ABSTRACT
While questions of affect are now ubiquitous in studies of queer modernism, affect has not been discussed explicitly in terms of emotional labor and feeling work. This chapter aims to move conversations about affect from questions of identity and libido toward those of labor and sociality. Applying Arlie Hochschild’s feminist theories of emotional labor, it is argued that Elizabeth Bowen’s blasé female protagonists in Friends and Relations (1931) and To the North (1933) expose the work that goes into propping up social relations and illustrate phenomenological ways for knowing affect as a form of labor. For Bowen, this labor is central to both heteronormative femininity and queer sociality and, thus, offers a way of thinking about intimacy that is eccentric to the hetero-homo binary. Moreover, moving from a psychoanalytic lens to a Marxist feminist one enables readers to see Bowen’s emotionally distant women not as traumatized or stunted but as refusing the emotional labor of femininity. For Bowen, whether gay or straight, love is just too much work.
