In recent years, feminist scholarship on emotional labor has proliferated. I identify a related but distinct form of care labor, hermeneutic labor. Hermeneutic labor is the burdensome activity of: understanding and coherently expressing one’s own feelings, desires, intentions, and movitations; discerning those of others; and inventing solutions for relational issues arising from interpersonal tensions. I argue that hermeneutic labor disproportionately falls on women’s shoulders in heteropatriachal societies, especially in intimate relationships between women and men. I also suggest that some of (...) the gendered burdens of emotional labor that feminist scholars point out would better be described as hermeneutic labor. Drawing on feminist philosophy as well as findings from social psychology and sociology, I argue that the exploitation of women’s hermeneutic labor is a pervasive element of what Sandra Bartky calls the ‘micropolitics’ of intimate relationships. The widespread expectation that women are relationship maintenance experts, as well as the prevalence of a gendered demand-withdraw pattern of communication, leads an exploitative situation to appear natural or even desirable, even as it leads to women’s dissatisfaction. This situation may be considered misogynistic in Kate Manne’s sense, where misogyny is a property of social environments rather than a worldview. (shrink)

In this paper, we introduce an enactive account of loving as participatory sense-making inspired by the “I love to you” of the feminist philosopher Luce Irigaray. Emancipating from the fusionist concept of romantic love, which understands love as unity, we conceptualise loving as an existential engagement in a dialectic of encounter, in continuous processes of becoming-in-relation. In these processes, desire acquires a certain prominence as the need to know (the other, the relation, oneself) more. We build on Irigaray’s account of (...) love to present a phenomenology of loving interactions and then our enactive account. Finally, we draw some implications for ethics. These concern language, difference, vulnerability, desire, and self-transformation. (shrink)

In this article I explore love's relation to gendered power asymmetries by comparing Anna Jónasdóttir's, Jessica Benjamin's and Teresa Brennan's respective theorizations of this theme. Despite the considerable differences between these feminist frameworks, they can all be read in terms of what I call the figure of the Dominant and its Constitutive Other. This refers to the contradictory relation whereby the powerful and ‘independent’ existence of the one is premised on that which is other to it, as well as on (...) the denial and obscuring of this constitutive dependence. Via a dialogue with critical realist and metaReal themes I move from a concern with how the feminine ‘Other’ tacitly constitutes the masculine Dominant through practices of love, to thematizing the basic stratum of being as the constitutive Other of the oppressive economy of love. The structure of the self emerges as a central organizing principle in the oppressive relations considered, and the article explores what might be a non-violent mode.. (shrink)

In this article I attempt to reconcile two seemingly conflicting theorisations of love, the one elaborated by Roy Bhaskar as part of his philosophy of meta-Reality and Anna G. Jónasdóttir’s historical materialist-radical feminist theory of love power. While Bhaskar emphasises the essentially non-dual character of love, envisioning it as a ‘no-lose situation’, Jónasdóttir stresses the antagonistic features structuring love relations by conceptualising love as a productive power that men tend to exploit women of. Rather than seeing these accounts as mutually (...) exclusive I show that they can be reconciled by aid of the general ontology elaborated by Bhaskar in his philosophy of meta-Reality. (shrink)

Analysis of the local implementation of paternity establishment and child support policy in four Wisconsin counties suggests that these policies reproduce some aspects of patriarchal gender relations. The counties' information-collecting practices focused on nonmarital mothers' sexual activity and nonmarital fathers' employment and income. Women were questioned far more extensively than men about their sexual practices and partners; women's accounts of their sexual activity were used to evaluate their overall truthfulness, and administrative practices in effect encouraged alleged fathers to state whether (...) they were convinced of the mother's sexual fidelity. By demonstrating the gendered nature of the terms under which public assistance is granted, the findings highlight the significance of the process of policy implementation for understanding the gendered character of state systems of social provision. (shrink)

Disputes about how to understand intersectional relations often pivot around the tension between separateness and inseparability, where some scholars emphasize the need to separate between different intersectional categories while others claim they are inseparable. In this article the author takes issue with the either/or thinking that underpins an unnecessary and unproductive polarization in the debate over the in/separability of intersectional categories. Drawing on Roy Bhaskar’s dialectical critical realist philosophy, the author argues that we can think of intersectional categories as well (...) as different ontological levels as both distinct and unified and elaborates on the issue of how significance of the dialectical notion of unity-in-difference for intersectional studies. As part of the argument the author addresses the issue of what it actually means for something to be distinct or separate as opposed to inseparable or unified with something else, demonstrating that lack of clarity about this is at the heart of polarized arguments about separateness versus inseparability in intersectionality theory. (shrink)

ABSTRACTPopular music life is permeated by a quantitative form of male dominance, and has been for several decades. Based on a recent study this article engages with the reproduction of said male dominance by attempting to understand boys’ approaches to popular music and musicians. In particular, by making use of an interdisciplinary explanatory feminist theory the article seeks to show that interacting mechanisms at different levels make the adoption of a so-called ‘identificatory’ approach attainable for boys. The potential effect of (...) their adoption of this approach is that male dominance within popular music life is reproduced. In addition to this, however, a more general aim of this article is to illustrate the ways in which critical realism can inform empirical gender research, especially in terms of the postulation of explanatory mechanisms. (shrink)

It has long been taboo for feminist theorists to draw on notions of nature in their conceptualizations of gender relations. Objecting to this nature-phobia, I argue that we need to anchor our social theories in explicit notions of the natural necessities on which any social structure draws and must ultimately accommodate. Such a reference to a ‘natural ontological order’ is needed not only for explaining how power structures can get a hold over people, but also for specifying the ways in (...) which the natural necessities impose absolute constraints on the forms that oppressive structures can take, ultimately creating a conatus to getting rid of the oppressive structure. In the human-social realm a crucial aspect of nature is those basic human needs that any society must meet in order to reproduce itself. One such human need that has been theoretically overlooked, although often implicitly assumed, is the need for love. Drawing on Anna G. Jónasdóttir's theory of ‘love power’, I elaborate on the contradictions inherent in the power that men acquire by exploiting women's love, arguing that these contradictions can be understood only with reference to natural necessities. (shrink)

The article critically discusses Pettit’s account of love as an intimate attachment. I will not question his notion that love implies care; my aim is to show how, under certain social structural conditions, the demands of love bring about and/or reproduce oppression. First, I recap and discuss Pettit’s conception of love. Second, I show how the traditional gender order generates asymmetries in the provision of care, thus setting the ground for situations in which the demands of care become oppressive. Third, (...) I critically discuss the ways in which a person can resist the oppression implied in the demands of care. In a fourth step, I consider Pettit’s critique of problematic forms of love. Finally, I conclude by drawing upon the categories of freedom and domination as key concepts for developing a more critical account of love. (shrink)

ABSTRACTFeminist theory and critical realism should consolidate their collaboration since they have much in common. Nevertheless, feminist standpoint theory and critical realist ontology remain at odds, as extended debates have shown. I argue that this is because of the importance that feminism places on difference – which brings up the problem of relationality in a material way – and thus makes it hard to integrate into traditional critical realism. Dialectical critical realism contributes greatly to an understanding of relationality but lacks (...) difference’s historicity. This claim is elaborated through a discussion of intersectionality in feminism and feminist new materialism. The discussion shows that the mainstream understanding of both approaches has grave deficiencies and profits from critical realist metatheory. Notwithstanding, CR can learn from the motives and ways that difference is deployed in both strands. (shrink)

This article aims to develop new conceptions of the psychosocial dynamics that drive the re-romanticization of domestic femininity in current financialized capitalism. Feminist scholars have described this heightened cultivation of mothering as a reparative move in response to irreconcilable tensions between cultural ideals of the ‘balancing mother’ and ‘lean-in femininity’. This article adds a materialist-psychosocial lens to these conceptions, to enhance understanding of what drives this craving for domestic femininity. Drawing on a free-association narrative interview study with couples in the (...) financial elite in the comparatively gender-egalitarian Norwegian context, I describe a specific emotional mechanism that resists democratization of gender in this specific group. The interviews reveal a felt need to cultivate ‘the human side of things’ at safe distance from the competitiveness of ‘hard-core finance’. The Nordic earner–carer model with its entwinement of care and professional pursuits, cultivated by the more self-fulfilment-oriented parts of the professional middle-class appears not only unwanted but threatening. In my analysis, I retrieve and develop a psychoanalytically inspired historical-materialist feminism, one that perceives of the gendered division of work as a split in modes of focusing human energy. I suggest that the resurgent cultivation of domestic femininity is nurtured by a self-energizing antagonism between competitive and relational practices. I further argue that the cultivation of domestic femininity in these financial couples points to a potential antagonism between the democratization of love and the specific anxiety-driven competitiveness to which this financial-elite group may be particularly susceptible. (shrink)