2017: A. Malinowska, & M. Gratzke (Eds.), Materiality of Love, Essays on Affection and Cultural Practice. New York: Taylor & Francis (Routledge)
Drawing on love studies and research in material cultures, this book seeks to re-examine love through materiality studies, especially their recent incarnations, new materialism and object-oriented philosophy, to spark a debate on the relationship between love, objects and forms of materializing affection. It focuses on love as a material form and traces connections between feelings and materiality, especially in relation to the changing notion of the material as marked by digital culture, as well as the developments in understanding the nature of non-human affect. It provides insight into how materiality, in its broadest sense, impacts the understanding of the meanings and practices of love today and reversely, how love contributes to the production and transformation of the material world.
2017: A. Burge, & M. Gratzke (Eds.), Critical Love Studies. Special issue of Journal of Popular Romance Studies.
The Journal of Popular Romance Studies started out as an interdisciplinary journal exploring popular romance fiction, mostly in print. It has steadily been expanding its remit to include “the logics, institutions, and social practices of romantic love in global popular culture.” Recent special issues have thrown a light on romantic love in regional contexts such as Latin America (issue 4.1) and Australia (issue 4.2) as well as on questions of library studies and popular romance and on the increasing queer sensibilities of popular romance media. This special issue on the emerging field of Critical Love Studies (CLS) draws together contributions from various disciplines ranging from human geography to cultural studies, and it marks a further development both for JPRS and for popular romance studies more generally.
There are plenty of definitions of love but none of them – we feel – captures the fullness of love, unless we subscribe to a religious view which determines a deity as the sole source of all love. As always, there is wisdom in the way people use language. As guest editor Michael Gratzke, who chairs the international Love Research Network, points out in his contribution which opens this special issue, “The Oxford English Dictionary lists no fewer than seven different uses of the noun, not counting scoring conventions in games including tennis, and four categories for the verb.” This irreducible multiplicity is an indicator for the richness of love as it is experienced and expressed by people. Critical Love Studies, therefore, refrains from offering a single definition of love. As shorthand, we stick with phenomenological descriptors such as parental love, sibling love, romantic (or intimate) love, neighbourly love or the more abstract loves for one’s community, a sports team or country.
The approach of Critical Love Studies is not to reduce any occurrence of love to an instance of something other than love: that is, to sexual desire, or to re-inscriptions of consumer culture, or to exercises in gendered power, etc. Rather, the currency of love is “love acts,” a concept modelled on the “speech acts” of Linguistics. As Gratzke explains, “each occurrence of love should be judged against the backdrop of the socio-historic circumstances in which a set of love acts is performed” (Gratzke 2017). We cannot grasp the fullness of love (its langue); instead we look at the patterns of love acts (the parole of love) in their given context. This robustly contextualized investigation must retain “a good dose of scepticism regarding our ability fully to understand the object of our studies.” In other words, as scholars of love, we need to be careful, to look closely at our subject(s) and, above all, to be critical, not just of practices and institutions of love, but of our own methodologies and analytical frameworks. Whilst it makes good sense to be critical of love, in particular the inequalities in the division of emotional and reproductive labour, we must at all times retain both confidence in and a critical stance towards our own bias, which is that love is a valuable expression of human relationality.