Made tea for your partner today? Helped a vulnerable neighbour? You may have been performing what Alva Gotby calls “emotional reproduction” – the caring and emotional work we do to create good feeling amid life under capitalism, but that also plays a part in reproducing that very system and its norms. While it may feel like love, such work can be exhausting, unjustly organised and heavily gendered.

Inspired by Wages for Housework and sharing common ground with thinkers such as Sophie Lewis, Alva reflects on the often invisible, isolating and unevenly distributed emotional work that we perform to help each other withstand capitalism – and that keeps us attached to the status quo. It’s a discussion that raises crucial questions. We ask: is anything left of love after such an analysis? What does this mean for altruism? And how can we think critically about care while still valuing it? It’s not that we must stop caring, Alva explains; instead, we need wholesale reform of the social relations within which we care. Seeking “equality” within the norms of romantic coupledom and the insular nuclear family will only get us so far.

Plus: what about the mobilisation of another emotion – hate – in the so-called manosphere? And is the “trad wife” a response, of sorts, to the same crisis that Alva identifies? A provocative conversation, reflecting on love, private life, emotion, family, care and capitalism.

Guest: Alva Gotby; Hosts: Rosie Hancock, Alexis Hieu Truong; Executive Producer: Alice Bloch; Sound Engineer: David Crackles; Music: Joe Gardner; Artwork: Erin Aniker

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Episode Resources

By Alva Gotby

• They Call It Love: The Politics of Emotional Life (Verso, 2023)
• Feeling at Home: Transforming the Politics of Housing (Verso, 2025)

From the Sociological Review Foundation

• Uncommon Sense episodes on: Care, with Bev Skeggs; Emotion, with Billy Holzberg; Burnout, with Hannah Proctor; Joy, with Akwugo Emejulu
• Book review of “They Call it Love” – Patrycja Sosnowska-Buxton (2023)
• Contributions, conjunctures and care: Revisiting Formations of Class and Gender – journal article by Helen Wood and Jo Littler (2025)
• Migrants' Regular Army of Labour – journal article by Sara Farris (2015)

Further resources

• “The Managed Heart” – Arlie Hochschild
• “Formations of Class and Gender” – Bev Skeggs
• “The Feminine Mystique” – Betty Friedan
• “The Promise of Happiness” – Sara Ahmed
• “Abolish the Family” – Sophie Lewis
• “Radical Intimacy” – Sophie K Rosa
• “The Mental Load: A Feminist Comic” – Emma
• “Wages Against Housework” – Sylvia Federici
• “I cannot hold appropriate space for these bizarre self-care templates” – Shon Faye (on DAZED)
• “The Mothers Who Fought To Radically Reimagine Welfare” – Gene Demby (on NRP)
• “I'm a professional cuddler - let me tell you why a hug feels so good” – Danny Fullbrook (on BBC News)

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