Doing Gender, Doing Love: Interdisciplinary Voices

The emotion of love is ontologically foundational: it is through love that people fulfil their basic humanity, by relating to one another and forging and re-tracing, time and again, the borders of their identity.Children first apprehend their sense of self as they are loved by those who care and raise them; later in life individuals continue to relate to others in multiple and heterogeneous loving ways, in friendship, in bonds of altruistic care, and in intimate and erotic relationships. In this collection, we explore how gender is tied to ‘doing’ love, and shapes loving practices in gender specific ways; we explore how loving and being loved correlate to modes of identity formation and we investigate how ideologies on gender and love can be correlated to subjection and intimate violence, yet can also offer the occasion for emancipation through a praxis of resistance to patriarchal power.