Love, Heterosexuality and Society

Paul Johnson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2007
• ISBN:
  9781134218578
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Sciences sociales
• Subtopic: Études LGBT

Heterosexuality is a largely 'silent' set of practices and identities – it is assumed to be everywhere and yet often remains unnamed and unexplored. Despite recent changes in the theoretical understanding and representation of sexuality, heterosexuality continues to be socially normative.

Forging a new agenda for the study of heterosexuality, this in-depth volume, the first research monograph to focus on heterosexuality and society, presents an empirical study of the construction, negotiation and enactment of heterosexual sexuality. Using detailed interview data, it investigates how heterosexuality, as both an identity and a set of practices, is accomplished through love relationships. Rather than assuming that romantic love is an outcome or expression of a pre-defined sexuality, Johnson explores how sexuality is brought to life through love.

Situated in the ongoing theoretical debates concerning the relationship between gender and sexuality, Paul Johnson's book shows how ways of loving are interwoven with the construction, practice, regulation and government of heterosexuality. Excellently written, this important book also looks at gender in society, and explores such areas as heterosexual subjectivities and the borders of desire. As such, the research it contains will be valuable for all students of sociology and gender studies.

1
The essence of love

No wonder everyone wants it – as if they have known such love before and can barely remember it, yet are compelled ever after to seek it as the single thing worth living for. Without love, most of life remains concealed. Nothing is as fascinating as love, unfortunately.

(Hanif Kureishi, Intimacy, 71)

Love is only an explanation of the whole thing.

(Dorothy)

Love, writes Erich Fromm, ‘is an active power in man’ ([1957] 1995:16, italics in original): ‘I love from the essence of my being – and experience the other person in the essence of his or her being. In essence, all human beings are identical’ ([1957] 1995:44). Is love, and the process of loving, essential to all human beings? Is it, as Fromm suggests, a residual ‘power’ which is inside every ‘identical’ human being? Is it a need which, perhaps like eating and sleeping, requires no explanation other than it is vital to our lives? We might conclude that this is the case given that sociology has paid little attention to actually explaining what romantic, passionate or intimate love is (Jackson, 1999). Even though romantic love has a highly stylized and coded language through which it is spoken, represented and communicated (Goode, 1959; Luhmann, 1986), and is recognized to adhere to distinctive discursive parameters (Barthes, 1990), there is very little empirical work which seeks to elucidate how people define love or how they experience it.

In this chapter I want to explore how people understand love and, furthermore, begin to sketch out how constructions of love are interwoven with, and delimited by, heterosexuality. I want to begin with a common assertion that love is one of the most natural and requisite forms of human experience and that it represents a basic human ontology. bell hooks (2000), for example, argues that all human beings yearn for love. Such a yearning is produced because every human being is a ‘wounded child’ who, in order to repair the ‘first banishment from love’s paradise’, must ‘find the love our hearts long for’ (hooks, 2000: x). ‘The light of love is always in us’, argues hooks, ‘the life force inside a dark place waiting to be born – waiting to see the light’ (hooks, 2000:68). When I began to look at how people talk about love I found that this view was pervasive: love is often conceived as a universal property of human existence, a force or power inside the body, which is natural, innate, and struggling for expression.

This idea of love is exemplified in most ‘self-help’ books or ‘manuals’ on the subject where instructions, plans and programmes promise to aid us through the negotiation of this most complicated of all human cosmologies. This is not absent from academic work where a whole tradition of ‘radical Freudians’ attempted to show us how we may love ‘properly’ (Fromm, [1957] 1995; Marcuse, 1955; Reich, 1961). Even Shulamith Firestone, an arch critic of romantic love, would like to hold on to an essentiality of love which becomes distorted by power: ‘when we talk about romantic love we mean love distorted by its power context – the sex class system – into a diseased form of love’ (1972:139), ‘it becomes complicated, corrupted, or obstructed by an unequal balance of power’ (1972:124, italics in original). Yet what such work achieves is a reification of love. Rather than analyse the social construction of love, the emphasis is placed on the analysis of the social organization of human relationships. What this affects (and this can be seen in the beliefs which hooks and Fromm outline) is an idea that the ability to fall in love, and the desire to be in love, are natural or human essences which, although subject to social forces which direct them in certain ways, remain the ‘truths’ of humanity.

In hooks’ and Fromm’s work, armed with the language of psychology, love is often posited as that which all humans could do if only they could do it free from external constraint. Love is conceived of as a ‘stubborn drive’ (much like Foucault described our view of sexuality) denigrated by the impersonal forces of capitalism and patriarchy. And yet, as Nikolas Rose points out: ‘What humans are able to do is not intrinsic to the flesh, the body, the psyche, the mind, or the soul; it is constantly shifting and changing from place to place, time to time, with the linking of humans into apparatuses of thought and action’ (Rose, 1998:182). If the capacity to ‘do’ love is therefore historically specific and, as Rose points out, relies on certain apparatuses of thought which both enables and constrains what humans are and what humans can do, then we must problematize ontological assertions which claim love (as both desire and practice) is simply the result of being human. Instead we must consider how such assertions are constructed and maintained through the discourses which constitute them. As Jackson (1999) argues: ‘Emotions are not simply “felt” as internal states provoked by the unconscious sense of a lost infantile satisfaction – they are actively structured and understood through culturally specific discourses’ (1999:119). In the following sections I want to explore how these culturally specific discourses construct love as an essence of humanness and, as an effect of our continuous incitement of them, how we ‘make love’ the basis for particular ways of being and acting.

What is love? Finding the words …

I want to begin with one of the most striking features of our language of love, which is the lack of a clear way to describe what love ‘is’. Given that romantic/passionate love is one of the fundamental facets of our social existence, we might expect that most people would be able to define it. Yet when I asked people the questions, ‘what is love?’ or ‘how would you define love?’, I was presented with a range of answers which all demonstrated how love appears difficult to render into language:

PHILLIP: It’s a mutual thing […] and you can sense it. You can feel it building. It’s hard to describe, I don’t think I could put a description on it.

HEATHER: There isn’t a word that encompasses it, just, I don’t know […] it’s almost as if there’s something beyond love. As if love isn’t a big enough word to encompass the unconditional aspects of it.

CARL: It’s intangible […] well it can mean all kinds of things can’t it?

RUTH: It’s difficult, it’s hard isn’t it, […] it’s hard to put it into words.

DOROTHY: It’s a thing you can’t really grasp, you can’t really say to anybody what falling in love is, it’s not something you can get hold of, it just seems to … blossom. Doesn’t it?

CATHERINE: I think it is something extra, there’s something a little bit extra that you just can’t quite explain, you can’t quite put your finger on it but you know that there’s something there that’s extra, definitely, something you can’t describe […] there are lots of different elements that make love up, there must be, there must be […] but I don’t think there are many people that can explain things.

What is common to all of these accounts is that love, both conceptually and experientially, appears resistant to descriptive language. There is, as Catherine says, something ‘extra’ which resists reduction to a simple description. This extra dimension of love, something ‘intangible’ that ‘you can’t really grasp’, and a thing which one can only ‘sense’, is the language of love personified. These are descriptions which attempt to capture love in language, but serve only to recount love as something which ‘you can’t put your finger on’, a state of being which mysteriously ‘blossoms’. Freudian psychoanalysis would account for the inability to explain love in rational description as one aspect of a form of human desire which is a largely unconscious process. As Wendy Langford argues, in her psychoanalytic analysis of love’s compelling nature, our desire for love is based on an original childish narcissism, the ‘knowledge of which has been lost from consciousness’ (1999:143). ‘The whole point of love’, argues Langford, ‘is that our actions are motivated by what we are unaware of’ (1999:149, italics in original).

Much like psychoanalysis, biologically deterministic explanations often describe love as the result of innate human drives which result from biological impulses derived from the foundational need to reproduce. The conflation of love into sexual desire and, further, into a reified model of reproductive sexuality is the normative explanation of why human beings love. As Ellen explained to me during an interview, love can be understood as a biological process which results from ‘this hormonal, physical thing, this mating urge’. Mike Featherstone notes:

The need to reproduce sexually is something we share with other animal species, along with most plant species […] animals always copulate in the same way, whereas human beings have woven around this act a wide range of practices, institutions, rites and representations.

(1999:1)

In this sense, Featherstone’s argument is clear: ‘sexuality is clearly the primordial source with eroticism and love the derivative forms’ (1999:1). What this elaborates is a commonly held belief that all sexual and amorous practices have a distinctive genealogy which can be read back to an original need to reproduce (the seemingly indisputable state of nature). But is sex an authentic real to love’s socially constructed ritual? The fact that both psychoanalytic and biological accounts reduce love to some more ‘fundamental’ feature of existence means that they fail to tell us what love ‘is’ outside of a mechanistic description of what love ‘does’. And, in leaving the issue of love being something ‘you can’t really grasp’ unexplored, affect a certain ‘naturalness’ around love.

The central problem of an untheorized essentiality of love has continually found direct expression in social science. If individuals find love difficult to ‘put into words’ so too has sociology.¹ But the descriptions of love outlined above present intractable philosophical problems within the language of social science because they appear, by convention, outside of the rubric of the rational analysis which sociology delimits as the criteria for its own business. Since falling in love appears, as Jackson notes, as ‘indefinable, mysterious, outside rational discourse’, it often seems sociology concludes that it is ‘knowable only intuitively, at the level of feeling’ (1999:100). Such a conclusion has often relegated love to a realm of an incommunicable set of emotions that are beyond the reach of a social science which cannot pervade the ‘inner’ life of the individual. Thus, love remains the domain of philosophy, of psychoanalysis, of psychology and biology, and of poetry. The problem seems one of language; the language of the heart seems to resist the rationalist descriptions of any activity which attempts to impose explanation upon it. As Catherine says, there is a belief that there are few people who could actually explain love. And Catherine would be right if she turned to science for the answer. The causal language of science is, as Charles Lindholm argues, no use because it ‘tends strongly to reduce romantic attraction to something else, that is sexual desire, the exchange of pleasure, the maximization of the gene pool and so on’ (1999:247).

As Jackson (1999) notes, social science has frequently studied the institutional expression of romantic love whilst leaving love itself as an unspecified object of inquiry. In doing this, social science has reproduced the perennial subject/object problem of its own domain of inquiry, specifying the ‘objective’ manifestations of romance, marriage, kinship and domesticity as its site of study whilst relegating the ‘emotion’ of love to the personal sphere.² Perhaps this is because love, as a set of emotions, has no materiality outside of the relations which it inspires. Yet this is no reason to conclude that the construction of love itself is not important. On the contrary, it is precisely the ways that love appears mysterious and elusive which is of central significance to the material relations to which it becomes attached.

As we see above, love presents difficulties for analysis because it is premised on a belief that it cannot be precisely communicated in language. Yet, what is more easily and more frequently communicated is how love ‘feels’. When we say we are ‘in love’ with someone we have a particular lexicon of associated feelings (sensations, emotions, bodily metaphors) to describe it:

CATHERINE: [being in love is] being very very happy, being very very comfortable, being able to trust somebody.

DOROTHY: It’s just we felt comfortable and warm with each other, you know, it just seemed, you know, nothing at all, we never argued about anything.

CARL: [love is] profoundly emotional, being very close to someone.

VICTORIA: Like a warm blanket. Well you know when you’re in the bed and you’re all curled up in your blanket and you just go to sleep and you’re in a deep sleep and nothing can disturb you. You don’t want to get up, you don’t have to get up. It’s just like that.

These quotations illustrate that, even though people often have difficulty answering questions about what love ‘is’, they find it far easier to talk about how love ‘feels’. Words such as ‘comfortable’ and ‘warm’ are extremely common in the accounts about how it feels to be in love. Love is often represented in specific metaphors that relate to temperature and bodily condition (see Lupton, 1998, for a detailed description of how language metaphors are employed to materialize emotions within corporeality). These metaphors are tangible ways of describing love and constitute a definite descriptive language which employs our body at the centre of delimiting how love feels. More importantly they constitute a way of describing, through expressing the feelings that being in love produces (as opposed to the feelings and sensations we associate with our other social relationships) what romantic/intimate love ‘is’.

So there are two central tropes in the language of love: the first is that love is constructed as beyond description and the second is that it ...