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.
Highlights
This essay introduces an article collection on the geographies of emotional and care labour,1 and builds on various calls to consider how emotions are significant sites of enquiry to better understand the social world (i.e., Ahmed, 2004; Anderson and Smith, 2001; Hochschild, 2012)
Writing over half a century ago, Jean–Paul Sartre (1960 pp 33–38) argued that focusing on emotions brings attention to the unpredictable, disorganised and symbolic aspects of human lives that are often marginalised by traditional methods of enquiry
Taking emotions seriously in the study of social, political, and economic life can be used as a theoretical and methodological tool for destabilising the binaries inherited from the Enlightenment
Summary
This essay introduces an article collection on the geographies of emotional and care labour, and builds on various calls to consider how emotions are significant sites of enquiry to better understand the social world (i.e., Ahmed, 2004; Anderson and Smith, 2001; Hochschild, 2012). Much contemporary social sciences and humanities scholarship ignores or downplays the importance of emotions to the benefit of an epistemological and methodological preference for rationality This commitment goes hand in hand with a modernist, capitalist, and colonial enterprise that separates and prioritises inquiries into the public over the private, emphasises the agency of some bodies over others, and privileges sight and the visual over the senses of touch, olfaction, and taste (Irigaray, 1985; Laporte, 2002). The collection places these forms of world-making activity front-and-centre as crucial sites of enquiry into the workings of local and global political economies
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