gothhabiba:

imo–emotional labour is Real but we need to consider it as very closely married (ha) to domestic, reproductive, & sexual labour, and we need to consider all of these forces for how they work to economically disempower women, as well as for how they form the basis for capitalist exploitation of men in the workplace (it’s a lot easier to work long hours at a gruelling or mind-numbing job if you have a wife taking care of all of the cooking & cleaning and also soothing the psychic wounds inflicted by a day in the workplace–think Victorian “angel in the home” archetype), & how this has laid the groundwork for women’s labour in the workplace to be seen as merely supplementary to that of the men they are surely married to, & therefore worth less.

these critiques are all fundamentally & unavoidably anti-capitalist ones. it is an act of bad faith to take a critique such as the one inherent in the term “emotional labour” and subsume it back into capitalist thought by acting as if emotional work (including emotional work in relationships that are not exploitative, which it is a mistake to call “emotional labour”) is purely transactional, or even has a monetary value. one of capitalism’s major functions is to isolate us from each other & to limit our imaginations such that we see everything in terms of capital, even our emotions and relationships to each other, and some of what people mistakenly call “emotional labour” is clearly an example of that.