Abstract
Love and the Politics of Intimacy, edited by Stanislava Dikova, Wendy McMahon, and Jordan Savage is situated in the up-and-coming field of love studies. While common sense understandings of love involve intimate relationships and intense feelings, love studies are more concerned with how our ways of thinking about and practicing love are shaped in different locations and at different points in time as well as the diversity of power dynamics that come into play around the subject of love. Unsurprisingly, gender studies has taken up the topic of love with enthusiasm and many contributions to love studies have a feminist orientation (Jónasdóttir and Ferguson, 2014).
The present volume brings together the subjects of love and intimacy and places them in a political perspective. It primarily draws upon contributions from literary and cultural studies, and philosophy, which may account for why love is treated less as an affective experience or human activity than as a discursive phenomenon. There is a strong preference for topics like romance novels, historical figures, and fictional characters in books and movies. This perhaps explains why the editors recommend in the preface that this volume should be read in conjunction with another edited volume Love and the Politics of Care (Dikova et al., 2022), which presumably draws on the emotional experience of love with contributions from the social sciences, social work and medicine. In their introduction, they emphasize that the approach to love taken in this volume is a critical one: love will be treated as ‘socially, culturally and economically constructed’ and ‘confined by heteronormative, patriarchal and racialized boundaries’ (p. 2). Should this approach seem a bit grim, they go on to explain that the ‘liberatory and emancipatory potentials of intimacy and love’ would also be explored, although the reader should not expect a ‘full practical liberatory politics’ any time soon (p. 8).
The volume contains 13 essays, organized in three sections: ‘Love and communities’, ‘Intimate bodies’, and ‘Love’s boundaries’. The rationale for this organization is somewhat mysterious and, indeed, the chapters in the sections seem to have little to do with the overreaching topic. For example, what is a biography of the sexual renegade Jack the Lass, who defied Victorian conventions by celebrating her love for the ‘fairer sex’ and marrying a woman, doing under ‘Love and communities’? Are we expected to view Victorian England as a community? ‘Intimate bodies’ purports to be about intimate love, yet it is strangely disembodied with chapters on digital love, Deleuzian ‘desiring-machines’, and a chapter on how the health services treat genital sexual pain in which the subject of the volume seems to have disappeared altogether. ‘Love’s boundaries’ is intended to interrogate traditional conceptions of love and is based almost entirely on literary treatments of love with chapters on the Italian sentimental novel, the French 18th century love novel, the fantasy fiction Frankissstein: A Love Story (2019) by Jeanette Winterson, along with two somewhat esoteric theoretical chapters which tackle how love and intimacy should be understood, namely, as a ‘theoretical object’ that expands the boundaries of knowledge or as practices which do not have to be linked to specific people or objects.
I must admit that, at least for this reader, it was difficult to make sense of where this book was going or, indeed, what the contributions had to do with love, intimacy or even politics. Instead of an overview of an up-and-coming new field of studies, this volume is a collection of stand-alone chapters, haphazardly placed in sections that had little to do with their content or the relation between them. I missed an introduction that provided a frame that organized and pulled the chapters together thematically. This is not to say that there were not a few gems to be found in the book. One of my favourites was ‘A love letter to white friends’ by Deya Mukherjee. She provides a chilling look at how the word ‘love’ is used in university organizations devoted to diversity and equality as well as in activist groups with an explicit commitment to anti-racism. While these spaces are very different, ‘love’ is used – or, perhaps better, abused – in both as a tool to deflect criticism from racialized people and establish the ‘good intentions’ of actors who have engaged in racist practices (‘This team is bound by love’, ‘He’s really a big softie; his heart is in the right place’, etc.). The person who calls out a practice as racist is silenced and even pathologized (‘you need to calm down’) and the racist is endowed with an ‘automatic, evergreen innocence’ (p. 70). This chapter is a perfect example of how ‘love’ can cover over unjust structures and, paradoxically, maintain the very racialized inequalities which white, anti-racist activists claim to be fighting. As Audre Lorde (2019) so presciently noted, the ‘real work’ of love is quite different; it requires the realization that anger is a potentially transformative power which is not at odds with love and which is, indeed, a necessity in loving spaces within racialized societies.
Another very different, but equally thought-provoking chapter was ‘Digital love: Love through the screen/of the screen’ by Daniel O’Brien. He explores the interactions between love and technology whereby digital spaces create new forms of intimacy, from Tamagotchi toys that children learn to care for to AI relationships to replace lovers in real time (Spike Jonze’s sci-fi comedy Her is used as a case in point) as well as the LifeNaut website where users can leave a digital legacy for their loved ones after they die. Important questions are raised about what it means when people increasingly look to technology for love and intimacy that allows them to evade direct human contact. In both these chapters, we are invited to think about what love is about and whether this is the kind of world we really want.
Despite the occasional gems, I found Love and the Politics of Intimacy disappointing. As volume, it does little to help us understand the joys and perils and the hopes and disillusionments of love. Nor does it enable us to imagine how and under what circumstances love might become a transformative practice for creating a better world. These are the questions that gender studies urgently needs to address.
