Chapter 10: Emotional First Responders: The Gendered Burden of Care

The previous chapter traced how epistemic collapse unfolded within families, as shared moral worlds gave way to confusion, mistrust, and emotional fatigue. In this chapter, we move from the loss of shared meaning to the work of endurance that followed. Rupture as a movement asks what radicalisation does to connection itself. Here, we focus on its emotional consequences, showing how care, patience, and containment became unequally distributed, and how the labour of holding families together reveals the hidden costs of living beside belief.

In the first half of the chapter, we draw on Alva Gotby’s (2022) concept of emotional reproduction to analyse how SNCs, particularly women, undertook the ongoing work of managing conflict and restoring calm within Q-affected homes. We trace how their efforts to sustain intimacy, soothe volatility, and preserve a sense of normality amounted to unpaid gendered care work. Although many described these acts as love or duty, recognising them as emotionally reproductive labour exposes how radicalisation continues to live through the everyday maintenance of relationships. We then explore the embodied toll of this labour, showing how exhaustion, guilt, and physical strain marked the point where care and endurance blurred together. Across these accounts, consequence does not appear as a single or stable outcome but as something that shifts over time and across relationships. Emotional strain, obligation, and endurance accumulate and change form, revealing that radicalisation’s effects are not fixed events but living processes. This dynamic quality strengthens our argument that radicalisation is relational in both formation and aftermath. It unfolds through interaction, negotiation, and care, and its consequences, like its causes, circulate through the very ties that sustain family life.