Archive of Valentines Day

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.

A flash sale of our top works of activism and theory to celebrate the made-up holiday Red Day.

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.

Kathi Weeks draws on 1970s feminist critiques of romance to investigate the contemporary management discourses of love and happiness at work. 

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. 

On Valentine's Day, Emma Dowling makes a powerful case for thinking about the structure of social relationships rather than simply 'the one'.