Connective Labor as Emotional Vocabulary: Inequality, Mutuality, and the Politics of Feelings in Care-Work

Care-work research has been largely dominated by two accounts of emotions in care: as love/attachment or as “emotional labor.” These two accounts have led scholars to focus on questions of authenticity and motive—for example, how much do caregivers really feel for their charges?—rather than questions of skill, interaction, and sense making. The domination of these two accounts has also left the care-work field open to critiques from critical race theorists and disability scholars, who argue that existing research amplifies the “love rhetoric” that depoliticizes and de-skills the work of care; uses emotional care to make distinctions that naturalize racialized visions of care-work, for example, between “nurturant care and reproductive labor”; and is insufficiently attuned to intragender inequalities. These critics often advocate for the field to deemphasize emotion in care-work analyses. I propose instead that we address these issues by complicating and deepening our reckoning of the emotional dimensions of care. As part of this effort, I offer the term “connective labor” to capture the work of using emotion to see and reflect an understanding of the other, work that overlaps with but is not identical to notions of recognition, acknowledgment, and pastoral power. Relying on examples from interviews and observations with more than sixty care-work practitioners, I elaborate on the connective labor concept, review how the care-work literature treats emotion and the critiques thereof, and explore how connective labor affords us a different view of the politics, inequality, and mutuality of care.