Love and Struggle: Relationships, Emotional Labor and the Role of Love in Social Movements

• In Event: Tough Love: The Role of Love in Social Movements

Abstract

Communion plays an important yet under-recognized role in organizing. Close relationships facilitate trust, commitment and collective action, evoking a familial sense of belonging, mutual responsibility, and caring. bell hooks (1994) calls us to address the role of love in liberation struggles in order to reject domination. Yet in our most intimate moments we reproduce such social relations. This paper constructs a framework for exploring the passion, fervor and challenges of friendships, comradeships and romances within social movements. Mutual support, respect, commitment, disappointment, tough love, loss, and insecurity are conceived as emotional work involved in fighting, while embedded within, racist patriarchy.

hooks, b. (1994). Outlaw culture: Resisting representations. Routledge.

Presenter

• Erin Rose Ellison, University of California, Santa Cruz