Posts tagged: valentines-day

A love that is home

“I love you. We get to make up what that storied word means.”
Love and Revolution: The Inessa-Lenin-Krupskaya triangle

“If you fall in love with a struggle, it is easy to fall in love with those who share that struggle and vice versa.”
Masturbation Manifesto 1997

"Could it be that independent orgasms might lead to independent thoughts?"
Lay all your love on me

What would it mean to theorise love as a form of labour? How can we think of our emotional dependency on other people in political terms, rather than as expressions of individual and interior subjectivity?
A Hitchcock Blonde in Paris | Bluebeard's Castle

Anna Biller captures the seductively luxurious glamour of a honeymoon in Paris in her gothic novel Bluebeard’s Castle.
Love and the New Morality

The Russian Marxist revolutionary Alexandra Kollantai was a key leader of the Russian Socialist movement, the only woman in the early Soviet government, and a tireless campaigner and writer for women's emancipation. For Valentine's Day, we present an extract from her review of The Sexual Crisis by the German writer Meisel-Hess. It is a reminder that Kollontai's ideas on sexual relations and women's liberation were part of a more general ferment of ideas on these questions in Western Europe at the beginning of this century.

For more, listen to Kristen Ghodsee on Kollontai, and on the political economy of Valentine's Day.
The unknowns of sexual desire

Katherine Angel on the endless negotiations of power within sexual experiences.
With love, from us to you!

This week we're thinking about love, desire and relationships, at the intersection of capitalism, the state, and heteronormativity. And, Love Island.
Sex and Self-Knowledge: Beyond Consent

Good sex shouldn't depend on faultless self-knowledge. Katherine Angel puts forward the case for desire's emergent and contextual nature.
The Singles Manifesto

Marie Edwards' powerful feminist manifesto from 1974.
Love in the Feminist City

From Charlotte Brontë to Carrie Bradshaw, via Betty Friedan: Leslie Kern on how urban architecture has expanded and constrained women's freedom to live independently and without men.
If Heterosexualism Existed, We Wouldn’t Have To Make It Up

Despite its flagrant impossibility, heterosexuality can inspire a utopian love of difference in those who choose to follow its path, argues Sophie Lewis. Just don't look to the 'straight camp' of Love Island for inspiration.