Professor Anna Secor anna.j.secor@durham.ac.uk
Professor
Taking the scene of ‘The Great Resignation’ in the USA and UK (2021‐2023) as its starting point, this paper explores how love ‐ with its promises and disappointments, its nurture and its destruction ‐ is activated in relation to the ideologies of work that prop up capitalism’s world. Through critical engagement with the popular maxims of ‘do what you love’ and ‘work won’t love you back’, we trace the weave of love and work in the context of predominantly (but not only) high-status, employment-based work within the unevenly gendered, racialised and sexualised labour markets in the USA and the UK. We show how the call to love work or to recognise work’s lack, while ostensibly antithetical, both offer a key to understanding the promise and problem of work’s love. We argue that work’s love is productive of the capitalist world and the violences that accompany it and foreclose alternative possibilities. Through a critique of Arendt’s theorisation of the world, we conclude by showing how love and work are central to geographical imaginaries of worldliness, and to both the rejection and possibility of other worlds after (or within) colonial-capitalism’s abolition. Our analysis thus demonstrates how affect and ideology ‐ that is, modes of feeling and forms of consciousness that (re)produce the material relations of capitalism’s world ‐ at once reverse into and continue one another in work’s love.
Secor, A. J., Ruez, D., & Cockayne, D. (2024). Love and Work: Affect and Ideology Beyond ‘The Great Resignation’. New Formations, 112, 94-112. https://doi.org/10.3898/newf%3A112.05.2024
Journal Article Type | Article |
---|---|
Acceptance Date | Oct 15, 2024 |
Online Publication Date | Mar 1, 2024 |
Publication Date | Mar 1, 2024 |
Deposit Date | Nov 11, 2024 |
Publicly Available Date | Nov 12, 2024 |
Journal | New Formations |
Print ISSN | 0950-2378 |
Electronic ISSN | 0950-2378 |
Publisher | Lawrence Wishart |
Peer Reviewed | Peer Reviewed |
Volume | 112 |
Pages | 94-112 |
DOI | https://doi.org/10.3898/newf%3A112.05.2024 |
Public URL | https://durham-repository.worktribe.com/output/3091746 |
Accepted Journal Article
(455 Kb)
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