Precarity and gender: What’s love got to do with it?

Abstract

This article examines the concept of precarity from a feminist perspective, focused on love and affective labour, critically addressing the gender inequalities of neoliberal capitalism. The romantic, heterosexual model of love, typical for modern Western societies, has been dismantled and criticized in various ways, leading to contradictory solutions, which include its annihilation, sublation and modification, as well as (rather conservative) efforts to preserve it. However, love – in its different versions, both as theory and in practice – still provides models and solutions, not only for the neoliberal labour market and new forms of exploitation and expropria-tion of care and affective labour, but also for revolutionary ideas and transformations, among both feminists and Marxi-sts. It thus requires a theory focusing on the sublation, rather than annihilation, of love’s past models. In my article I build such a perspective, signalling its potential for resistance and models for revolution in the times of neoliberal capitalism.