Feminism and the Power of Love

Interdisciplinary Interventions

Adriana García-Andrade, Lena Gunnarsson, Anna Jónasdóttir, Adriana García-Andrade, Lena Gunnarsson, Anna G. Jónasdóttir, Anna Jónasdóttir, Adriana García-Andrade, Lena Gunnarsson, Anna G. Jónasdóttir

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9781351780124
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

The power of love has become a renewed matter of feminist and non-feminist attention in the 21st century's theory debates. What is this power? Is it a form of domination? Or is it a liberating force in our contemporary societies?

Within Feminism and the Power of Love lies the central argument that, although love is a crucial site of gendered power asymmetries, it is also a vital source of human empowerment that we cannot live without. Instead of emphasizing "either-or", this enlightening title puts the dualities and contradictions of love center stage. Indeed, by offering various theoretical perspectives on what makes love such a central value and motivator for people, this title will increase one's understanding as to why love can keep people in its grip - even when practiced in ways that deplete and oppress. In light of such analyses, the contributions within Feminism and the Power of Love present new perspectives on the conditions and characteristics of non-oppressive, mutually enhancing ways of loving.

Bridging the gap between Feminist Affect Studies and Feminist Love Studies, this book will appeal to undergraduate and postgraduate students, including postdoctoral researchers, interested in fields such as women's and gender studies, sociology, political science, philosophy, cultural studies and sexuality studies.

1 The power of love

Towards an interdisciplinary and multi-theoretical feminist love studies

Lena Gunnarsson, Adriana García-Andrade and Anna G. Jónasdóttir

Although love in some form is arguably as old as humankind, many scholars judge that it has never been as socially and existentially decisive as it is in contemporary western societies (Bauman 2003; Beck and Beck-Gernsheim 1995; Ferry 2013; Giddens 1992; Gunnarsson 2014a; Illouz 2012; Jónasdóttir 1994, 2011; Kaufmann 2011; Luhmann 1998; May 2011). The loosening of collective and role-based modes of recognition and existential security has meant that, to an increasing extent, love has become the most significant source of people’s ‘ontological rootedness’ (May 2011) or ‘ontological security’ (Giddens 1992). For instance, while conceding that it seems to be a universal fact that love is a source of self-enhancement, Eva Illouz argues that ‘the sense of self-worth provided by love in modern relationships is of particular and acute importance, precisely because at stake in contemporary individualism is the difficulty to establish one’s self-worth and because the pressure for self-differentiation and developing a sense of uniqueness has considerably increased with modernity’ (2012: 112; cf. Beck and Beck-Gernsheim 1995; Gunnarsson 2014a; Gunnarsson 1994, 2011; Luhmann 1998). Luc Ferry goes as far as stating that the world is currently going through a ‘revolution of love’. When fewer and fewer believe in values like God, the Nation or the Revolution, the only thing in which basically everyone believes is love. Although love, as the new great principle of meaning against which to measure the ‘good life’, revolves around the private sphere, Ferry states that the revolution of love has repercussions for public and political life as well. For instance, he sees the ecological movement as premised on the historically recent phenomenon of parental love, forming the basis of a concern for the lives of future generations (Ferry 2013). The long-standing feminist insight that the personal is political has now reached into the core of male-stream theorizing.

The increasing social significance of love is a crucial theme also in Anna Jónasdóttir’s feminist theorization of contemporary western societies, which is more specifically focused on sexual love, understood as a ‘causal power in history’. In line with Illouz and others, she argues that under current social conditions, ‘when individuals are forced/free to make and remake themselves under continuously changing circumstances, love as a source of creative/re-creative human power seems to be needed more and more strongly’ (Jónasdóttir 2011: 50). She also addresses the historically specific relation between love and the economy (cf. Bryson 2011; Hochschild 2003; Illouz 2007, 2012), tentatively proposing that ‘capital is becoming more and more dependent on recreative (as distinct from procreative) love power; and on conditioning people to use and invest their energy [and love power] to serve, directly or indirectly, continued economic growth’ (Jónasdóttir 1994: 229).

The growing de facto social significance of love is likely to be one crucial factor behind the increasing academic interest in love, forming the new field of what Jónasdóttir terms ‘love studies’ (Jónasdóttir 2014). While love was long an embarrassing topic for scholars aiming to be taken seriously (Toye 2010) (with literary studies and parts of philosophy as exceptions), it is now commonplace as a male-stream topic of study in many different disciplines, ranging from neuroscience to political science. Given that most people would rate love as one of life’s highest values and motivators (Ferguson and Jónasdóttir 2014), as witnessed by its topicality in music, literature and art, this growing academic interest in love is important because it helps bridge the gap between academic and lay inclinations, contributing to a deeper understanding of people’s behavior and, consequently, to social life as a whole (Sayer 2011).

As part of the expanding general field of love studies, a revitalized sub-field of feminist love studies has begun to take shape (Ferguson and Jónasdóttir 2014). It has done so only hesitantly though, despite the fact that love is generally thought of as a feminine realm. As Margaret Toye suggests, it is probably precisely because of love’s association with ‘the realm of women, the home, the private, the apolitical, the “not serious”’ that, struggling to be taken seriously, feminist theorists feel such a ‘nervousness around the topic’ (2010: 41). However, since the organization of love under patriarchy is strongly structured by gender, contributing to the subordination of women to men (de Beauvoir 1989; Dempsey 2002; Ferguson 1989, 1991, 2012; Firestone 1970; Gunnarsson 2011, 2014a, 2014b; Illouz 2012; Jackson 2014; Jónasdóttir 1994, 2009, 2011; Langford 1999; Thagaard 1997) and privileging heterosexual love over same-sex love (Butler 1990; Ferguson 1989, 1991; Jackson 2006; Rich 1980), it remains centrally important that feminist theorists take part in shaping the field of love studies.

As part of the generally growing significance of love in late modern societies, love also seems to be becoming an increasingly important arena of gender struggle (Jónasdóttir 2009). As a result of formal gender equality and the relative decline in women’s economic dependence on men, we have entered an era in which many middle and upper class women, above all but not exclusively in the West/North, remain bound to men only by the bonds of sexual attraction and love (Giddens 1992; Gunnarsson 2014a; Jónasdóttir 1994 [1991]). The implications of this have not been sufficiently explored by feminist theorists. What are the mechanisms of power internal to love? And what is it that motivates women to continue to attach themselves to men, even when this is not necessitated by economic and other constraints? In other words, what kind(s) of power is the power of love? And what difference does it make in and for feminist theory and politics?

In the feminist work on love that does exist, especially as part of second wave feminism, the dominant way to explain women’s choice to attach themselves to men in the name of love, even when this implies subordination and the draining of women’s powers, has been by recourse to notions of patriarchal ideology or discourse. With some exceptions (e.g. Leon 1978; Sarachild 1978; Willis 1980), the recurrent theme of second wave feminist discourse on love was to conceive of heterosexual love as a delusion or false consciousness, ensuring that women continue to submit to men (Atkinson 1974; The Feminists 1973; Firestone 1970; see Douglas 1990, Jónasdóttir 2014, and Grossi this volume for overviews). As bell hooks puts forward, this feminist tendency to reduce love to a matter of patriarchal ideology has led to the alienation of most women from feminism. For hooks, to see love itself as the problem was a mistake of second wave feminists. ‘We were to do away with love and put in its place a concern with gaining rights and power’, she states, highlighting that this inhibited the development of a more complex feminist theorization of love. ‘Rather than rethinking love and insisting on its importance and value, feminist discourse on love simply stopped’ (2000: 102). Highlighting that the emergence of love studies as a new research field has so far been driven to a large extent by male mainstream theorists, Jónasdóttir echoes hook’s plea for more feminist inquiries into love. Since love is ‘one of the most vital, and difficult – not the least for women, matters to deal with in practical life and in theory, it should be particularly urgent for feminists to be (pro)active in this area’ (Jónasdóttir 2014: 25).

Although ideological notions of compulsory heterosexual love, bound up with norms of femininity and masculinity, are of course immensely important as vehicles reproducing heterosexuality as a dominant system with associated gendered power relations, this book departs from tendencies of reducing love to ideology or discourse. A central assumption structuring the book is that although love is a crucial site of (in particular) gendered power asymmetries, it is also a vital source of human enhancement that we cannot, in its basic form, live without. Refraining from tendencies in much work on love to emphasize either love’s oppressive or enhancing qualities and implications (see Gunnarsson 2011, 2014a), the book puts the dualities, dynamics, and contradictions of love center stage, in the conviction that love’s indisputable power can be organized in both mutually enhancing and egalitarian and oppressive and exploitative ways. From a range of different theoretical points of view, it aims to elucidate what makes love such a central value and motivator for people, thereby adding to the understanding of why love can keep people in its grip even when practiced in ways that deplete and oppress. In light of such analyses, ontological as well as historical and empirical, it also offers new perspectives on the conditions and characteristics of non-oppressive, mutually enhancing ways of loving.

The power of love

Taking different routes into the theme of love and its relation to power, the contributions in this volume engage in a collective effort to draw the contours of what we call feminist love studies. What, then, do we mean by ‘love’? Reflecting the multifaceted everyday as well as scholarly understandings of love, this book does not endorse a single definition of love. Implicitly or explicitly, the contributions work with and around different notions of love, ranging from understanding it in terms of an emotion, affect, practice, energy, or bond, to an ideology, historical code, and/or methodology. Love is seen as irreducible to sexuality; at the same time, many of the contributors deal with sexual forms of love, acknowledging the practical and ontological links between love and sexuality. An important conceptual backdrop of the research collaboration generally and this book specifically is Jónasdóttir’s concept of love power (Jónasdóttir 1994, 2009, 2011, this volume). For Jónasdóttir, a social and political theorist based in Sweden, love power refers to that basic human capacity by means of which we can and do empower each other as worthy human existences. Jónasdóttir works with(in) a historical-materialist framework, a mode of thought that assumes the existence of certain basic human powers, coupled with fundamental needs, which in turn provide an ontological foundation for more specific historical accounts of power structures. Jónasdóttir thus operates with a dual notion of power, both in the ‘positive’ sense of a basic psycho-organic capacity and in the ‘negative’ sense of oppressive or exploitative power.¹ Rarely made in poststructuralist accounts, such a distinction has begun to be considered in some post-poststructuralist versions of the ‘new’ feminist materialism, in particular in feminist affect theory (e.g. Brennan 2004). Jónasdóttir’s feminist reconstruction of a Marxian historical-materialist perspective takes into account love’s dual capacity of power and constraint, highlighting these as two sides of the same coin. Indeed, we can make sense of the human vulnerability resulting from the fact that we need to love and be loved, which can make us prone to accept unequal conditions when this need is not met, only in light of love’s constructive power (Gunnarsson 2014a).

Jónasdóttir thinks of patriarchal love as an exploitative relationship, where men appropriate more of women’s loving energies than they give in return. The fact that love is powerful in the constructive sense also means that people are likely to have an interest in exploiting it, providing yet another clue to love’s dual empowering/disempowering potential. In Chapter 2 Jónasdóttir continues to elaborate her groundbreaking notion of love power by responding to some typical questions that her theory has provoked. At a time when the historical-materialist perspective is marginalized within feminist theory, a crucial part of the argument operates on the ontological level, elucidating the specific perspective that she takes on power generally and on love power specifically.

Independently of Jónasdóttir but roughly at the same time, US philosopher Ann Ferguson developed her theory of ‘sex-affective production’ (1989, 1991), which has remarkable similarities to Jónasdóttir’s theory of love power. Both applied and expanded basic Marxian categories for the purpose of theorizing gendered power, although where Jónasdóttir talked about men’s exploitation of women’s love power, Ferguson referred to a similar process in terms of men’s exploitation of women’s ‘sex/affective energy’. In Chapter 3 Ferguson revises her theory somewhat, replacing the notion of sex/affective energy with the twin concepts of ‘love energy’ and ‘sexual energy’, and demonstrates how contradictions inherent in current western patriarchy make it impossible for both women and men to meet the sexual and love needs that these structures also produce. Crucial in Jónasdóttir’s and Ferguson’s work alike is the understanding of power both in terms of a basic, vital human capacity, and in terms of historically constituted power inequalities, where the theorizations of the latter are based in distinct ontologies of the former. As Toye highlights in this volume, by building her account on the notion of ‘energy’, Ferguson’s contribution points towards connections with the new materialist and affective turns that distance themselves from ‘old’ Marxian materialism and which are explored in both Toye’s and Jones’ contributions (see below).

When the term ‘love’ is invoked, people often envision different kinds of sexual couple love. Although heterosexual couple love does constitute a pivotal institution in the work of both Jónasdóttir and Ferguson, neither of them restricts their conceptualization to this specific institution; both work with broad notions of love, opening the concept up for analysis as a continuum differently practiced across social relations. In this volume, Ferguson does center on couple love, proposing that romantic love is inherently alienated and patriarchal. She also suggests that even the feminist ideal of mutual love is something that cannot be achieved in our society if conditions such as capitalism and militarism continue to exert and promote contradictory goals among women and men. As in Lena Gunnarsson’s chapter, for Ferguson, not only are women losing out, but men are also rendered unable to receive and give more love energy. In Chapter 4, Australian historian and law scholar Renata Grossi reviews the central feminist debate on precisely why and in which sense romantic love is problematic, putting it in conversation with the debate over same-sex marriage as played out in the Australian context. She reviews different strands of feminist critiques of love to interrogate the fact that arguments for same-sex marriage often draw a lot of their force from positive images of romantic love that stand in stark contrast with the traditional feminist discourse on romantic love. Grossi explores to what extent the feminist critique has been based on views of romantic love as inherently oppressive and to what extent it has been pictured as precarious only due to its association with oppressive orders of power, leaving room for the possibility of equal and liberating forms of romantic love. With some caution, she makes a plea for analytically disconnecting romantic love from its oppressive and heteronormative forms, suggesting that same-sex marriage may open the way for a radicalization of love.

Canadian literary scholar Margaret Toye takes us back in Chapter 5 to more basic ontological discussions about how to think love and power together. She does so by putting feminist love studies in conversation with feminist affect studies, arguing that the present lack of such conversations is the result of a strong Marxian materialist influence in love studies, as contrasted with affect studies’ lineage in a poststructuralist paradigm where Toye herself feels at home. Aiming to bridge the gulf between the fields, Toye suggests exploring love in terms of affective energy, since energy is a concept that figures in both fields and is often used to conceptualize connections between power, life and love. Whereas the feminist historical-materialist paradigm understands power structures in terms of the exploitation of energy along quite determinate, historically located, gendered lines, the Deleuzian philosophy underpinning much feminist theorizing on affect puts more emphasis on the diffuse character of power. Both, however, dissolve dichotomies between power in the negative, constraining sense and power in the productive, creative sense. Toye discusses the work of Teresa Brennan, which is also touched upon in Jónasdóttir’s contribution and comprises a particularly interesting point of potential conversation between the affective and love paradigms. Both affect and love are central conceptual building blocks in Brennan’s theory. Despite the fact that she takes a psychoanalytic approach to these themes, her perspective on how feminine and masculine selves are constituted by means of the unequal transmission of living attention converges in intriguing ways with Ferguson’s and Jónasdóttir’s accounts (see Gunnarsson 2016).

Where Toye embraces the feminist turn to affect, US political theorist Kathleen Jones is warier about ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• List of contributors
• Preface and acknowledgements
• 1. The power of love: Towards an interdisciplinary and multi-theoretical feminist love studies
• PART I: Questioning love and power
• PART II: Love and affect
• PART III: Togetherness and its forms
• Index