Down with Love: Feminist Critique and the New Ideologies of Work

The threat of paltry benefits or of losing our homes leaves us vulnerable to worse treatment: we, almost always, need a job more than a job needs us. Our entrance into work is unfree, and while we’re there, our time is not our own.

They wanted democratic control over the firm; they got employee stock ownership plans. They wanted less work, a life less dominated by demands of the boss; they got fewer jobs and work fragmented into gigs. They wanted less hierarchical trade unions; they got union-busting. They wanted freedom for creative pursuits; they got, in Fisher’s terms, “ma

Today’s ideal workers are cheery and “flexible,” networked and net-savvy, creative and caring. They love their work but hop from job to job like serial monogamists; their hours stretch long and the line between the home and the workplace blurs. Security, the watchword of the industrial ethic, where workers spent a lifetime at one job and earned a p

Indeed, if one imagines these two threads in capitalist culture—instrumental/rational and expressive/affective—as the strands in a rope twisted tighter and tighter, then the rope began to double up and curl back onto itself as rational calculations were proposed for the intimate sphere and, as I will show, expressive and affective approaches were p