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COLD INTIMACIES: THE MAKING OF EMOTIONAL CAPITALISM Eva Illouz Cambridge: Polity Press, 2007
Our private world of intimate domestic relationships involves a different set of skills than our public world of work and economic transactions. The former compels our emotional and connected self and the latter our rational and detached self. Even as feminists repeatedly study the emotional labour that women perform in the workplace, and establish that "the personal is political," a commonsense assumption dictates that there is an acute separation between our private and public self. Cultural sociologist Eva Illouz adeptly crafts a different argument in Cold Intimacies: The Making of Emotional Capitalism. She contends that the rationality of capitalism and the economy has fully permeated the realm of emotional relationships; and, conversely, that psychological discourse has so completely infused our understandings of how we operate in the workforce that emotion is now a key object of transaction at work. A particularly remarkable feature of Illouz's approach in this work is her astute use of interdisciplinary methodologies and theories, as well as her wide range of source material.
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