Love and the Politics of Intimacy Bodies, Boundaries,
Liberation - 1st Edition
Visit the link below to download the full version of this book:
https://medidownload.com/product/love-and-the-politics-of-intimacy-bodies-bounda
ries-liberation-1st-edition/
Click Download Now
BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC
Bloomsbury Publishing Inc
1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA
50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK
29 Earlsfort Terrace, Dublin 2, Ireland
BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of
Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
First published in the United States of America 2023
Copyright © Stanislava Dikova, Wendy McMahon, and Jordan Savage, 2023
Each chapter © of Contributors
For legal purposes the Acknowledgements on p. xvi constitute
an extension of this copyright page.
Cover design: Eleanor Rose
Cover Image © Getty Images
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted
in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying,
recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior
permission in writing from the publishers.
Bloomsbury Publishing Inc does not have any control over, or responsibility for,
any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given
in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher
regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased
to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Dikova, Stanislava, editor. | McMahon, Wendy, editor. | Savage, Jordan, editor.
Title: Love and the politics of intimacy : bodies, boundaries, liberation / edited by
Stanislava Dikova, Wendy McMahon and Jordan Savage.
Description: New York, NY : Bloomsbury Academic, 2022. |
Includes bibliographical references and index. | Summary: “Interdisciplinary
studies on the position of love in contemporary global thought and literature that reflect on
experiences of intimate, romantic, and sexual love, and the role of individual
identity”– Provided by publisher.
Identifiers: LCCN 2022028608 (print) | LCCN 2022028609 (ebook) |
ISBN 9781501387371 (hardback) | ISBN 9781501387418 (paperback) |
ISBN 9781501387388 (epub) | ISBN 9781501387395 (pdf) |
ISBN 9781501387401 (ebook other)
Subjects: LCSH: Love–Social aspects. | Intimacy (Psychology) | Emotions–Political aspects.
Classification: LCC HM1151 .L69 2022 (print) | LCC HM1151 (ebook) |
DDC 306.7–dc23/eng/20220901
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022028608
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022028609
ISBN: HB: 978-1-5013-8737-1
ePDF: 978-1-5013-8739-5
eBook: 978-1-5013-8738-8
Typeset by Newgen KnowledgeWorks Pvt. Ltd., Chennai, India
To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com
and sign up for our newsletters.
For Amy May
CONTENTS
List of figures ix
Notes on contributors x
Preface xiii
Acknowledgements xvi
Introduction 1
Stanislava Dikova, Wendy McMahon and Jordan Savage
Part 1 Love and communities
1 ‘Love is a battle, love is a war’: James Baldwin’s use of
love to represent race, gender and sexuality in segregated
America 13
Daniele Nunziata
2 Liberating the Victorian politics of love through Jack the
Lass and Anne Lister 31
Vicky Panossian and Salma Yassine
3 The lover and the tribe 47
Ian Davidson
4 A love letter to white friends 63
Deya Mukherjee
viii CONTENTS
Part 2 Intimate bodies
5 The sharper end of love: When sex is painful, how is
intimate love navigated? Reflections from a qualitative
study in England and France 81
Hannah Loret
6 Kathy Acker’s voice in Blood and Guts in High School and
Deleuze and Guattari’s ‘desiring-machines’ 95
Gemma Curto
7 Digital love: Love through the screen/of the screen 111
Daniel O’Brien
8 #BlackLove and dating sites: A South African perspective
of cyber-love and cyber-ethics during Covid-19 127
Adelina Mbinjama
Part 3 Love’s boundaries
9 Imploding fireworks: Love and self-knowledge in the
contemporary Italian sentimental novel 149
Francesca Pierini
10 Lovespeak, love novels and the onset of modernity 163
Gary Kelly
11 Love as theoretical object in Marguerite Duras’s
writings 181
Crisia Constantine
12 Love without object 201
Lauren Edwards
13 Post-humanism and the road to castle Frankisstein 217
Lawrence Quill
Index 235
FIGURES
6.1 Map of My Dreams 107
6.2 Dream Map 2 108
CONTRIBUTORS
Crisia Constantine is a cultural studies scholar, writer and curator, educator,
art facilitator and practitioner. As a doctoral researcher at Queensland
College of Art, Griffith University, Constantine surveys the relation between
‘seeing’ and ‘knowing’ in the field of visual arts and literary studies. Also, her
work explores nomadism, childhood and women’s trauma and community
memory.
Gemma Curto is a PhD candidate in English literature at the University of
Sheffield. Her research lies in interdisciplinary approaches to the relationship
between literature, scientific methodologies and ecology. Gemma has published
an article in Green Letters on floods in biocentric graphic novels (2020).
Ian Davidson is Professor of Poetry at University College Dublin. He is a
poet and critic and teaches literature and creative writing. He has written
extensively on modern and contemporary poetry and most recently on Diane
di Prima, Bill Griffiths and Tom Pickard. Recent poetry publications are From
a Council House in Connacht (2021) and By Tiny Twisting Ways (2021).
Stanislava Dikova is a postdoctoral researcher and a visiting fellow in the
Department of Literature, Film, and Theatre Studies at the University of
Essex, UK. Her research interests revolve around twentieth-century literature
and thought, writing by women, histories of knowledge and feminist social
theory. Stanislava’s writing has appeared in Modernist Review, the LSE
Review of Books and Feminist Modernist Studies. She is currently working
on her first monograph.
Lauren Edwards, JD, is a PhD candidate in philosophy and a neuroscience
graduate diploma candidate at York University (Toronto). Lauren’s PhD
dissertation centres on the philosophy of love, philosophy of emotion,
cognitive science and feminist ethics. In particular, the dissertation argues
that love can exist without a beloved despite all contemporary philosophical
and scientific theories of love to the contrary.
CONTRIBUTORS xi
Gary Kelly is Distinguished University Professor at the University of Alberta
and teaches English and comparative literature. He has written numerous
books and essays on long eighteenth-century literature in Britain, Ireland
and America, especially the novel, women’s writing and popular print
culture. Current projects include a history of cheap romanticism and a
political history of fun.
Hannah Loret is a PhD researcher at Nottingham Trent University and works
as an NHS clinical support worker. Her research focuses on cross-national
perceptions of vulvovaginal sexual pain. She is particularly interested in
studying how women experience intimate life within complex systems of
care, currently in England and France.
Adelina Mbinjama is a lecturer in the Department of Media Studies at the
Cape Peninsula University of Technology in Cape Town, South Africa. Her
teaching and research interests are in social media communications, cyber-
ethics, black feminism and representation of women in the media. She holds
a doctoral degree in media studies from the Nelson Mandela University.
Wendy McMahon is Associate Professor in American Studies at the University
of East Anglia, UK. Her research interests centre around contemporary
literatures of the American hemisphere and their intersections with
disaster studies, human rights, law, capitalism and globalization, conflict
and security, migration and exile, place, belonging and citizenship. Wendy
has a particular interest in the relationship between Caribbean and US
topographies, colonialism, and decolonial emancipatory art, activism and
writing. Wendy has published on Cuban exile writing, Caribbean literature
and masculinity, African American literature and human rights, as well as
the relationship between landscape and history in literature.
Deya Mukherjee is a lover of radical bookshops who has worked in
movements for worker’s rights, justice for migrants, anti-racism and housing
justice. She has contributed articles to The Bristol Cable and her poetry has
been published in Verse Kraken, Atlas + Alice and Tears in the Fence. She is
currently working on a novel about tired, brown women making mistakes
and befriending ghosts.
Daniele Nunziata is Lecturer in English Literature at the University
of Oxford. He specializes in postcolonial and world literatures. His
first published book is Colonial and Postcolonial Cyprus: Transportal
Literatures of Empire, Nationalism, and Sectarianism (2020). He has
published widely on postcolonial subjects in various peer-reviewed
journals (including in PMLA and the Journal of Postcolonial Writing), and
xii CONTRIBUTORS
he contributes to both Great Writers Inspire and Writers Make Worlds. He
primarily teaches literary studies at St Anne’s College and for the Oxford
Prospects and Global Development Institute. His poetry has received
several accolades.
Vicky Panossian is an early career scholar of sociology and social
anthropology from the Central European University in Vienna, Austria. She
is currently serving as editor-in-chief of Afkar: The Undergraduate Journal
of Middle East Studies. Vicky’s research interests range from cultural identity
studies to contemporary Middle East studies.
Daniel O’Brien is a lecturer in film and digital media at the University of
Essex. His interests and areas of research span across film, interactive media
art and computer game studies. He has published work in all these subjects.
Recent publications include The Pervasive and the Digital: Immersive
Worlds in Four Interactive Artworks (2020), Extant’s Flatland: Disability
and Postphenomenological Narrative (2020) and Hap-Tech Narration and
the Postphenomenological Film (2019).
Francesca Pierini is an adjunct lecturer in the English Department of the
University of Basel. A former postdoctoral fellow at the Institute of European
and American Studies (Academia Sinica, Taiwan) and an international
scholar at KU Leuven (Belgium), Francesca’s academic interests include
cultural studies, anglophone literary representations of Italian culture, E. M.
Forster, and the modern and contemporary anglophone romance novel.
Lawrence Quill is a professor in the Department of Political Science at San
Jose State University, CA. His research interests focus on the contribution of
political theory to understanding the impact of technology on self, society
and politics.
Jordan Savage is Lecturer in US Literature. Her research centres on literary
and cinematic constructions of US nationalism and national identity. She is
interested in the iconography of dirt in the Western poetry, especially Native
poetry, offering counter-narratives to US nationalism; and the myth structure
of American exceptionalism. Jordan has published on contemporary poetry
from Britain and the United States, modern poetics and Western generic studies.
Salma Yassine is an early career scholar of gender studies at the Central
European University in Vienna, Austria. Her academic interests mainly
tackle gender and sexuality in Arab contexts of culture, literature and media.
PREFACE
This collection of essays, and its companion volume Love and the Politics
of Care, presents an interdisciplinary, global study of love, drawing on
sociology, philosophy, social care work, literary studies, film, the performing
arts, the digital and medical humanities and creative writing practice. The
case studies discussed in each chapter are situated in various locations
across Europe, Africa, Asia and the Americas and provide a comprehensive
coverage of love, both conceptually and practically, as an essential aspect of
personal and public life. The temporal reach spans from the Enlightenment
period, when most current forms of political, monetary and institutional
organization were elaborated, to the present day.
Every essay or creative piece included in this collection has something
to say about love and the difficulties encountered while trying to lead a
loving life. The locations of love explored through these studies range
from the deeply intimate space of a sexual encounter to the transnational
arena of the global care work industry. This broad landscape demonstrates
the foundational role love plays in the very fabric of our individual and
social lives. The body, the family, the workplace, the home, the digital, the
institutional and the global are all enclosures in which love meets with
restrictions, which condition the lives of those who experience it. From racial
and class barriers to physical borders between nations, love’s boundaries
are drawn by discourses of power, institutional and systemic practices of
control and the forces of the marketplace. The intended consequences of
this ritualistic demarcation reach far into the lives of those individuals who
love and wish to be loved intimately, deeply, protectively and freely. All
contributions to this collection work with these ideas and ask the following
questions: Who is allowed to love, and in what ways? What discourses of
love do we feel obliged to participate in or be excluded from? How do
national and international superstructures alter or instrumentalize love, and
what is the effect of this? Questions of gender and sexuality, race, nation,
faith and disability are all addressed. The guiding aim in this approach
has been to provide a conceptual and genealogical overview of the existing
tension between love and the lived conditions within which it is practised.
In doing so, these volumes present an alternative history of love that,
though not exhaustive, goes beyond its traditionally discussed theological
and moral manifestations, focusing instead on its presence in everyday life.
xiv PREFACE
Talking about love across the disciplinary divide provides a further impetus
for renewed investigation of a set of ideas that is all too often confined
within the history of Western thought. Our two collections also look at the
present and future moments in search of an inspiration for transforming and
recharting the pathways of love in such a way as to lead us to a more diverse
and emancipatory model of social life. The present volume, Love and the
Politics of Intimacy, engages with the construction of love as intimacy as
a practice that occurs between, through, within and, increasingly, beyond
bodies, asking questions about the norms and contexts in which they
operate. Its companion volume, Love and the Politics of Care, addresses the
politicization of love through practices of care that stretch from the familial
to the institutional and looks at practices of regulation directed both by the
state and the market and the interconnections between the two within the
neoliberal ideological framework.
The emergence of this project was rooted in our experiences of the
contemporary university in the UK, where ideas of love and care are often
weaponized by government and management against staff in order to extract
additional work and further erode working conditions.1 This rhetoric is
also commonly used to diminish resolve for industrial action and weaken
union power within the UK higher education sector. We wondered whether
this power dynamic was in operation in other sectors of the economy and,
by extension, in the homes and personal lives of those who labour in them,
particularly in situations where there is an expectation of care. Our call for
submissions generated a strong response, which convinced us that scholars
and practitioners from many disciplines are interested in asking similar
questions, and that our collection could contribute to the burgeoning field
of ‘Love Studies’ identified by Anna G. Jónasdóttir and Ann Ferguson
as an emerging ‘historically specific field of knowledge interests’ that is
both ‘heterogeneous’ and ‘conflicted’.2 The two volumes were conceived
together, and we hope they will continue their joined existence by being read
together, but this is by no means a requirement for productive engagement
with either.
Notes
1 See Amelia Horgan, Lost in Work: Escaping Capitalism (London: Pluto Press,
2021), 58, 132–4. According to data provided by the University and College
Union (UCU), 46 per cent of universities use precarious labour in the form
of zero-hours contracts to deliver their teaching, and 68 per cent of research
staff are on fixed-term contracts. Source: UCU, ‘Stamp Out Casual Contracts’,
https://www.ucu.org.uk/stampout (accessed 11 January 2022).
2 Anna G. Jónasdóttir and Ann Ferguson, eds, Love: A Question for Feminism in
the Twenty-First Century (London: Routledge, 2014), 2.
PREFACE xv
Bibliography
Horgan, Amelia. Lost in Work: Escaping Capitalism. London: Pluto Press, 2021.
Jónasdóttir, Anna G., and Ann Ferguson, eds, Love: A Question for Feminism in
the Twenty-First Century. London: Routledge, 2014.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
We, the editors, would like to convey our immense gratitude and appreciation
to all contributors to the volume for sharing their work with us at the most
turbulent of times. This project began to take shape in the spring of 2019,
before any of us knew that a global pandemic was about to alter the course of
our professional and personal lives. Despite this, our contributors persisted
with their searching inquiries and presented us with a selection of chapters,
which we are honoured to present in this collection. We also wish to extend
our gratitude to our commissioning editor at Bloomsbury, Amy Martin,
whose faith in the project kept us on track throughout the process, and to the
three anonymous readers, who gave us their time and generously provided
thoughtful feedback. A very special thanks is due to Matias Vienener at
the Kathy Acker Literary Trust for permission to reproduce images from
Kathy Acker’s novel, Blood and Guts in High School (New York: Grove
Press, 1978). A further thanks is also due to all the anonymous participants
who have taken part in the research interviews and questionnaires that have
informed the research insights developed in some of the chapters. We would
also like to acknowledge the support of our colleagues at the University of
Essex, the University of East Anglia and Keele University. We’re also grateful
for the support and loving inspiration of our families, especially Ian, Russel
and Andy.
Introduction
Stanislava Dikova, Wendy McMahon
and Jordan Savage
In a collection titled Love and the Politics of Intimacy, we are inevitably
asking about the relationship between the intimate – which is so often
conceived of as private, personal, even secret or hermetic – and the social
and public. To be intimate, from the Latin intimus, inner or inmost, is
to be private – to be intimate with another, to share that privacy and to
share the ‘inner-self’. But, as Lauren Berlant tells us in the opening of their
1998 special issue on intimacy, ‘the inwardness of the intimate is met by
a corresponding publicness’:1 part of the frisson of romantic intimacy, for
example, might derive from what is hidden, what is shared and what is at
risk of discovery or exposure. Berlant’s special issue set some significant
parameters for rethinking intimacy, calling:
Not only for a redescription but for transformative analyses of the
rhetorical and material conditions that enable hegemonic fantasies to
thrive in the minds and the bodies of subjects while, at the same time,
attachments are developing that might redirect the different routes taken
by history and biography. To rethink intimacy is to appraise how we have
been and how we live and how we might imagine lives that make more
sense than the ones so many are living.2
This collection of essays takes up the challenge of this rethinking in its broad
appraisal of how intimacy is conceived and experienced in the context of
twenty-first-century neoliberalism. As Eileen Boris and Rhacel Salazar
Parreñas state, ‘one of the most striking features of contemporary global
