Al Owski’s Reviews > They Call It Love: The Politics of Emotional Life > Status Update
Al Owski
is on page 68 of 192
“While the capacity for motherhood appears to be the essential function of women's bodies, it is in fact unevenly distributed. Many women lack the ability to bear children. But motherhood itself should also be understood as a profoundly social category rather than just a natural capacity of bodies. As Roberts has shown, enslaved black women were excluded from the nineteenth-century construction of femininity.”
— Jun 06, 2024 07:45AM
Like flag
Al’s Previous Updates
Al Owski
is on page 148 of 192
“the politics of reclaiming material wealth cannot do without a focus on the emotional dimensions of ownership and belonging, and how these need to change in the process of creating more liveable futures. Radical politics has to include an emphasis on emotional reproduction and social life, and we must assume that our current forms of sociality will be transformed within the process of transforming society.”
— Aug 30, 2024 04:33AM
Al Owski
is on page 142 of 192
“Alan Sears notes that the current organisation of waged work, together with increased pressures on families to provide unwaged care work, leaves little time for pleasurable interactions with friends. The relatively low level of commodification of friendship compared to romantic or familial attachments means that friendship is currently being increasingly marginalised in our lives."
— Aug 30, 2024 04:31AM
Al Owski
is on page 136 of 192
“Race is not a static thing but involves processes of racialisation. Racialisation marks certain groups as worthless, which facilitates their constitution as surplus populations — groups excluded from the labour force but simultaneously necessary for the capitalist economy and creating competition between workers.”
— Aug 29, 2024 03:32PM
Al Owski
is on page 135 of 192
“moving beyond the family, we can draw inspiration from the African American tradition of multiple forms of parenting. .... these models are not exclusively about the care of one's own children but about a form of guardianship of the community as a whole. Other-mothering, the practice of being an extra parent of someone else's child, can become community other-mothering...”
— Aug 29, 2024 03:29PM
Al Owski
is on page 134 of 192
“The goal should be to make eldercare and intergenerational solidarity generally accessible, thus counteracting the privatisation of care within kinship structures as well as the abusive and exploitative relations of care within many private and state facilities. It is essential that we move away from a model where having children becomes an investment in one's own future access to care.”
— Aug 29, 2024 09:39AM
Al Owski
is on page 134 of 192
“The politics of childcare and eldercare fit together through a more generalised logic of heterosexual temporality and genealogy. As Kath Weston points out, the fear of ageing and dying alone may be a motivating factor behind the decision to have children. Family is one of the few structures that encourage intergenerational care, thus offering some support in an increasingly age-stratified society.”
— Aug 29, 2024 04:01AM
Al Owski
is on page 133 of 192
“gentrification threatens the forms of working-class community and solidarity that have provided a social and material safety net for elderly people outside the nuclear family, but such sociality can be recreated. The project of queering eldercare can look to less individualised practices of care and support for inspiration for how to go beyond our currently privatised models of sociality and reproduction”
— Aug 29, 2024 03:59AM
Al Owski
is on page 133 of 192
“The elderly have to be removed and made invisible in order for ideals of the productive subject, and the family as the reproduction of life, to become sustainable. Moreover, the social valuation of waged work serves to devalue the lives of the elderly and others who are not productive within the capitalist economy. Old age is made socially invisible...”
— Aug 29, 2024 03:58AM
Al Owski
is on page 133 of 192
“eldercare needs to be central to rethinking models of reproduction. Ageing, illness, disability, and death imply a loss of individual autonomy, and can therefore challenge ideals of liberal subjectivity and possessive individualism. Yet ageing is conspicuously absent from much political discourse, including on the left.”
— Aug 29, 2024 03:57AM
Al Owski
is on page 133 of 192
“But parenting practices which exist in heterosexual families, such as adoption, surrogacy, and reliance on nannies and childcare workers, already implicitly question whether a child can only have one mother. A queer critique of reproductive labour can point to these unstable and invisible aspects of the institu- tion of heterosexual reproduction.”
— Aug 29, 2024 03:54AM
