Dumb Bitch Disease

step two: contort absolutely all stimuli in my environment to relate to the my wound in some manner, ideally one which justifies random acts of unbridled aggression and vengeance

In a similar vein, Jules Joanne Gleeson and Kade Doyle Griffiths argue that since the family is an economic unit, critiquing the patriarchal or heteronormative values of family relationships is insufficient. They write that ‘not many will accept their children losing social advantages which they possess. The absence of alternative institutions of obligation ensures that this is felt as a binding burden: beyond the family, there are merely individuals.’ The challenge of the abolitionist project is to think of how the work that families do can be transformed and diffused rather than just abandoned, and how we can create other forms of bonds so that we can be more than ‘merely individuals’. We cannot replace family units with detached individuals, as individuals, both adults and children, cannot meet many of their own needs. In Gleeson and Griffiths’s words, ‘A purely negative effort to destroy the family would simply result in starving infants’, and, I would add, many lonely and sick adults.

Contrary to some articulations of family abolition, I argue that it cannot just mean the expansion of existing kinship models. Because the family is a fundamentally exclusionary social form, and one based on a zero-sum model of emotional bonds, we cannot just expect to abolish the family by including more people in our intimate sphere while leaving existing family relationships intact. Family abolition does not mean inviting more people over for family dinner. Because current and dominant models of kinship are based on scarcity and property, family abolition means that how we relate to our biological kin would change fundamentally, to the point where these relations would no longer be recognisable to us. They would become less emotionally charged and fraught.

The demand for family abolition must be articulated according to the specific form the family has taken in different historical phases. Whereas for Marx and Engels, ‘the family’ meant the emerging hegemony of bourgeois family values, the feminist writings of the sixties and seventies target the twentieth-century male-breadwinner model of a working-class family. As M. E. O’Brien shows, this family model was won through extensive working-class struggle, and therefore family abolitionists had to position themselves against the grain of the mainstream workers’ movement. Shifting models of (re) production have further unravelled the already limited access to the kinds of protection and emotional security that the mid-century white nuclear family model offered.

Today, a heightened dependence on commodified reproductive services indicates that the family has become increasingly precarious – something that parts of the left consider a worrying sign of neoliberalism’s impact on communities and human relationality. Arlie Russell Hochschild’s later writings, for example, articulate a socialist position that defends an expanded notion of the family, which now includes single parents and homosexual couples raising children. This new and inclusive notion of family, the argument goes, must be protected against the neoliberal commodification of human relationships. According to this logic, the family is under threat, and we need to find solutions that would protect family life. But as Sarah Brouillette points out, ‘The family has not been destroyed enough.’ A socialist politics that seeks to defend the family against the onslaught of neoliberal individualism has missed the fact that family values and familial labour are in fact essential conditions for the existence of such individualism.

What can account for the persistence of nuclear family models after the end of the family wage and the breadwinner model? One reason the family remains a hegemonic form, even as it has become more precarious and flexible than it was in the post-war period, is that we have failed to construct viable alternatives. The nuclear family appears increasingly unstable, as indicated by higher divorce rates and seemingly more inclusive norms surrounding family arrangements. This has led to a discourse of the family being in crisis. But no new model has taken its place, and access to care and resources often remains tied to membership in a family. People keep imagining familial relations as the source of the good life, despite how inadequate they are in terms of meeting the emotional and physical needs of most people.

In undoing the privatisation of family, we must also abolish the privatisation of feeling. The family under capitalism functions as a nexus of privatised emotional bonds. Emotional labour has to be refused for a feminist movement to be able to mobilise emotion in an emancipatory way. This refusal means doing emotion differently. I am not arguing against emotional care for other people. Rather, I want to articulate a politics in which we struggle against emotional reproduction as we know it – that is, tied up with forms of sociality and ideology that continually recreate and privilege privatised social bonds and hierarchically constituted subjectivities. Abolishing the family and gender involves the ungendering of emotion. It also involves moving away from niceness as the dominant good feeling, and accepting or even cultivating bad feeling. As a dominant family value of the bourgeoisie, niceness has a tendency to obscure social hierarchy, exploitation, and antagonisms. Niceness has a propensity to travel upwards in the social hierarchy, accumulating at the top and associating those at the bottom with bad feeling and emotional stigma. In order to abolish emotional labour and bourgeois family values, niceness has to be deprivileged as a socially desirable feeling. This might mean that we all have to live with some emotional discomfort, rather than allowing comfort to adhere to the most privileged. It would mean refusing the good life as we know it – a life of good jobs, home ownership, and proprietarian family relationships.”]

The invisibility of emotional labour is premised on a differential valuation of emotion based on gender. If women’s emotional expression is visible as emotion, it is because men’s emotional expressions tend to be interpreted as a statement of fact. Hochschild writes that when men express anger, ‘it is deemed “rational” or understandable anger, anger that indicates not weakness of character but deeply held conviction’. In contrast, ‘women’s feelings are not seen as a response to real events but as reflections of themselves as “emotional” women’. While women perform more of the invisible work of attending to the feelings of others, they are nonetheless deemed to be excessively emotional themselves. There is a circular association of femininity and emotion in which femininity is devalued because of its connection with emotionality while emotion becomes devalued when coded as feminine. This serves to empower those expressing the right kind of feelings while marginalising those who are thought to express improper, excessive, and feminised emotions. As men’s expressions of feeling are coded as rational rather than emotional, they have a greater claim to constructing a generally accepted view of the world. While women work harder to maintain social relations, men have greater control over the content of the world view created in those interactions. Women thus often work to affirm a construction of the world that persistently subordinates them. This serves the reproduction of gender hierarchy and women’s subordinate position, especially within heterosexual relationships.

Hochschild points out that the fact that women tend to form intimate connections with men differentiates gendered oppression from hierarchies based on race or class. This intimacy explains the primacy of emotional labour within gendered oppression, as this labour creates the social relations that perpetuate gendered hierarchy. While racialised and classed oppression and exploitation primarily play out at work or in public, gender is continually reproduced through intimate family relations. Emotional labour has been increasingly commodified since women started to enter waged work in greater numbers, but gendered oppression at work is distinctly shaped by relations formed in the private sphere. This gives heterosexual gender relations a distinct character, as the subordinated are tasked with forming intimate bonds of love with their oppressors and adapt their seemingly authentic emotional lives to the needs of those who subordinate them. Hochschild writes that since ‘men and women do try to love one another … the very closeness of the bond they accept calls for some disguise of subordination’. Emotional labour, then, not only reproduces more general forms of gendered exploitation and oppression but also presents oppression as love.

Men tend to feel more entitled to their partner’s nurturance than women do. This runs contrary to the received knowledge that women are more emotionally demanding in intimate relationships. According to this understanding of heterosexual love, men express their love differently, and it is unfair of women to demand full reciprocity. This idea mobilises the trope of men as emotionally inexpressive – what Stephanie Shields calls the paradigm of masculinity as self-control.66 Men can reinforce their power by withholding emotional expression. This also means that women often have to rely on other women for emotional support. According to Tamsin Wilton, heterosexual women’s friendships tend to function as support systems that serve to uphold male dominance by naturalising men’s lack of emotional reciprocity. Such support systems aim to minimise the emotional harms of heterosexual relationships without challenging the source of that harm. Friendship can therefore function as a source of emotional reproduction, which serves to shore up the very relationships that continually marginalise those friendships and posits them as less important than romantic love and family bonds.”]