Archive of Valentines Day

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?

It is mostly through intimate relationships that we reproduce ourselves emotionally, and that we create our sense of authentic subjectivity.

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.

Katherine Angel on the endless negotiations of power within sexual experiences.

This week we're thinking about love, desire and relationships, at the intersection of capitalism, the state, and heteronormativity. And, Love Island. 

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

Marie Edwards' powerful feminist manifesto from 1974.

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. 

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. 

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