Year: 2017
Type: article
Abstract: This article outlines the objectives of Critical Love Studies, their grounding in a wide range of critical theory, a multi-disciplinary methodology linking narrative approaches from literary studies, linguistics, social sciences and psychology, and gives an example of practical application in literary scholarship and participatory community research into experiences of love in the human lifespan. It introduces the concept of “love acts” which are likened to performative speech acts in the ways in which they create social reality. The relationship between an occurrence of love (a set of interrelated love acts) and its social context may be affirmative or constitute some form of deviation from the norm. In some cases, love acts which deviate from the norm achieve “critical mass” and have a transformative effect on their social world. Finally, this article discusses the love dispositif. A dispositif or apparatus is constituted by the dynamic and productive interplay of discourses, practices, and the material conditions for their existence. The love dispositif hence encompasses love norms, love institutions, love theory, all speech acts and practices generated by and in the name of love, as well as the material conditions, such as the gendered division of reproductive labour, and even oxytocin levels in people who experience love. None of these in isolation suffice to understand or explain “love”. Together they produce and reproduce everything we experience or represent as love.
Author: Michael Gratzke
Language: English
Subfield: Literature and Literary Theory
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W2662518258