article examines maternalism in the Czech Republic by exploring how waged and unwaged forms of caring work were framed through discourses of women's innately caring nature in the late twentieth century. Present-day hospital volunteering programmes, which bring female, lay volunteers onto hospital wards to provide unwaged care to patients, are inscribed by maternalist tropes historically associated with domestic work and family care, rather than the neutral expertise associated with female waged care workers in public, institutional settings. The article assesses the contemporary reinvention of maternalist discourses and their capacity to mobilise unwaged caring labour. For much of the twentieth century the right of mothers to public resources and recognition for the care they provide was enshrined within redistributive systems of both liberal capitalist and state socialist European nation states. In many cases these rights and provisions for mothers were a result of the successes of earlier nineteenth-century campaigns of bourgeois and working-class women for greater social and economic protections for mothers and children. 1 Founded on the view that women were naturally suited to care giving, these maternalist forms of entitlement became embedded within the burgeoning welfare bureaucracies of the twentieth century, affording a minimum level of security for women and their children, whilst also sustaining and naturalising a highly gendered division of caring labour in industrial societies. Yet by the late twentieth century a clear shift away from these policies had become discernible, as governments of advanced economies in Europe and beyond adopted measures encouraging increased labour market participation amongst women generally, and mothers particularly. Mothers' entitlement to public resources has been eclipsed by a resurgent emphasis on women as workers. This has been championed across a broad range of political constituencies, from feminist campaigns for gender equality in employment, to neoliberal policy agendas aiming to reduce 'welfare dependency' amongst certain groups of women, notably poor single mothers. 2

Third Text

This discussion explores the assumption that it is love, rather than material gain, that motivates art and cultural workers. Addressing how they have internalised the ideology that one loves one's labour, contributors consider the gendered and class conditions of work in the cultural and academic sectors. Reading 'theory' against 'practice,' they reflect on their own work experiences and upbringings, their curatorial research, and their readings of feminist and Marxist theories of artistic and feminized labour. They discuss how the precarious conditions of cultural labour today isolate workers, dividing them against each other, and how reflections within feminist art history and theory have downplayed the importance of class and reproductive labour. Highlighting the dangers of over-identifying with work, contributors consider the potential of disidentifying from work roles and from institutional conventions as one strategy to challenge the exploitation of the self as well as others. The article concludes with a consideration of how 'labours of love' might be collectively revalued and prioritised.