The Contradictions of Love

Towards a feminist-realist ontology of sociosexuality

Lena Gunnarsson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781138904620
• eBook ISBN: 9781317915768
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

The Contradictions of Love: Towards a feminist-realist ontology of sociosexuality offers a robust and multifaceted theoretical account of how, in contemporary western societies, women continue to be subordinated to men through sexual love. The book defends and elaborates Anna G. Jónasdóttir's thesis that men tend to exploit women of their 'love power', by means of an innovative application of critical realism, dialectical critical realism and the philosophy of metaReality. Gunnarsson also offers a critique of the state of affairs of contemporary feminist theory.

The author demonstrates that the meta-theoretical framework of critical realism offers the tools that can counter the poststructuralist hegemony still prevailing in feminist theory. On a general level, The Contradictions of Love attempts at reconciling theoretical positions which tend to appear in opposition to one another. In particular, it offers a way of bridging the gap between the notion of love as a locus of exploitation and that of love as a force which can conquer oppression.

This book is a unique and timely contribution in the field of feminist theory, in that it offers the first elaborate assessment and development of Jónasdóttir's important but relatively sidestepped work, and in that it counters poststructuralist trends from the point of view of a robust critical realist framework that has hitherto been spectacularly absent in feminist theory, although it offers solutions to metatheoretical problems at the forefront of feminist debates; in the field of critical realism broadly defined, in that it elaborates on crucial ontological themes of (dialectical) critical realism and the philosophy of metaReality via a discussion of the issues of love, sexuality, gender and power; and finally, in the field of love studies, in that it offers a sophisticated account of how gender asymmetries prevail in love despite norms of gender equality and reciprocity, and in that it reconciles feminist, conflict-oriented perspectives on love with notions of love as transcending conflict.

1 Introduction

DOI: 10.4324/9781315851464-1

Love, perhaps even more than child-bearing, is the pivot of women’s oppression today. I realize this has frightening implications: do we want to get rid of love? The panic felt at any threat to love is a good clue to its political significance. … [Love] is portrayed in novels, even metaphysics, but in them it is described, or better, re-created, not analysed. Love has never really been fully understood, though it may have been fully experienced, and that experience communicated. There is a reason for this absence of analysis: women and love are underpinnings. Examine them and you threaten the very structure of culture.

Shulamith Firestone (1970/1979: 121)

This book offers a theoretical account of why and how, in contemporary western societies characterized by formal equality and women’s relative economic independence from men, women continue to be subordinated to men through sexuality and love. Setting off with an assessment of two important feminist theorizations of how gendered power is constituted through sexuality – those of Judith Butler and Anna G. Jónasdóttir – throughout the course of the book I shift focus to love, analysing how it forms a fundamental basis of men’s power in these societies. By means of an innovative application of Roy Bhaskar’s critical realism, dialectical critical realism and philosophy of metaReality, I investigate and elaborate Anna G. Jónasdóttir’s claim that, in societies relatively freed from formal-legal and economic constraints on gender equality, a decisive part of men’s power as men is based in their exploitation of women’s ‘love power’, the term Jónasdóttir uses to designate the dialectic of our caring and erotic-ecstatic capacities. The book also provides a critique of the state of affairs of contemporary feminist theory. I demonstrate that the meta-theoretical framework of critical realism, broadly defined,¹ offers the tools that can counter the poststructuralist hegemony in feminist theory. On a general level, the dialectical approach endorsed in this work sustains a reconciliatory transcendence of theoretical positions that tend to appear in opposition to one another. In particular, it offers a way of bridging the gap between the notion of love as a locus of exploitation and that of love as a force that can conquer oppression.

In this introductory chapter I begin with an overview of how feminist theorists have dealt with sexuality and its relation to gendered power. I then address the issue of love’s place in these frameworks and, highlighting the relative love deficit in feminist theory, I underline the particular importance for feminists to address the topic now. Next, I offer an overview of empirical research that bears witness to the tenacity of women’s subordination to men as sexual beings in contemporary western societies. This is followed by an outline of the structure and content of the book. I then offer a meta-theoretical context to the project of the book, which has a strong philosophical undercurrent. I first address the ontological deficit in feminist theory, which is only now being challenged, and the widespread feminist scepticism against realism. I go on with a presentation of the basic tenets of critical realism and its more recent extensions, dialectical critical realism and the philosophy of metaReality, and clarify their role in the book.

The applicability of the theoretical framework advanced in this work is restricted to contemporary western societies where women are formally legally equal with men and relatively economically dependent from individual men, due to welfare state arrangements and women’s large-scale employment. Most of the theoretical and empirical studies on which I draw are from the Nordic and Anglophone countries. The question of applicability is complex in that societies and gender orders are neither homogenic wholes nor neatly separated from one another. Even in a country like Sweden, with its relatively high level of economic gender equality, some women are economically dependent on individual men. The claims made in the book may be even more applicable to a certain section of Asian or African women’s experiences than to the lives of some women living in the west. In this sense, the theoretical framework developed in this work is likely to have some relevance, although limited, for gendered relations worldwide, while being only generally applicable to the western welfare societies that are its strict object of analysis. This impossibility of neatly singling out an object of applicability is explained by the fact that, although different gender orders and societies have their own distinct dynamics, they are also part of one differentiated, yet internally related, whole.² The object of analysis in this book, then, should properly be understood as a tendency in the relations between women and men, which is concentrated to the west but partly stretching its reach globally.

Feminist theory and sexuality

The foundational concern of feminist theory is how our lives as sexed/sexual beings are organized by historically varying regimes of power. It was very much thanks to feminists that sexuality lost its status as being altogether given and ‘natural’ and was instead recognized as a field of practices, desires, norms and ideas determined at least partly by human-made, and thus transformable, institutions. With the famous slogan ‘The personal is political’, feminists of the so-called second wave highlighted that the problems we experience in our sexual relationships are not private, but expressions of the broader organization of society. Not only did feminists bring attention to the fact that the sexual desires, possibilities and vulnerabilities of women and men are shaped by historically evolved power structures; they also emphasized that the organization of sexuality is crucial for what is going on in the rest of society, such as the economy and the state. Sexuality, hitherto often claimed to be a remaining reserve of naturalness and privacy, was denaturalized and politicized.

To a large extent the differences between the diverse strands of second wave feminism that emerged from the 1960s to the 1980s can be grasped from the point of view of how they addressed sexuality. The question of exactly how crucial sexuality was as a basis of male power became a watershed between different groupings of feminist theorists. The characteristic radical feminist position was that sexuality is the pivot of men’s patriarchal power. Lesbian radical feminists in particular, but also scholars non-aligned with the lesbian feminist movement, argued that sexual interaction between women and men is directed more by male power than mutual pleasure. Lesbian radical feminists also problematized the naturalness of heterosexuality and pointed out that the institution of ‘compulsory heterosexuality’ (Rich, 1980/1983), regulated by the state through marriage, was a central political device binding women to men and, consequently, to subordination.

While radical feminists were concerned with how male power is constituted through the sexual relation as such, for socialist and Marxist feminists the political importance of sexuality was less immediate and fundamental. They primarily called attention to the ways that the heterosexual bond is tied up with inequalities in the field of paid and unpaid labour, highlighting that, for a woman, sexual partnership with a man, mostly materialized in marriage, also meant that she had the main responsibility for unpaid household work and childcare and lesser possibilities to advance in the area of paid labour. As a popular saying had it, ‘You start by sinking into his arms and end up with your arms in his sink’. From the point of view of these insights, the Marxist analyses of capitalism prevalent at the time were criticized for their neglect of the economic importance of women’s domestic work. The whole capitalist apparatus, socialist and Marxist feminists argued, depends upon a sexual division of labour outside of it; most obviously, there would be no workers to exploit in the labour market if it were not for all the unpaid work performed by women in the home. Whereas Marxist feminists generally saw sexual relations as determined in the last instance by the forces of capital and focused on women’s subordination as workers, socialist feminists distinguished themselves from Marxist feminists by their acknowledgement of sexuality’s relatively autonomous political significance, and struggled with how to reconcile this stance with their Marxian focus on economic exploitation.

Most second wave feminists theorized the power structure of sexuality in terms of male domination or exploitation. When some radical feminists promoted lesbianism, they saw it mainly as a way out of the grip of the male dominance understood to be inherent in current heterosexuality. With the advent of poststructuralist queer theory in the late 1980s and its celebration of non-heterosexual practices, the focus on male dominance was downplayed and attention shifted to the ways that power constitutes the gendered subject as such. Sexuality kept its role as a pivot of feminist theorizing, but rather than being studied as concrete practice or relation, what was now the centre of attention was how the discursive hetero/homosexual binary structures the production of social reality. Most influentially, Judith Butler (1990/1999) argued that the discursive ‘heterosexual matrix’ makes intelligible only certain kinds of desires and identities, and reconceptualized political struggle as the general attempt to subvert such orders of intelligibility and the identities they produce.

The only ‘great’ male theorist who had put sexuality at the centre of his theoretical system was Sigmund Freud, and second wave feminists like Juliet Mitchell (1974/2000) drew creatively and critically on his work in order to grasp the specific dynamic of sexuality and gender constitution. In the poststructuralist approaches to sexuality dominating feminist theory today the dialogue with psychoanalytical theory is also pivotal. Postmodernist psychoanalytical theory is one of the key resources drawn on both in queer feminist ventures to deconstruct sexual identities and in the work of so-called French difference feminists, who challenge phallogocentrism by putting the specific female sexual identity and experience at the centre of philosophical discussions.

What’s love got to do with it?

Inasmuch as it is as sexed beings that women and men come to occupy their different positions in the social order, it is no surprise that sexuality has been at the centre of feminist analyses of gendered power. What about love, then? In practice, sexuality is intimately connected to love. Any discussion of heterosexuality, for instance, implicitly or explicitly involves not only the issue of desire but of love too. Nonetheless, love is often ignored in feminist approaches to sexuality. While this is the case especially for the later poststructuralist theories of sexuality, perhaps largely due to their relative disconnection from concrete practices, the legacy of Simone de Beauvoir’s essay on love in her famous The second sex (1949/1989) did reverberate in some of the second wave feminist thinking, notably in radical feminist work. When Beauvoir’s existentialist take on love under patriarchy was that women’s love of men constituted an instance of mauvais fois, locking women in immanence, the recurrent theme of second wave discourses on heterosexual love was that it was a kind of delusion or false consciousness, ensuring that women keep submitting themselves to their masters (see Douglas, 1990, for an overview).

The feminist tendency to reduce love to ‘an ideological delusion; an idealized image of (inhibited) sexual desire; or a symbolic or discursive element performing disciplinary power’ (Jónasdóttir, 2014: 19) precluded analyses of love itself, of what it is about love that makes it a vehicle of oppression. It also forestalled a theoretical acknowledgment of love’s liberating potential. Diagnosing the history of feminist perspectives on love, bell hooks argues that it was a mistake that second wave feminists tended to see love itself as the problem. ‘We were to do away with love and put in its place a concern with gaining rights and power’, she remembers. This inhibited the development of a more complex feminist theorization of love, inasmuch as ‘[r]ather than rethinking love and insisting on its importance and value, feminist discourse on love simply stopped’ (2000b: 102). One influential contemporary feminist theorist who does engage theoretically with love is the French philosopher Luce Irigaray (1992/1996, 2002b), but, while taken up in fields like philosophy and literature, her work has not had much impact on feminist social theory (Jónasdóttir, 2014).

Insofar as the search for love is a central motivation in most people’s lives, in particular in the western world, and inasmuch as women continue to attach themselves to men in the name of love, this theoretical deficit is highly problematic. Despite women’s particular ideological enmeshment in the realm of love, the absence of love seems even more marked in feminist than non-feminist works (Jónasdóttir, 2014). Indeed, 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: 4). Meanwhile – and perhaps ironically – from the 1990s onwards, malestream sociologists interested in the general structural transformations of modern societies have begun to recognize love’s sociological significance. In his influential The transformation of intimacy (1992) Anthony Giddens argues that the increasing disconnection of intimacy from tradition and judicial and economic regulation has given rise to a ‘pure relationship’, that he holds to imply a more democratic and equal bond between women and men. Ulrich Beck and Elisabeth Beck-Gernsheim (1990/1995) similarly pinpoint how wider societal changes transform our most intimate endeavours, yet arrive at less optimistic conclusions. Apart from acknowledging that gender inequalities seem to survive the rearranging of intimacy, they highlight that the new setting of love is the condition not only of more democratic ways of relating but also of confusion and power struggles. Even more pessimistically, Eva Illouz (2012) has lately argued that the institutional changes of modernity, whereby processes of commodification increasingly structure intimate encounters and partnership, have made it more difficult to form intense bonds. Although the feminist body of thought is not her point of entry into the theme of love, Illouz also argues that, far from eroding, male dominance has taken on a new emotional form.

Jónasdóttir, who is unique among feminist theorists in that she puts love at the structural centre of her theoretical system (1991/1994, 2009, 2011), notes that the topic of love is becoming increasingly present in academic works, addressed in its own terms rather than as ‘an epiphenomenon, or a reflection of something more basic’ such as labour, care, commitment or desire (2013: 19). Still, feminist theorists seem to have caught onto this trend to a lesser degree than non-feminist scholars. Insofar as I agree with other feminist scholars (de Beauvoir, 1949/1989; Firestone, 1970/1979; Haavind, 1984; Jónasdóttir, 1991/1994, 2009, 2011; Langford, 1994, 1999) that heterosexual love is a linchpin of the system that subordinates women to men, it is crucial that this love deficit in feminist theory be remedied. This is even more important since love, while arguably being a universal human phenomenon, seems to be more socially decisive than ever (Beck and Beck-Gernsheim, 1990/1995; Illouz, 2012; Jónasdóttir, 2011). Having earlier been subordinated to other rationales, love enjoys an increasingly independent social significance. For example, it is an unprecedented fact that the experience of love is the factor which determines how households and reproduction are organized. Also, as Illouz highlights, whereas in pre-modernity a person’s social worth was largely based on the esteem received from fulfilling roles and duties, it is now increasingly based on personali...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction
• PART I Feminist modes of theorizing sexuality and gendered power
• PART II Meta-theoretical interlude: Challenging poststructuralist feminism
• PART III The reality of love and power: A feminist-realist depth approach
• References
• Index