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

Because at some level, the mandate to love your work and be happy with it has a very simple and straightforward rationale: the dictate to work more. Love and happiness, these management gurus explain, are endless reservoirs of energy, concentration, and motivation. How do we make ourselves happy and in love with our job? Here is a typical response:... See more

The need for romantic love is thus imagined as so deeply entrenched in the structures of feminine subjectivity that women desire nothing so much as to be safely ensconced in the institutions, marriage and family, that will secure it. As de Beauvoir describes the woman in search of love and marriage, “she chooses to want her enslavement so ardently ... See more

To be competitive in this job market and to hold on to, let alone advance within, whatever job we might manage to land, we will need to adapt, in some way and to some degree, to the workplace-feeling rules and affective expectations that are increasingly being imposed up and down the labor hierarchy. Whether that means an employee will be required ... See more

Indeed, the literature on love and happiness at work is remarkable for its insistence on the identity of interests that will be generated, that both employers and employees will profit equally from its recipes for emotional reform and affective discipline. In what is perhaps a way to make good on the claim about mutual advantage, the health benefit... See more

The ideologies of love and happiness at work also function to depoliticize the employment relation by impeding the formation of collectivities and undermining relations of solidarity. One of the remarkable features of the various efforts to teach us how to love and be happy in our work is their advice to detach from other social relations. Stop all... See more