Allison J.

Pugh

Connective Labor as Emotional Vocabulary: Inequality,

Mutuality, and the Politics of Feelings in Care-Work

B etty Sinclair was a forty-seven-year-old home health aide who immi-

grated to New York City from Guyana in 2011.1 She worked seventy-
two hours a week for two different agencies, taking care of the elderly
and infirm in their homes, preparing food, bathing, dressing, and accompa-
nying them outside. Much of her work was tactile and hands-on, managing
basic bodily needs for those who could not care for themselves. But it was her
emotional skills that earned her the reputation as someone who could handle
the “hard” cases, those who were openly rude or disrespectful—about 10–
15 percent of those whom she took care of, she estimated. The hard cases
were often just unhappy, Betty explained to me in her lilting cadence, as
we sat in a café after her latest shift. Many of them had lost their mobility
and, with it, their autonomy. “So you better understand what really hap-
pening to them, or why they behaving like that,” she said. “And then when
they be comfortable, they open up to you, and then you will then get a good
relationship.”
The care-work literature does not have a good vocabulary to capture
these emotional dimensions of care. It is not that the field has ignored emo-
tion or even the emotional part of being a home health aide (e.g., Diamond
2009; Stacey 2011). But research has been largely dominated by two

The idea for this article originated at the 2017 Global Carework Summit in Lowell, MA; my
thanks to the organizers and audience there, as well as at the 2021 Social Life of Care confer-
ence at the University of Cambridge and the 2021 Sociology of Emotions Section Session on
“Emotions and Inequality” at the ASA annual meetings. Arlie Hochschild, Rachel Sherman,
Steve Lopez, and Carrie Lane have been helpful as this project has evolved, but their munifi-
cence should not be taken to presume their agreement with the arguments here. Thanks are
also due to the editors of the special issue, three anonymous reviewers, and to Miranda Out-
man for excellent editorial assistance, as well as to Ira Bashkow, Jennifer Cyd Rubenstein, and
Denise Walsh for comments on earlier drafts. Genevieve Charles, Jaime Hartless, and Allister
Pilar Plater provided vital research help. This project was supported by National Science Foun-
dation grant no. 1755419 as well as the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences
and the Berggruen Institute.
1
All names and some identifying details have been changed for confidentiality purposes.

Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, volume 49, number 1, Autumn 2023.
© 2023 The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. Published by The University of Chicago Press.
https://doi.org/10.1086/725837
142 y Pugh

accounts of emotions in care—as love/attachment or as “emotional labor”

(Hochschild 2012, xi). These two accounts have led scholars to focus on
questions of authenticity and motive—for example, how much do caregiv-
ers really feel for their charges?—rather than questions of skill, interaction,
and sense making. Furthermore, the domination of these two accounts has
left the care-work field open to critiques from critical race theorists and dis-
ability scholars, who argue that existing research amplifies the “love rheto-
ric” that depoliticizes and de-skills the work of care; uses emotional care to
make distinctions that naturalize racialized visions of care-work, for exam-
ple, between nurturant care and reproductive labor; and is insufficiently at-
tuned to intragender inequalities, including the way women exploit caregiv-
ers and the way women caregivers can exploit others. These critics often
advocate for the field to deemphasize emotion in care-work analyses (Hop-
kins et al. 2007).
Rather than turning our gaze away from emotion, however, I argue that
we can remedy these problems by instead turning toward it: by complicat-
ing and deepening our reckoning of the emotional dimensions of care. As
part of this effort, I offer the term “connective labor” to capture the partic-
ular work of using emotion to see and reflect an understanding of the other
(Pugh 2022a, 2022b). This work is performed by diverse practitioners in
many different occupations, including those not normally associated with
care, but it plays a central role in care-work (Giordano 2014). I contend that
diving deeper into the emotional sense making that is part of care-work frees
us from the trap of love rhetoric, renders the work visible even when it is
performed in jobs not normally considered nurturing, and enables us to
grapple with the inequalities that shape and are shaped by care-work, while
also recognizing its transformative potential. “We should be able to value
relationship without reducing care to the warm and fuzzy,” writes Mignon
Duffy (2011, 140). “We need a vocabulary that recognizes the relational
components of care work and is not constrained by the gendered discourses
of morality and motherhood” (140). I propose to contribute to that vocab-
ulary with connective labor.
In what follows, I elaborate on the concept of connective labor, relying
on examples from an ongoing book project involving interviews and obser-
vations with 108 informants, including more than sixty care-work practi-
tioners. I review how the care-work literature treats emotion and the cri-
tiques thereof, and I explore how the concept of connective labor affords
us a different view of the politics, inequality, and mutuality of care. Connec-
tive labor is just the first in what I hope is a series of other contributions that
I call upon scholars to make to expand our understanding of how emotion
works in care.
 S I G N S Autumn 2023 y 143

Connective labor and care-work

To introduce connective labor, I start not with an iconic illustration, such as
a particularly astute emotional reflection offered by a therapist or professional
empath but, instead, with a fairly mundane example to show not how rarified
this labor is or how perfect must be its deployment but, indeed, how it counts
even in more prosaic or partial guises. Betty, the home health-care aide and
hard cases specialist, told me a story of an aged couple she had tended recently,
where the man was officially her patient while his wife was healthy and well.
The woman was routinely so disrespectful to new aides that they would quit
every day, until finally the agency sent Betty.
First, she called ahead to introduce herself, as she always does. “So the
wife was like ‘everybody who calling always calling and asking for Mark,
Mark,’ ” Betty said, remembering being a bit taken aback. “And I was like
‘she rude,’ but I didn’t take it in.” Betty arrived at the house, and when
she brought Mark to the breakfast table, she asked him what he would like
to eat. “And he told me, and then I asked the wife, I said, [Willa], you need
the same thing?’ And she turned and she looked at me [in surprise].”
That simple question opened the door, and a few days later, Willa asked
Betty to sit down and talk; in their chat, Betty told the woman she had been
rude, and Willa explained herself. “And then I realized the reason why she and
the aides had been getting into a problem, because they’re preparing for the
husband alone,” Betty said. “She said ‘they’re coming into my home and sit-
ting down in here, and they kind of give me [just] a cup of water, you know,
and things like that get to me.’” Despite Willa’s lament, however, in this ac-
count, the aides were definitely doing their jobs, as they were not paid to care
for her. But Betty could see the woman’s viewpoint. “[She and her husband
were] eating the same thing, they live in the same apartment, they’re sleeping
in the same bed. And after none of the aides never offer her any breakfast, she’s
got to get up and go and make the breakfast.” Betty continued feeding Willa as
well as Mark, in violation of the agency’s policy. “[My supervisor] said ‘Betty,
you’re training the client bad,’” Betty said, but then he followed up with “but
I like your attitude because this is how you keep clients.” Betty ended up stay-
ing there for five months, saying “the wife didn’t want me to go”; before she
left, she trained another aide, and that person ended up remaining with the
couple for years.
This story has several emotional dimensions to it. On the wife’s side,
we hear her anger stemming from expectations of service, possibly even
racialized deference: her rage at her house being invaded—“they’re coming
into my home”—and not being given that which her husband received. But
Willa also clearly felt excluded by the aides, who rendered her invisible. For
Betty’s part, we can certainly hear the purposeful management of feeling that
144 y Pugh

Arlie Hochschild (2012) terms “emotional labor,” as when the wife is rude
on the phone but Betty “doesn’t take it in.” But we also hear something else:
Betty’s emotional fluency, her capacity to read the other’s feelings, to take
their perspective seriously—“so you better understand what really happen-
ing to them”—and to communicate it back to them, in her words and ac-
tions. Betty uses emotions as a sense-making tool, to understand the other
from clues both discursive and bodily (Otis 2011); from these raw materials
she then conveys to them that they are understood, through practices as sim-
ple as making peas and rice.
These interactions serve as a kind of witnessing, a mirroring of another
person that can generate dignity and be transformative, for the giver and
the given. To be sure, mirroring can also do harm, as when it communicates
misrecognition or stigma (Fleming, Lamont, and Welburn 2012). But Betty
let the wife know that she saw her from her perspective, a gift of visibility that
worked to calm the wife down. In seeing her, Betty helped to convey—and
in so conveying she helped to constitute—a shared humanity.
I define “connective labor” as the creating and sharing of an emotional ac-
knowledgment, through a process of seeing or reflecting another person, in
order to create value. While this kind of work can be found in many occupa-
tions beyond care, when it is deployed in care-work, the value created is in con-
tributing to the physical and mental well-being of another. Thus, connective
labor in care-work has a unique moral valence. Connective labor is made up of
four components: first, empathic listening, in which workers cultivate a shared
emotional understanding of someone else’s perspective (Clark 1997); second,
often, but not always, emotion management, because caregivers cannot al-
ways just let loose with their own visceral reactions in the clinic or the class-
room; third, witnessing, with which workers reflect back—through words
and/or actions—what they see of the other person; and, finally, acknowledg-
ment, or the receiving of this witnessing, since following Berenice Fisher and
Joan Tronto (1990), I consider these processes interactive, in which the client,
patient, or student helps to co-construct the meaning of the encounter. Con-
nective labor is both a skill and an interaction, then; it included not just Betty’s
capacity to read the other but also the collaboration between Betty and the
wife to create meaning out of their exchange.
Practitioners across a host of different occupations, from therapists to
teachers to physicians to sex workers, testify to the power of connective la-
bor.2 When one Oakland middle-school student known for behavior

2
I use data from this project primarily as illustration for theoretical argument and so do not
go into detail about methods and sampling here; please see Pugh (forthcoming) for more in-
formation on the project’s methodology.
 S I G N S Autumn 2023 y 145

problems started acting out, for example, the school knew to call upon
Mutulu Acoli, a special education teacher there. “Usually, like if I see him
like that, I know I can go up to him and stop him, even if he’s, like, torn
through a couple other adults,” Mutulu told me. “I’m like, ‘nope. Look
at me. Who am I? You know I got you, so listen to me. What’s going on,
and let’s talk so we can get you back in class.’ ”
For Mutulu, “I got you” meant that he knew the boy well enough to be
aware of the backstory, to realize the boy had a rationale for acting out, even
as he worked to get him back on track. “Basically we have the trust that I’m
not trying to just say he did something bad without reasoning, and I’m also
going to be behind him in how he’s feeling,” Mutulu said. He saw the boy
as a whole person, not just as a problem kid, and he reflected that vision
back to the boy; because the boy felt seen, that meant Mutulu could reach
him when other people could not.
As part of this project, I also spent six months observing hospital chap-
lains in training. One day they were sharing with each other what it meant
to them to simply be present with patients. One chaplain, Erin, told the
others that she had been called to a patient’s bedside after he had been in-
tubated, “even though he really didn’t want to be intubated, and the doc-
tors were saying he would die if he was extubated, and that he might die
even if he was intubated,” she said. “And I was just sitting there with him
trying to be with him, reading his body signals, and he was full of anger,
and screaming ‘Why, why, why’ through his tube, and he couldn’t really
write because he was on too many pain meds.”
At that moment, Erin said, she grabbed a box of Kleenex and gave it to
him, telling him to throw it against the wall and that it would make him feel
better. “And then I reached out my hand, and I thought he was going to
hold my hand, and he ended up grabbing me by the arm and pulling me
in and holding on to me for fifteen minutes. And the next time I saw him
he was not intubated, and not dying,” she paused to make the sign of a prayer,
“and he said, ‘There is nothing like being in the worst moment of your life
and being met with comfort by someone you don’t even know, when you
feel like someone understands you.’ ”
Teachers and chaplains inhabit very different social locations than do sex
workers or home health-care aides—even highly valued ones like Betty.
Careful scholarly work (e.g., Cranford 2020) has documented the relevance
of those contexts for the care people are able to give. By drilling down to
the emotional components of connective labor, however, this project
chronicles some surprising similarities across these occupations, despite
their dramatic differences in power, autonomy, training, and pay. As I
argue below, we also gain a new vantage point on the role of inequality
146 y Pugh

in care-work. While these examples allow us to elaborate on what emo-

tional sense making has in common across settings, however, none of them
should be taken to mean that these contexts are not consequential for
organizing, working conditions, or forging alliances between workers and
recipients.3
Stories from the chaplains, teachers, and healthcare practitioners I spoke
to capture something of the transformative influence that caregivers feel when
they use connective labor in their work. In an echo of what Michel Foucault
(1982, 782) has dubbed “pastoral power,” they harness the intimate under-
standing of another, or “guidance through knowledge of people’s secrets”
(Cook and Brunton 2015, 546) to the aim of salvation or, in secular con-
texts, mental and physical well-being. Foucault usefully suggests a cultural/
emotional dimension to this power—not just the fact of one person’s vulner-
ability but how the pastor can make the other feel better about their vulner-
ability—and characteristically, he argues that the power acts not just upon
the flock but also upon the pastor, making them feel responsible. Other
scholars have emphasized the relationality of such power (e.g., Mayes
2009), noting that its effects are mutually constituted in the moment of
consultation, what Nikolas Rose (2001, 10) calls the “intense bi-directional
affective entanglements between all parties to the encounter” that he warns
“blur the boundaries of coercion and consent.” Pastoral power combines
two kinds of Foucauldian power: the fostering of self-governing subjects
and a disciplining surveillance, making it both individualizing and totalizing,
a blend Foucault calls “tricky” (1982, 782; see also Illouz 2007).
These twin capacities of connective labor—to cultivate the individual into
being and to curtail their individuality—are also prominent in scholarly dis-
cussions of recognition (Honneth 1996; Butler 2011). A comprehensive
discussion of the voluminous scholarship on recognition is not possible here.
Much of it, however, focuses on its political implications, and in doing so,
many scholars have decided—as did Axel Honneth—that the emotional rec-
ognition of the other, or what Honneth (1996, 92) calls “love,” was a private
matter. Feminist versions take intimate recognition more seriously (Connolly
2010). Judith Butler (2011) argues that recognition involves some inter-
personal violence, in that it requires that one is legible to the other; thus,
it insists that the other fit into preexisting notions and identities. Some
scholars argue that some of the domination threatened here might be atten-
uated by moving from recognition to acknowledgment, which does not

3
Thanks to an anonymous reviewer for highlighting this point.
 S I G N S Autumn 2023 y 147

presume to know the other quite so well and so acquiesces to uncertainty

(Oliver 2001; Giordano 2014).
As a form of emotional acknowledgment, connective labor both overlaps
with and is different from the recognition that grips these scholars, who so
often focus on identities or groups as opposed to emotional perceptions and
priorities. These commentators nonetheless highlight some of the power,
and danger, of connective labor in care, to be found in the process of reading
the other. On the one hand, in a caring relation, the carer tries to set aside
their own biases and perceptions in order to more fully understand the other;
as Simone Weil puts it (1977, 51; as cited in Noddings 2010), “the soul emp-
ties itself of all its own contents in order to receive into itself the being it is
looking at, just as he is, in all his truth.” On the other hand, if carers are
not wholly successful in what is surely an impossible task, they can rely
on dehumanizing images that might then be internalized by those who
are read (Fanon 1967). We cannot fully explore the risks and benefits
of this sort of emotional reading, however, if we do not have a name for
it, and right now it is elided by the primary accounts of emotion in care-
work.

Care-work and emotion

Care-work scholars have been confounded by the question of how to talk
about emotions. Many researchers seem to view emotions as either “attach-
ment,” when caregivers or recipients feel love or affection for the other in
an ongoing relationship, or “emotional labor,” when people manage their
emotions to produce the “right” feeling in themselves and others. This bi-
nary seems to hinge on whether or not caregivers “really” feel for their cli-
ents and patients; it makes research priorities out of such issues as moti-
vation, authenticity, and alienation. In addition, neither of these ideas leave
much room for thinking of emotions as perception tools—for example, that
workers might be able to use empathy to understand and reflect others with-
out necessarily loving them nor striving to gin up affection or enthusiasm.
These issues, central to care work debates, contribute to the perceived inequal-
ities of care scholarship.

Attachment
Some care-work scholars point to attachment as an integral part of care. For
example, Francesca M. Cancian and Stacey J. Oliker (2000, 2) define “care-
giving” as “feelings of affection and responsibility combined with actions that
provide responsively for an individual’s personal needs or well-being, in a face-
to-face relationship.” Attachment brings with it the motivation necessary for
148 y Pugh

care, some scholars argue (e.g., Himmelweit 1999). As Paula England notes
in her review (2005), scholars imply that care is better when the practitioner
harbors feelings of affection for their client or patient, instead of being wholly
motivated by money. Writes Susan Himmelweit (1999, 29): “A carer will
not succeed in delivering good care unless he appears to the person being
cared for (the caree) to be motivated by genuine concern for his well-being.”
Yet, we might posit that the issue here is not whether caregivers feel affec-
tion and love for their clients and patients, since such feelings often (but not
always) arise in care situations. As one home-care worker told Jane Aronson
and Sheila M. Neysmith (1996, 65), “They might say, ‘Well, try not to get
involved.’ Well, you cannot not get involved. If you’re going in there reg-
ularly and you’re seeing the situation, you become part of that person. It’s
very hard not to become . . . involved, you know.” Instead, it is how cen-
tral those feelings are to their work: does their care count as care, regardless
of their personal attachment to the care recipient? Even more important, what
is emotion in care if not attachment?

Emotional labor
The term “emotional labor” is dotted across the landscape of care-work re-
search, as scholars depict caregivers marshaling the “right” emotion within
themselves or eliciting it in their charges as part of their jobs (e.g., Milligan
2005). As Hochschild (2012, 7) defines it, emotion work “requires one to
induce or suppress feeling in order to sustain the outward countenance that
produces the proper state of mind in others”; she reserves the term “emo-
tional labor” for that work conducted for a wage, cautioning that workers
risk feeling alienated from their very selves when they control emotions for
their employers. “The funeral parlor director, the doctor, the complaints clerk,
the day-care worker all apply a sense of ‘should’ to the situated feelings that
emerge in the course of a week,” Hochschild writes (1979, 572). As a nor-
mative arena, replete with dictates about who ought to care and how they
ought to do it, there are plenty of “shoulds” in care-work, including how
people should feel.
Furthermore, many researchers argue that part of good care is “creating
in others feelings of well-being or affirmation” (Wharton 2009, 149); a nurs-
ing home resident can be clean and tidy, but if they do not feel like they are
and are anxious about that, care has on some level not been fully accom-
plished (Fisher and Tronto 1990). To the extent that caregivers actively con-
trol and modify their own emotions to generate feelings of well-being in
their clients, their efforts surely involve emotional labor.
While the original meaning of emotional labor was quite limited to this
sense of oft-alienated emotion management, it has since expanded dramatically
 S I G N S Autumn 2023 y 149

for some scholars. Since writing The Managed Heart, Hochschild (2012,
2013) has sought to broaden the concept of emotional labor to mean all
kinds of work involving emotions, calling attention to its outsourcing and
what happens when it is performed for a wage. As Rachel Sherman (2015,
176 n. 2) notes, emotional labor “is now widely used to describe all kinds
of commodified emotional work, although this was not its original meaning”
(see also Lopez 2006; Cain 2013). While some scholars continue to deploy
the term in its initial definition (e.g., Kelly 2016), others’ expansion of the
term to mean a much broader range of emotional behaviors is surely an in-
dicator of how much researchers find they need to be able to think and talk
across that range. Yet while an umbrella term is useful, we must also expand
our retinue of concepts to specify practices within the range, of which emo-
tion management and attachment are but two components.4

Other kinds of emotional work

Many care jobs are drenched in feeling. In the absence of a more variegated
map of emotions in care-work, some scholars have tried various ways to in-
corporate emotions; a number have coined their own terms. Some have sim-
ply intimated that care-work involves “genuine” emotional engagement that
is not quite attachment nor emotional labor (Folbre and Wright 2012; Ar-
menia 2018), although the word “genuine” suggests that they are still fo-
cused on its authenticity. Cancian (2000, 147) gets a little more specific with
“emotional care,” which requires “a personal relationship, a flexible response
to an individual’s unique needs, and an element of egalitarian ‘listening’ to
the wishes of the care receiver, instead of imposing authoritative ‘help.’”
Following Cancian, Steven Lopez (2006) has complained that the domi-
nance of the concept of emotional labor has drowned out other notions
of how organizations might manage worker emotions; he posits the con-
cept of “organized emotional care,” when firms encourage relationship build-
ing and emotional honesty between caregivers and care recipients. Kathleen
Lynch (2007, 560) identifies “love labor” as that which “emotionally . . .
involves listening, affirming, supporting and challenging, as well as identify-
ing with someone and supporting her or him emotionally at times of dis-
tress,” which echoes others’ definitions of empathic caring (Giordano 2014).
Similarly, among those who study personal service—a domain not always
accepted within care-work (see below)—authors have identified “emotional
service labor” to capture a similar kind of sense making through reflection.

4
For clarity, from this point forward I refer to the more limited definition as “emotion
management” and the umbrella term as “emotional labor.”
150 y Pugh

In her study of personal trainers, Jennifer Smith Maguire (2001, 393) writes,
“the ability to cultivate different styles and then to effectively intuit the most
appropriate style for the client are part of the relational adaptability of per-
sonal training.” Sometimes scholars seem to tiptoe around the notion of
emotional experiences not captured by existing terminology, offering up
lists such as “the emotions, the smiles and eye contact, the time for conver-
sations big and small, the gentle touches and gestures” but not organizing
the uses of emotion in a patterned way (Henry 2018, 342; see also Cain
2013). These scholars attempt to make a space for emotions not captured
by the two dominant approaches.
The reign of attachment and emotional management as paradigms gov-
erning how care scholars talk about feeling has led researchers to focus on
the presence and purity of that feeling, through registers such as motivation,
authenticity, and alienation (e.g., Grant, Morales, and Sallaz 2009). For ex-
ample, researchers have identified a prisoner of love framework (Folbre 2001)
in which the intrinsic rewards of altruism bind caregivers to jobs that are
undercompensated (Lightman and Kevins 2019). While altruism may be dis-
tinct from emotion, instead linked simply to a “concern for the well-being
of care recipients” (Folbre and Wright 2012, 1), the line between such
concern and feelings of care or love is actually a bit blurry in scholarship.
In England’s influential (2005) review, for example, her discussion of the
prisoner of love model ranges over both “altruistic preferences” and emo-
tional bonds that “put care workers in a vulnerable position,” which she
terms the “emotional hostage effect” (390). Research into emotion man-
agement and care has focused on its impact on worker alienation and engage-
ment. While interactive caring jobs do not always involve emotion manage-
ment (Wharton 2009), and emotion management does not always lead to
feelings of alienation or inauthenticity (Orzechowicz 2008), when they do,
such feelings are linked to depression (Erickson and Wharton 1997). These
long-standing areas of research have come under some criticism of late, how-
ever, leading some to eschew emotional analysis outright.

Critiques of emotions in care-work literature

Feminists identified and excavated the work of care decades ago to bring to
the fore of scholarly analysis an enterprise that was undervalued, invisible,
and mostly performed by women. Inequality was central to this intellectual
project. Yet more recent interventions by critical race theorists and disability
scholars have critiqued existing research for shoring up a “love rhetoric” that
depoliticizes and de-skills the work of care for naturalizing racialized distinc-
tions of care-work by definitionally excluding and demarcating the work of
 S I G N S Autumn 2023 y 151

people of color and for being insufficiently attuned to intragender inequalities,

including the way women exploit caregivers and the way women caregivers
can exploit others. At the heart of these critiques of the care-work scholar-
ship has been its treatment of emotions.

Critique 1: Emotions de-skill and depoliticize care

Scholars take issue with the centrality of sentiment in care-work scholar-
ship, or what Raka Ray and Seemin Qayum (2009, 25) have dubbed the
“rhetoric of love,” a discursive net draped over relations among domestic
workers, their charges, and their employers. Such rhetoric can make those
relations meaningful, as they find among workers in India, but care-workers
pay a heavy price. Mary Romero and Nancy Pérez (2016, 179) note that
love rhetoric obscures the skill involved in care-work, suppresses recogni-
tion of care as a collective responsibility, justifies the exclusion of care-work
from labor regulation, enables exploitation and abuse, and “blurs the inter-
sectional issues of inequality in the labor and focuses solely on gender,”
thereby obscuring race, class, and gender inequalities (see also Ray and
Qayum 2009; Saraceno 2010).
Romero and Pérez also critique the theme of emotional labor as essen-
tializing, although they appear to define it as attachment. “Here [in emotional
labor], love is frequently constructed as a central component of care work;
and all too often, the ability to excel is tied to workers as mothers with the
implication that they have a cultural propensity toward family, babies, and
care work,” they write (2016, 179), arguing that the emphasis on love may
serve to bolster the status of motherhood but at the cost of shoring up inequal-
ities in care-work. In this argument, emotions defang care-work of its capacity
to address its intersectional inequalities.

Critique II: Emotions reinscribe racialized divisions of care-work

Care-work scholars have engaged in definitional debates from the field’s
inception. Some have sought distinctions between face-to-face work and
caring support such as cleaning, with concepts such as “nurturant and non-
nurturant” care (Duffy 2005, 78), “nurturant and reproductive labor”
(Dwyer 2013, 395), or “nonpractical relational work” and “practical tasks”
(Aronson and Neysmith 1996, 68). These distinctions can be particularly
helpful for highlighting the relational component of care-work that is not
generally trained or compensated by employers or reimbursed by insurers.
Indeed, Duffy’s (2011) comprehensive analysis of care-work employment
patterns suggests that the relational element of care has become increasingly
devalued as it has become more feminized and commodified; she calls for
recognizing relational labor without ignoring other aspects of care.
152 y Pugh

Yet while scholars have used these distinctions to analyze race- and
class-based pay gaps (Budig, Hodges, and England 2019) or track the ra-
cial/ethnic and gendered composition of these jobs (Duffy 2011), critics
have argued that these categories themselves foster inequality among women
(Roberts 1997). Distinctions between work that involves face-to-face nur-
ture and that involving backstage support sound impartial, but they are far
from race- or class-neutral; as Dorothy Roberts (1997, 71) contends, they
follow the separation of “spiritual” and “menial” labor or “dirty” work that
once characterized the unpaid work of privileged white women as house-
wives and the domestic labor done by nonwhite, immigrant, and working-
class women (Glenn 2010). Furthermore, these categories do not simply
reflect actual distinctions in the field, these scholars note, as care jobs often
resist such neat categorization, mixing cleaning and interacting, cooking and
nurture (Anderson and Hughes 2010; Lutz 2011). In contrast, for exam-
ple, Evelyn Nakano Glenn (2010) offers a tripartite definition: direct care
(which includes emotional and physical care), maintaining the physical sur-
roundings, and fostering people’s social connections.
Drawing symbolic boundaries may seem neutral or simply descriptive, but
it in fact enacts distinctions that rely on preexisting cultural notions suffused
with normative meaning. These cultural meanings amplify existing inequal-
ities of race/ethnicity, class, citizenship, ability, and age, among others. They
sometimes make for counterintuitive groupings (Budig, Hodges, and En-
gland 2019) while drawing firm boundaries that critics argue are not al-
ways so cut and dried. These differences are messier in actuality: Betty, the
home health aide, both cooks and connects emotionally. That the defini-
tional distinctions are not inevitable suggests that whatever their analytic
purpose, their accomplishment is in part the making and remaking of these
inequalities.

Critique III: Emotions hide the mutuality of care

For their part, disability activists critique visions of care-work that rely on
emotions as a conduit for that care, arguing that these models offer a per-
sonalized, patronizing form of care, located in the private sphere, that por-
trays disabled people as “victims of personal tragedy” in contrast to the
caregiver’s heroism (Hopkins et al. 2007, 121; see also Oliver and Barnes
1990). Relatedly, scholars argue that care receivers are diminished when care
is defined on the basis of the abilities of the client/recipient, specifically
whether or not they are able to provide for themselves (Mauldin and Saxena
2018), with categories such as necessary care and personal service (Waerness
1996) or “dependency work” and “domestic labor” (Kittay 2020, 35). On
 S I G N S Autumn 2023 y 153

the one hand, these distinctions are important for policy considerations,
since society has an interest in subsidizing care that satisfies basic needs oth-
erwise unmet. Tronto (2013, 22), whose foundational—and very broad—
definition would include both types, argues that the distinction captures
important observations about unequal relations: “in service, the actors who
command the care work that is provided by care workers are the ones with
greater power, whereas in ‘care,’ the more powerful actors provide the care
work for less powerful or more vulnerable recipients. . . . The difference is
in who appears to be in command.”
The difference also appears to be rooted in normative commitments, as
scholars attempt to distinguish between care that allows life and that which
allows luxury. As Sherman (2015, 166) observes, in reference to the per-
sonal chefs and concierges she interviewed, compared to workers focused
on basic needs fulfillment, “the kind of attention [these] workers offer may,
in fact, seem unnecessary or excessive, simply enacting and reproducing the
class entitlements of consumers.” Yet when care is viewed as only that which
satisfies basic needs, scholars argue, it serves to reduce care recipients to pas-
sive, dependent burdens, and this holds for people living with disabilities
(Kröger 2009) as well as children and youth (Morrow 1996; Lee 2001; Pugh
2014). Some scholars object that people can be at once dependent and inde-
pendent, and thus scholars should recognize interdependence instead (Fine
and Glendinning 2005). Others include a coconstitutive element to their
definitions of care, including a role for caregiver and recipient, highlighting
the mutuality of care-work (Tronto 1993; Douglas, Rice, and Kelly 2017;
Kittay 2020). Nonetheless, critical disability researchers have advocated a
turn to a “personal assistance” model instead, considering care—with its
emotional emphasis—“conceptually contaminated” (Kröger 2009, 399).
These three critiques have led some scholars to disavow the role of emo-
tions in care-work, to urge care-work researchers to deemphasize emotions
in their analyses, and to prioritize other framings that they argue are bet-
ter able incorporate the intersectional politics of care-work (Watson et al.
2004; Romero and Pérez 2016). “By removing culpability from the po-
litical and placing care work in the realm of the personal and affective,
[dominant narratives of emotion and love] often bolster . . . essentialist
views, [and] ultimately they also reinscribe inequality,” write Romero and
Perez (185). Meanwhile, as Tom Shakespeare has written, for the disabil-
ity activist, care is “value-laden, contested and confused, particularly in the
way it combines an emotional component and a description of basic human
services” (cited in Watson et al. 2004, 338–39). Emotions, in this view, are
the problem.
154 y Pugh

Turning toward emotions

Yet when we look more closely at the critiques involved, the problems that
are attributed to emotions stem in large part from the limited ways in which
the critics, and care-work scholars generally, have conceived and deployed
them: primarily, emotions in the guise of attachment. Attachment and the
other paradigm, emotion management, crowd out other means of think-
ing about emotions at work—for instance, how they might be used, skill-
fully, as a tool, in relational approaches to care-work, regardless of the pu-
rity of one’s motive or the authenticity of one’s feeling. The other uses of
emotion do not necessarily provoke the same problems that critics have
pointed out: these alternatives do not mean privatized, unregulated, or pa-
tronizing care (e.g., Lopez 2006), do not preclude notions of skill (e.g.,
Nelson 1990), and do not presume that caregivers need be prisoners of
love to be good at what they do (Ungerson 2005; Glenn 2010). Rather
than a step back from emotions, then, I would argue that we instead need
a deeper engagement with them, starting with a naming of more ways in
which feelings come into play. While a full development of this alternative
is not possible here, I use examples from research to explore below how the
concept of connective labor reveals new dimensions of care-work, especially
in light of the three critiques.

Seeing politics
Connective labor is emotional work, but it is also a skill, one that is recog-
nized and trained when professional counselors do it, to achieve what is
called a “therapeutic alliance.” Its reflective mirroring is frequently taught
as part of motivational interviewing, an approach that involves a formal cur-
riculum and is increasingly common in medical settings. Reflective, empathic
acknowledgment of the other is behind many of the vignettes in Lopez’s
(2006) account of the “organized emotional care” he witnessed in nursing
homes (133), for example, when a caregiver accurately recognized, reflected,
and responded to the distress of a nonverbal client, whose “relief and grat-
itude . . . was palpable and, in the context of their relationship, constituted
an important intrinsic reward” (148). These examples counter the notions
that because it is emotional, connective labor cannot be recognized as skill.
I observed a graduate course for school counselors for one semester, and
one day, they did an exercise to “encourage listening skills,” in which they
were paired up, with one person assigned to share a story “that invokes an
emotion in you” for two minutes without interruption, and the “helper”
was assigned to retell the story back to them “as if it were your own.” After
the exercise, Karen, the teacher, asked “What was it like as ‘helper’ to have
to listen, knowing you had to share back the details of their story?” A young
 S I G N S Autumn 2023 y 155

woman responded: “It made me realize that listening a lot takes a lot of
endurance.” She was not nearly this attentive normally, she said. “I mean
I love my mother, but when I listen to her, I’m getting the general gist.”
Karen agreed, adding that they needed “to be able to follow through all
the way to the end and keep track of it all while you’re doing that.” The
skill of listening, at its most basic, involved staying with the speaker, cog-
nitively, “all the way to the end.” Later in the semester, they observed pairs
of peers from behind a one-way mirror, evaluating their capacity to reflect
the other. Connective labor may be emotional, but some programs are act-
ing like it can be trained, evaluated, and improved.
Care scholars disagree about how much to enumerate the skills and
mechanisms of care-work. On the one hand, the more it is subject to ef-
ficiency pressures—regardless of the category of emotional activity—the more
it becomes emotion management, ginned up for a wage. Discussions of
care-work often retain a vague and mysterious quality about what counts
as care, intentionally so for some scholars who see it as a means to fend off
its further rationalization (e.g., Henry 2018). Others have argued that
we need to be much more specific about the processes of care in order to
make an argument for its value; when employers ignore it, they do not
systematize it but neither do they make time for it (Duffy 2011). “When
relationality is invisible, workers are not recognized and care is compro-
mised,” writes Duffy (2011, 138). “Describing and advocating for for-
mal recognition of relational labor as part of paid care work is critical to
addressing some of the problematic working conditions care workers now
face” (140).

Seeing inequality
Introducing connective labor also allows us to tackle some of the critiques
of inequality in care-work scholarship. First, and paradoxically, it disrupts
some of the distinctions that naturalize racial/ethnic and class differences
in care-work’s definitional debates. When we drill down into specific pro-
cesses of care, rather than classifying entire jobs as relational or nurturant
per se, we can identify work that involves more or fewer of these processes
(Pietrykowski 2017). This move helps to highlight the emotional compo-
nents of some jobs that might not be identified as relational in their entirety,
and it thereby decomposes seemingly fixed racial/ethnic binaries—the
white women’s nurturant labor and the women of color in reproductive
care—decried by critical race scholars. Depending on the context, for exam-
ple, hairdressers and waitresses can find themselves conducting substantial
connective labor on the job, yet both jobs have been dubbed reproductive,
or nonnurturant care, in some accounts.
156 y Pugh

Second, because it is a part of so many different jobs—in occupations of

widely ranging income, education, or formally recognized skill; in “nurtur-
ant” as well as some “nonnurturant” jobs; in “necessary care” and personal
service work—connective labor breaks free of what we might call the “par-
tial inequality horizon” that plagues care-work scholarship. Some scholars,
for example, point to low-wage nursing aides or domestic workers as vulner-
able to exploitation and abuse, with limited agency and resources. Others
are attuned to caregiver advantage, highlighting the paternalistic power that
care workers have over vulnerable care recipients. In particular, approaches
that start out by distinguishing between necessary and unnecessary care
preclude our ability to consider both of these kinds of inequality at the same
time. Yet because each of these kinds of workers actually engage in connec-
tive labor, we can see how advantage on either side shapes care-work. Rather
than presuming a particular trajectory of inequality in a relationship—for
example, “who is in command”—getting specific about relational processes
turns that into something to explore: the impact of “who is in command”
on caring labor.
My own research includes care-workers of widely varying origins, posi-
tioned very differently along axes of inequality, and their relative advan-
tage or disadvantage wields crucial impacts on their connective labor inter-
actions. I have found that inequality has three potent effects on connective
labor: first, it impedes it by silencing the less advantaged participant—either
worker or client—blocking the storytelling upon which it relies. Practition-
ers find themselves having to do extra work to make up for this silencing.
Gunika Navani, for example, was a primary care physician who said she tried
to make space for what patients thought of her advice. Early in her career,
she said, she just lectured them about eating their vegetables, until one pa-
tient finally told her that wasn’t going to happen, revealing the silencing
that the preceding patients had endured. Workers on the other side of
the chasm of advantage silence themselves, which shapes the kind of mirror-
ing they provide. Whitney Lampkin was a white, first-generation college
student who had three jobs: she worked as a veterinarian’s assistant, she sold
her own jewelry on the side, and she was a “sugar baby,” an ill-defined role
somewhere between being a paid companion and a sex worker. “On the
one hand it feels easy, but there’s also a very real emotional toll,” Whitney
said. “I’ve found for myself, that sugar babying has [a cost], of having to,
like, put up that façade, and kind of, like, suppress who I am.”
Second, inequality compounds the mental and physical vulnerabilities
of the less advantaged, be they worker or client. The organization of work
shapes these effects, through variable patterns of privacy, surveillance, speed-
up, and insecurity. I interviewed a white, primary care physician who told
 S I G N S Autumn 2023 y 157

me about what she considered one of her biggest failures, lecturing an obese
Black teenager “about not drinking sodas.” “That was pretty much what I
was doing at the end of the visit,” she recalled, “and he ended up in tears.”
After years of treating them, it was the last time she saw the family. “That
just—it was actually after a year of building up this trusting relationship with
this boy who had been so emotionally charged, I lost all trust with him.”
Traumatic as it was for the physician, we can imagine the visit was even more
so for the boy—disadvantaged by race, class, age, and other dimensions—
whose empathic listener had turned into judge.
Other times practitioners were the ones who experienced the vulnerabil-
ity. Whitney, the “sugar baby,” felt acutely disadvantaged by gender, age,
and income in her encounters. “I mean, there’s also kind of—at least for
me—this element of fear the whole time when you’re with these people,”
she said. “Like, I mean small-level things, like, ‘is somebody who I know
going to see me?’ to large-level things, like, ‘Is this person going to murder
me? Or, like, rape me?’ And that doesn’t really go away.”
Third, faced with the challenges inequality poses to their capacity to de-
liver meaningful connective labor, practitioners cultivate dignity practices—
to convince themselves and others of autonomy, safety, and equity, even
in its relative absence. Among those dignity practices was inviting aspects of
the “whole person” into the classroom or clinic. Ken Margolis, a middle-
school teacher in Oakland, had students handle attendance so he could walk
around the classroom. “You just notice aberrations, [like] if some kid is al-
ways bubbly and they’re not bubbly that day,” he said. “And you have to ask
very specific questions. So you say something like, ‘Is it a friend? Is it an en-
emy? Is it your stomach? Is it your head?’ Because they need to feel—every-
body needs to feel cared for. And respected, right?” Dignity practices are one
way practitioners fight the growing systematization of care, by disrupting the
boundaries around what counts as relevant information. They described it
as if they were finding the humane in themselves while insisting upon it
for others.

Seeing mutuality
Finally, the arguments of disability activists who attempt to ward off pater-
nalism by disavowing emotion appear to presume that love or attachment
are the only dimensions of emotions in care-work. But for connective labor
workers, emotions are a tool, a means of sensing the contours of the other,
their identity, their desires and dislikes, without which the care recipient is
standardized and the care-work is uniform; furthermore, feminists have de-
cried the denigration of gendered emotional work, which characterizes even
the work of personal assistants. The denial of emotional content, scholars
158 y Pugh

argue, is as much a disservice to the care recipient as it is to the caregiver

(Hopkins et al. 2007). In this vein, Christine Kelly (2016, 22) has attempted
a path out of the impasse, arguing for a notion of “accessible care” to include
both its capacity for oppression and its potential for compassion and empa-
thy in intimate relationships.
Connective labor may be emotional, but that does not mean it is neces-
sarily one-way; instead, it is a mutual achievement, only accomplished with
the shared acknowledgment of both (or more) parties. Inequality is also rel-
evant here, as not all are willing or able to articulate their own subjectivities
for someone else’s reflection.5 Foucault’s concept of pastoral power gets at
this “intrinsically social” element, which relies in part on the participation of
the pastor’s flock (Martin and Waring 2018).
This truth was brought home when I watched a supervision session that
Ethan Riordan, a clinical psychologist, held for several graduate students
training to be therapists. Two of them, Kelsey and Rupert, were seeing a
fairly difficult couple in marital counseling. They showed a video of the most
recent session, with the husband and wife on chairs facing them. “This is an
area that’s been an ongoing challenge for us,” the wife said on tape. “He’ll
say ‘you don’t want to get in shape,’ I will say, ‘yes, I do want to get in shape,
I’m struggling to figure out how to put it in my schedule.’” On the video,
Kelsey is heard saying “Sounds like being busy does different things to you.”
The man replies: “No.”
The students watching the video laughed. “He does that all the time,”
Kelsey said. “That’s hilarious,” said Sean, another student. The man con-
tinued. “You put a lot of busyness on your plate,” he said, speaking to his
wife.
At another point, the woman raised a point of disagreement about their
child. “People have different ways of showing caring, love, commitment,”
responded Kelsey. “It sounds like there are some differences.” Comment-
ing to the man, she said, “you’re seeing that growing your kids’ indepen-
dence is showing them caring, while for you,” she said to the woman, “help-
ing them out is showing them caring.” The man said flatly: “Thank you for
this summary.”
The students laughed again. “Can you get him to perspective-take?”
Sean queried. Sean’s question highlighted what all present understood to
be the therapist’s role: not to take sides, per se, but to offer interpretations
that would help each see the other’s point of view. Similarly, for Foucault,
the pastor figure “was not simply the forgiving master, the judge who con-
demned or acquitted, he was the master of truth,” the person who could

5
Thanks to an anonymous reviewer for emphasizing this point.
 S I G N S Autumn 2023 y 159

reveal the significance of their secrets (1978, 67). Yet such power had to be
participated in, acquiesced to, constituted by both the person with the se-
crets and the person listening to them; here we see a blurring of the “line
between coercion and consent” made manifest by someone’s refusal. The
video continued with the man saying to his wife, “you’ve been doing this
for fourteen years, making their goddamn lunches.” Refusing to be drawn
into the process by Kelsey’s attempts to reflect his point of view, the recalci-
trant client demonstrated that connective labor required an active participant.
Collaboration helps to create the meaning of the encounter. Wanda
Coombs, a sex therapist, told me that when she got it wrong, the sense of
something amiss was palpable. “When things are wrong or off, you feel it,”
she said. “Something halts and there’s kind of like silence or a dead air, and
that’s when I’m just like, what just happened here? And I’ll say it, you know,
‘I felt like maybe there was a shift here, does that feel like that resonates for
you or not,’ and invite them to come in to provide clarity.” Indeed, as
Noddings (2010, 392) argues, “without the reinforcing response of the
cared-for, carers suffer empathic exhaustion and burnout.” Connective la-
bor thus is not only defined by such mutuality, it is sustained by it (Fine
and Glendinning 2005).

Conclusion
Connective labor is a form of seeing and reflecting the other emotionally,
and as such, it is a particular kind of work involving the use of feeling as a
tool. While connective labor is prevalent in all manner of care-work, how-
ever, existing scholarship does not have the vocabulary to capture this and
other kinds of emotional work. Care-work scholarship has relied on two pri-
mary models of emotion—attachment and emotional labor—that have fo-
cused researchers’ attention on questions of motivation and alienation. The
dominance of these models has also left the field open to critiques by critical
race scholars and disability rights researchers, who argue that they gloss over
the politics of care-work and impede our capacity to reckon with its inter-
sectional inequalities. In this article, I have proposed connective labor as
one way to address these critiques, not by turning away from emotion but
by turning toward it to identify additional ways in which feelings are used
in care-work.
The naming of connective labor, and its differentiation from the two mod-
els, should not preclude the questions raised regarding attachment or emo-
tional labor—in particular, how their working conditions shape care. Yet
as shown, the term opens up other areas for research: how workers man-
age pastoral power and its tensions of affirming another’s uniqueness and
160 y Pugh

requiring their emotional legibility, the factors that shape the mutual co-
constitution of meaning in care-work interactions, how workers of varying
advantage conduct and experience connective labor, the cultural scripts and
contexts that generate recognition and misrecognition and their impact. I
hope that future research investigates the impact of care-work contexts on
the great variety of emotional skills that constitute care. These issues are just
some of the fertile expanse awaiting researchers.
Furthermore, there are many other appearances of emotions in care-work
as yet unidentified, and recognizing these instances could expand our ability
to explore and understand it. We might agree upon an umbrella term—the
latest version of emotional labor is fine, if we distinguish it sufficiently from
emotion management—to apply to the general notion of emotions at work,
of which attachment, emotion management, and connective labor are but
three variants. Such a project is beyond the scope of this article but is im-
plicated by it: by this point, I mean to underscore that connective labor is
not the whole of what is missing in care-work, but its inclusion makes room
for others to explore the terrain.

Departments of Sociology and Women, Gender, and Sexuality

University of Virginia

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