Love

A Question for Feminism in the Twenty-First Century

Anna G. Jónasdóttir, Ann Ferguson, Anna G. Jónasdóttir, Ann Ferguson

• Editorial: Routledge
• Año: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781134648153
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Ciencias sociales
• Categoría: Estudios de género

This unique, timely book of original essays sets the stage for a new materialist feminist debate on the analysis, ethics and politics of love. The contributors raise questions about social power and domination, situating their research in a materialist feminist perspective that investigates love historically, in order to understand changing ideologies, representations and practices. The essays range from studies of particular representations and examples of love - feminist translation, mass media images and internet love blogs - to feminist theories of love and marriage, to ethical and political theories describing, critiquing or advocating the use of love in groups as a radical force. They break new ground in bringing together questions of gendered interests in love, temporal dimensions of loving practices and the politics of love in radical transformations of society.

1 Introduction

Ann Ferguson and Anna G. Jónasdóttir

This book is a collection of feminist essays on love which adds to the growing research forming the new field of Love Studies, a field reaching across disciplines in the academy. The aim is to interject a stronger feminist presence into studies on love, especially for those students and scholars interested in cultural studies, the social sciences, philosophy, and political theory. It involves an intervention into the direction of feminist theory as well. Without rejecting the insights of poststructuralism, the book represents a return to and deepening of the strand of materialist feminism which both includes and goes beyond the study of discourses. The aim is to focus on the material practices and embodied experiences of love, power, and domination in order to move towards liberation. In this introduction we will situate the book in the feminist theory debates from the 1970s forward as they are relevant to the new field of Love Studies. In what follows we discuss the historical context of the book and frame the main issues it addresses.

THE BOOK IN CONTEXT

Until recently, there have been two significant gaps in the approach to love as an object of knowledge. First, there has been a huge gap between, on the one hand, how most people think (or “what people know”) about love, that it is one of the most valuable “things” in human life, and on the other hand, the rejection, ridiculing, or at best marginalization of love as a topic for serious studies in much of academia.

Second, there has been a gap between the enormous amount of work on love being done in art, in novels, drama, music, and film, as compared to the comparatively small amount of academic work investigating the subject of love through the years, plus the tendency to ignore or forget what has actually been done. The exception, of course, has been in those academic disciplines which focus on the study of works of art and fiction.

If the emergence of Love Studies as a new, expanding field of academic scholarship implies bridging these gaps to some extent, it also implies that doing love studies now can be seen as a timely “insurrection of subjugated knowledges,” to speak with Foucault (1997/2003: 6–7). But the growing interest in love can also be interpreted as implying that Power/Knowledge— or Power/Science—is now intruding into and exploiting the last reservoir of human social and bodily powers. We think that Foucault's notion of “returns of knowledge,” both in the form of “buried” historical contents and of previously “disqualified” theories can be useful here, if modified as elaborated in Chapter 2.

Since the early 1990s a growing interest in the subject of love can be seen in many disciplines and fields of academic scholarship. Love is now being studied without being translated into other terms, or excused as not really qualified for theory work proper. Nor is it thought of, as it has been and still is in some feminist theory and research, merely as a discursive device for seducing women or other others into one or another form of subordination.

The first claim we make here is that a new historically specific field of knowledge interests, what we call “Love Studies”, is emerging. The history of this emergence will be discussed further in the next chapter, Chapter 2. Love Studies, as we see it, is a heterogeneous and conflicted field of knowledge interests, and feminist theorists have been internally divided as to whether and how to enter into it.

We want to argue, as a second point, that feminist theory and politics has much to win by broadening and deepening the study of love, in part for the same reason that has made feminists so reluctant towards the subject. Inasmuch as love “works” ideologically to subordinate women, feminist scholars should work to challenge this by being at the forefront of framing the new field of Love Studies. Feminist scholars have already begun to do this by beginning to disarticulate questions of love from sexuality and to reframe theories of male dominance, and mechanisms for change, with this new lens (cf. Jónasdóttir, Bryson, and Jones (eds) 2011). How have feminist scholars approached studies of love until now? What is there to build on to make and remake Love Studies as a feminist field of empirically oriented, theoretically elaborative, and politically relevant scholarship?

Broadly, since the 1970s onwards three different perspectives and approaches to love can be distinguished among feminists. We call them Love as delusion and/or ideology, Love as a key element in ethics and in epistemology, and Love as social and biomaterial human power.

LOVE AS DELUSION: LOVE, OR MORE SPECIFICALLY, ROMANTIC LOVE SEEN AS AN IDEOLOGICAL FORCE

In the first and second wave women's movements of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in Europe and the US, feminist theories of love have tended to concentrate on heterosexual romantic couple love as problematic because imbedded with patriarchal ideology (Kollontai 1919/1972; de Beauvoir 1949/1987; Firestone 1971), or, in marriage, as constitutive of the gender positions that perpetuate male dominance (Wollstonecraft 1792/1975; Mitchell 1974). Some have argued that certain kinds of romantic love (those outside of marriage—Goldman 1910/2005) or those engaged in by lesbian feminists (Wittig 1981; Rich 1980) are sites of resistance to patriarchy. Hesford (2009) has re-thought the rejection of this approach by contemporary queer feminists to argue that in fact the creative political practices re-doing women's loves and friendships developed by radical feminist consciousness-raising groups set the stage for the contemporary queer critique of heteronormativity.

However, the early feminist (radical, socialist, lesbian) focus on sexual love as a destructive delusion and/or as a liberating power, gave way to discussions focusing on the politics of sexuality rather than on love (Douglas 1990; Stacey and Pearce 1995), or to various forms of care ethics and “love's labor” (cf. below). When the topic of sexual love reappeared in Anglo-American feminist theory discussion in the 1990s, it was mainly addressed indirectly, in form of “romantic love,” “romance,” or “romantic utopia” and inspired much by analyses of fiction and film developed in the 1980s. This breaking of the relative silence about love revealed the “extraordinary power and seduction of romantic discourse” (Stacey and Pearce 1995: 13; Illouz 1997). Other grounds on which feminists have addressed gender, power and the delusions of love are through critique of psychoanalytic theory of sexual desire (Benjamin 1990; Langford 1999), of the individualization and democratization of heterosexual love thesis (Beck and Beck-Gernsheim 1995; Giddens 1992; Jackson 1993, 1995), or by pinpointing the prolific “language of love,” in an era of “emotional capitalism” as a most ef cient way of controlling people and promoting consumerism (Evans 2003; Kipnis 2003; Illouz 2007, 2012).

LOVE AS A KEY ELEMENT IN EPISTEMOLOGY AND MORAL PHILOSOPHY

Feminist theorists have argued that Love is an uneliminable emotive power in knowledge of the world (Jaggar 1989; Rose 1994; Keller 1985). Nussbaum (1990) has even argued that particular loves portrayed in literature can teach us more about ourselves and our loves than life itself. But their thought is not very specific on love as a particular type of emotion and its special effects. None of the epistemological standpoint theorists (Harding 1993; Hartsock 1983; Haraway 1988; Collins 2000) really deal with love directly either. Some feminist moral theorists (such as Held 1993; Ruddick 1989; Noddings 1984; Gilligan 1982; and Tronto 1993) do emphasize the importance of a particular kind of gendered love, usually maternal love, in caring relations and caring work that fosters an ethic of care that women tend to have rather than the ethics of justice prevalent in male-dominated mainstream philosophy. However, the editors wish to emphasize a broader notion of love, in order to include sexual love as a distinct site of contemporary male dominance. We theorize the unequal and exploitative exchange in (heterosexual) sexual love of what Jónasdóttir (1994, 2009, 2011) calls “love power,” and Ferguson (1989, 1991) calls “sex/affective energy,” and not simply care and care work. Other types of love such as parenting, friendship, kin bonding and group solidarity (Ferguson 1989, 1991, 2012, and in this volume; Hennessy 2000, and in this volume) involve material activities and exchanges of love where male dominance can either persist or be undermined.

On yet another track, and coming at the question of heterosexual love from a Difference feminist perspective, Irigaray (1996) has argued that ther eare basic phenomenological differences between the two human biological sexes. These body-based differences not only give men and women different existential experiences of the world, but in the patriarchal history of ideas, the male thinkers from Plato and Aristotle to Hegel and Freud have imposed a phallogocentric perspective on the view of child human development and human nature, prioritizing and valuing the masculine imaginary and hiding or distorting the feminine imaginary. For Irigaray, the task for feminist reconfigurations of couple love is to propose a new vision of loving which does not involve the subject's attempt to possess the object. Rather we need to acknowledge each gender's rights to life as ontologically different subjects who can only relate indirectly in love, hence “I love to you,” rather than “I love you.” Not only Irigaray but Kristeva (1987) theorize the creative potential of what Toye (2010) calls a feminist “poethics of love” to re-think feminist theory and politics. Irigaray's seeming essentialism about this reconstructed couple love based only on heterosexuality has been challenged by lesbian-feminists who deconstruct Freud in another way so as to see perverse sexualities, such as lesbian love and sexuality, as hidden at the center of his thought (de Lauretis 1994). In a similar vein, poststructuralist Judith Butler is one of the founders of LGBT Queer feminist theory, whose re-reading of Freud rejects Irigaray's project by claiming that heterosexual desire and gender is itself formed in a heteronormative repudiation of abjected lesbian or gay love objects (Butler 1997).

Poststructuralist feminists on the pro-sex side of the Western feminist “sex wars” of the 1980s (Ferguson 1984) argued that, just as certain scientific power-knowledges (psychiatry, criminology, pedagogy, medicine) normalize some subjects and marginalize others, debates within feminist theory itself are struggles to normalize and valorize some discourses and subjects while rejecting others. So in the Western feminist political splits in the late 1970s and 1980s, for example, radical feminist discourse valorized lesbian-feminists who believe in monogamy and non-penetrative sex. They were seen to be vanguard, hence “better” feminists (real “women-identified” women), while heterosexual feminists and anyone who likes pornography and supports polyamory were marginalized. An emphasis on power and contextual differences between women by race, class, ethnicity, and sexuality also led poststructuralist and postmodernist theorists to reject any identity politics based on a supposed essentialist epistemological standpoint of womanhood (cf. Butler and Scott 1992).

What is often ignored in this argument rejecting identity politics are the self-referential flaws of poststructuralism as a political discourse (cf. also Jónasdóttir and Jones 2009). To reject identity politics because they are based on normalizing discourses is itself a meta-discourse that normalizes a certain kind of Queer (or anti-racist) politics that resists fixed identities in favor of coalition politics. But even coalition politics needs to be based on some kind of solidarity (cf. hooks 1982; Ferguson 2009), and norms are necessary for any united political action. Is there a fourth political position which rejects the humanist liberal politics of uniting around being human to demand rights to freedom and equality for all regardless of bodily differences, the essentialist feminist sex difference position that prioritizes gender power differences over all other power inequalities, and a poststructural Queer theory that posits coalitions between subjects who deny any commonalities in favor of endless particular differences between individuals?

LOVE SEEN AS A SOCIAL AND BIO-MATERIAL HUMA...