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Posts tagged: valentines-day

  • Love and the New Morality

    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.

  • With love, from us to you!

    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. 

  • Love in the Feminist City

    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. 

  • La Truite au Bleu by Dorothea Tanning (1952)

    Love Against the State

    Natasha Lennard reflects on the enduring necessity of marriage in order to prove one's love to the state.

  • Decolonising Desire: The Politics of Love

    Decolonising Desire: The Politics of Love

    Dalia Gebrial examines the colonial scripts that encode people in and out of the possibility of love. Embedded within the constituent discourses of love – of desirability, emotional labour, support and commitment – are codes of social value assigned to certain bodies; of who is worthy of love’s work. The labour of decolonising these representative paradigms is structural, and involves addressing their material histories.