The Outsourced Self: Intimate Life in Market Times
Arlie Russell Hochschild
Language: English
Pages: 320
ISBN: 080508889X
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
From the famed author of the bestselling The Second Shift and The Time Bind, a pathbreaking look at the transformation of private life in our for-profit world
The family has long been a haven in a heartless world, the one place immune to market forces and economic calculations, where the personal, the private, and the emotional hold sway. Yet as Arlie Russell Hochschild shows in The Outsourced Self, that is no longer the case: everything that was once part of private life―love, friendship, child rearing―is being transformed into packaged expertise to be sold back to confused, harried Americans.
Drawing on hundreds of interviews and original research, Hochschild follows the incursions of the market into every stage of intimate life. From dating services that train you to be the CEO of your love life to wedding planners who create a couple's "personal narrative"; from nameologists (who help you name your child) to wantologists (who help you name your goals); from commercial surrogate farms in India to hired mourners who will scatter your loved one's ashes in the ocean of your choice―Hochschild reveals a world in which the most intuitive and emotional of human acts have become work for hire.
Sharp and clear-eyed, Hochschild is full of sympathy for overstressed, outsourcing Americans, even as she warns of the market's threat to the personal realm they are striving so hard to preserve.
being with us. It’s hard to bear. Had she ever thought of moving her father in with her family? I asked. Joann paused to compose her answer: I love my father. I want to take care of him. I feel terribly guilty, but I can’t have my father live with us. Early in our marriage, my husband and father would get into big territorial fights over me. And the stairs are too much. He’d fall. And honestly, it’s torture for me to be around him. One day Nolan suggested, “Why don’t I visit your
and distrust of anything she could not. In her charming way, she was a loner—not the self-sufficient Robinson Crusoe, hero to free-market advocates such as Milton Friedman, but the kind of market-dependent loner who might make brand consultants such as Marc Gobe lick their lips. Were America to move toward Gloria’s dark vision—of frosty family, semihelpful friends, and a growing friendship market—these professional services might well become the new standard. After all, Gloria’s description of a
done it anyway if it had been my mother but Victoria wasn’t my mother. Barbara didn’t completely give up. On Victoria’s next birthday, she dropped in to the nursing home: Victoria’s hair was filthy, not just a week’s filthy, a month’s. I stalked up to the nurse’s station, livid. I pulled a nutty. I said, “Give me the soap! Get me a basin! Give me water—now!” They said “Oh, we’ll do it.” I said, “I’ll do it. Just because her family lives in New Jersey, don’t think no one’s watching.” I
consumers and service workers both. It’s so easy to do this, and we do it so automatically, we forget how quickly things that only yesterday seemed bizarre have become the norm today. As a people, Americans are brilliant at adapting to change. In a world that changes so rapidly, it’s a useful skill. But there is a hidden danger attached to it. For without quite naming it, we’re all busily adapting, trying to “regulate” the market from the inside. And what we’re not doing is altering the basic
“Medical Tourism: Global Competition in Health Care” (Dallas, TX: National Center for Policy Analysis, 2007). 3 For information about the Levine study, see: Aaron D. Levine, “Self-Regulation, Compensation, and the Ethical Recruitment of Oocyte Donors,” Hastings Center Report 40, no. 2 (2010); and David Tuller, “Payment Offers to Egg Donors Prompt Scrutiny,” New York Times, May 11, 2010. 4 See Xytex Cryo International Sperm Bank, “Patient Section: Information Options,”