Geographies of emotional and care labour

Abstract

Recent years have witnessed shifts in the social organisation of emotional and care labour, especially as they intersect with new global trends in migratory patterns and international mobility, the restructuring of social reproduction and public-private divides, as well as the flexibilization of labour markets and a resurgence of unpaid labour such as volunteer work. With a focus on emotions and affect as a central epistemological and methodological orientation, this essay aims to draw connections between three distinct but related bodies of feminist scholarship: social reproduction theory, studies of emotional labour, and emotional geographies. The paper frames these approaches relative to the project of understanding the spatial dimensions of forms of emotional and care labour in neoliberal times.

Re-wilding Parkdale? Environmental gentrification, settler colonialism, and the reconfiguration of nature in 21st century Toronto

“…Research into struggles over urban natures and their place in the valorization of the built environment can benefit from the kinds of questions that animate the revivified contemporary interest in social reproduction (i.e. Andrucki et al, 2017;Bhattacharya, 2017;Ferguson et al, 2016;Katz, 2017;Parish and Montsion, 2018;Ruddick et al, 2018). Initially developed by Marxist Feminists in the 1970s and 1980s, social reproduction seeks to understand the specificity of women's oppression under capitalism, and to contest the marginalization of women and domestic labour in studies of political economy.…”

My mum is on strike! Social reproduction and the (emotional) labor of ‘mothering work’ in neoliberal Britain

“…Indeed, recent research on family‐friendly policies in Austria demonstrated that even as men become more present in undertaking domestic tasks in the home (Landais, 2021), burnout and exhaustion persist—this leads us to argue that families are not structured in ways that can balance the demands of contemporary life. Parish and Montsion argue that Hochschild's attempt to leave ‘emotion work’ outside labor relations and thus outside ‘public’ life, ‘is a modernist, capitalist and colonial enterprise that separates and prioritizes inquiries into the public over the private, [and] emphasizes the agency of some bodies over others’ (2018 p.2).…”

“…The role of emotion is key to many definitions of social reproduction but remains under‐theorized (Farris, 2015; Federici, 2019; Ferguson, 2017; Laslett et al., 1989 p.383; Parish et al., 2018) and thus underutilized as a point of enquiry within social reproduction theory. This article will explore this gap in this body of work and provide suggestions for its development.…”