I. Marriage and Intimacy

A. Self-help industry: "therapeutic culture has come to play a significant role in bolstering and soothing the self" (19).
B. "'Entrepreneur of the self'" is "self-propelled, autonomous economic actor, ever responsive to a dynamic marketplace, and simultaneously encouraged to seek introspection, self-mastery, and personal fulfillment" (20).
C. Barbados = "a part of the world well trodden by many of the relevant tropes of contemporary neoliberalism (economy, enterprise, flexibility, and power) but less inclined toward thinking reflexively about selves, much less about feelings or affective life" (4).
D. Family has become entrepreneurial: "intimate relationships, parenthood, and selfhood, like businesses, become projects that demand similar adaptability, innovations, sensitivity to external demands, creativity, and responsiveness" (58)
E. Global trends: rising divorce rates, companionate marriage
F. Barbados: matrifocality
G. Higher rates of marriage among Barbadian entrepreneurs: romantic and economic partnership

1. "new affective order" includes "a longing for deep empathy, the capacity to be oneself with another and feel supported and in synch with that person, sympatico, understood, and upheld as a person" (65)
2. Women entrepreneurs: respectability and reputation

a. Respectability (British colonial legacy, middle class, women) = Victorian values of Christianity, marriage, propriety, higher education
b. Reputation (African, male, and working class): street corners, politics, rum shop, market, and musical stage; "sexual prowess, verbal wit, musical flair, and guile" (21)
c. Qualities of reputation are now key to middle-class entrepreneurial respectability: 3/4 of Barbadian children are born out of wedlock, but entrepreneurial women desire emotional and financial partnership

H. Entrepreneurial women's views of marriage

1. Marriage had been means to secure respectability
2. Now: in synch, soul mate

a. Heather in Paris
b. Same sex partner: emotional support and laughter at the end of a stressful day

3. Date nights versus homosocial leisure
4. Emotionally present, not just a "provider"

I. Men's views

1. Marriage as supportive division of labor
2. Prior view: marriage as plot, "Obeah Wedding" by Mighty Sparrow (1966)

J. Entrepreneurship connection

1. "When women achieve economic independence, and especially an independence won in the wily domain of entrepreneurship, their marital desires turn toward romantic connection grounded in emotional synchrony and in the cultivation of new selves in large part supported by a new middle-class marketplace " (85).
2. Yoga, self-help fulfillment books = "new fields of experience, new realms of desire in which the self and the couple and family are envisioned as entities to be fashioned, soothed, entertained, and nourished" (84)
3. Women are not dependent on men financially and instead seek loving partnership
4. "What I am arguing is that marriage be understood as not only a structural resource (financial security, supportive labor, contacts, advice, etc.) but also as an affective goal, integral to the neoliberal project of self making so critical to these contemporary entrepreneurs." (94).

K. Barbadian women drive this trend: leverage matrifocality within the new milieu of middle-classness (95)

 

II. The Work of Affect

A. Emotions in work and life: "...saturated by an economy of emotion that has become part of the labor process in and across these spheres, offering enrichment and solace, as well as worry and stress, for those most involved in these pursuits" (134).
B. Affective labor

1. Affect versus emotion
2. 17th century Dutch philosopher Baruch Spinoza: body not a bounded physical entity, but as something that emerges through its capacity to affect and be affected through its relationship to other entities
3. Interrelational energy that circulates
4. Brian Massumi (1995): affect = precognitive, prelinguistic potentiality; feedback between neuroscientific and sociocultural
5. Affect crafts citizen subjects: "'a feeling of ease, well-being, satisfaction, excitement, passion" (Hardt 1999, 96)" (136).
6. Neoliberal service economy: immaterial labor produces feelings, not things
7. Arlie Russell Hochschild, The Managed Heart (1986)

a. Emotional labor of Delta flight attendants
b. Gendered labor and alienation

8. Entrepreneurs today demand and provide affective labor

C. "Work-life balance"

1. Home = idealized space of nurturing, "reservoir of emotional capital" (138)
2. Prior image of Afro-Barbadian women as tough
3. "As an owner of a budding business enterprise, the new entrepreneur invests herself in cultivating relationships, offering empathic and caring service, being friendly and attentive not because she is commanded to do so by a boss but because she is aware that her own reputation and the success of her enterprise are enhanced through such modes of rapport" (142).
4. Grace listens to a client about a design project: "'I don't listen with my ears, I listen with my eyes, I listen with my heart, and that may sound a little corny but it's one of the things that has made us as a company successful... it is not an easy thing to listen and interpret'" (142).
5. Work = "sympathy, care, nurturance, love" and home = entrepreneurial investment and work (143).
6. "In one sense 'private' realms of life and thought are subtly yet increasingly amenable to Weberian rationalization, and the inducement to bring individuality, character, emotion and care to the formal capitalist marketplace of service has become an ever-growing expectation of paid labor and market exchanges" (143).

D. Nanny-housekeeper

1. Long tradition among middle-class Barbadian households
2. Doesn't challenge gendered division of labor
3. Frees up woman entrepreneur for quality time: "This 'freeing up' gives middle-class entrepreneurial women and men the capacity to engage in their demanding market-oriented work and new leisure pursuits and activities while also fostering the growing impetus to expend emotional energy and imagination toward each other, toward their customers and children, and to engage with themselves as subjects in their own right, as new loci of entrepreneurialism" (156).
4. Homemaking = loving, "emotionally saturated labor" (157).

E. Generational shift: "Part of this process of entrepreneurial self-exploration, coupling, and parenting entails a decisively different communicative set of tools and inclinations, the desire to talk through problems and express emotions in ways that her own parents, and Barbadian families more generally in the past, did not" (163).
F. Children are a project: camps, programs, care
G. "The work of work and the work of life are not only becoming more and more intertwined but also, for most of these entrepreneurs, the forms this labor takes are increasingly the same. Care, attunement, and nurturing lie at the heart of much of life and work today" (168).
H. Barbados not previously known for "expressive feelings of care and intimacy" (168)

 

III. Religion and Psy Fields

A. New churches, spiritual communities, yoga, meditation, psychotherapy, body practices, spas

1. Cater to middle classes
2. Soothe and connect mind and body

B. "'psy-effect'" (Nikolas Rose) and therapeutic culture (Eva Illouz): originated in US, now "'transnational language of selfhood'" (170)
C. Freeman: discourses take hold in culturally specific manners
D. Entrepreneurs "'find themselves' in the course of delivering caring, therapeutic exchanges with clients and customers. They make themselves and simultaneously make their livelihood in these affectively saturated exchanges. For their customers they create a new climate in which to cultivate themselves, and they meanwhile fuel the capitalist market" (182).
E. Self-actualization --> entrepreneurial success
F. Weber, revisited

1. Religious engagements invite people to take charge of themselves and to become introspective entrepreneurs of themselves (191-2).
2. Prosperity religion

a. Reputation becomes middle-class respectability through work on the self
b. Pentecostal church founded by an American pastor and his Barbadian wife offers prosperity sermons, business alliance with seminars on managing cash flow

3. Shopping around for churches
4. Emphasis on marital partnerships, emotional parenting, and forms of self-understanding
5. Entrepreneurialism --> middle-class respectability

G. "For the crux of neoliberal entrepreneurialism, as I see it, lies in the blurred boundaries between enterprise-as-business and the self (or child, or couple)-as-enterprise, between social relations of business and intimate economies of love and support" (208).