Okay so this is day three of my Facebook strike.
On this day I think I will attempt to sketch out the contours of my Feminist Marxist Philosophy of Love. This is my *big* project, so please be kind.
Now, this is going to be a very roughly drawn out skeleton of more detailed writing I’ve done. The scope and breadth of my theorizing on this subject has dramatically expanded over the past few months but my writing has not caught up.
My feminist marxist approach to dating:
1) Begins with a broad analysis of social relations under capitalism in general. This approach also proceeds from the idea that individuals have agency but are still strongly shaped by social structures.
2) Is both externally and inwardly focused. This is because a fm approach to love is an endeavor propelled forward by a commitment to just and liberatory social relations between people.
Human beings can not truly ever live outside the world they exist in. We are too deeply steeped in our subjective experiences, and this has a distorting effect. A commitment to justice and love, cannot be compartmentalized and divorced from a true commitment to justice and love for all the people of the world. These commitments, in order to be truly transformative must be externalized to something larger and outside ourselves. If not, these ideas collapse back into themselves. Love if anything, is a social practice, its a social relation, the more inwardly focused it is, the more distorted it becomes. Essentially, this means that a fm theory of love, must also be a theory necessarily tethered to a larger revolutionary anticapitalist vision of society. Why? See next point.
3) A marxist analysis of capital tells us that capitalism is inherently exploitative system geared towards profit. A fm approach to dating sees love as incompatible with injustice, exploitation and domination. As someone (I can’t remember who) once said, where the will to power is great, love will be lacking. Power imbalances between individuals are natural, but they should be counteracted consciously. This requires a broader analysis of the roots of inequality in our society. A fm analysis of the roots of inequality is not economically reductionist. Instead, my fm approach sees class, race, gender and sexuality as all being mutually constitutive.
2) As the last point alludes to, FM does not consider romance, love, dating, sex and sexuality outside the political and public context it is situated in. Most of the time love and romance is considered in isolation, as if these areas are entirely personal and private. Most advice and writing on relationships, love/romance, etc., found in the mainstream are presented as disconnected from and unrelated to the “serious” and “public” realm of politics and economics.
Feminism has done the most to counteract this. With its proclamation that the personal is political, feminism radically challenged western liberal capitalism’s modern construction of the public/private sphere dichotomy. This has been one of feminism’s most radical contributions, but it has not been recognized as such.
Love, romance and dating do not occur outside of capitalist market relations. That said, A feminist analysis of love sees its radical potential as a force that has tremendous potential to transcend market logic.
After all, think about the way forbidden love is depicted in the movies. Often it is shown as a force powerful enough to make you forget who you are supposed to love, socialize with and marry. (I.e., Love between two people of the wrong caste, class, race, etc.) Its safe to say that most people don’t like to think about love as tainted by economic considerations, and it is usually portrayed in the mainstream media as existing outside of them. In reality, love has become the ultimate consumerist vehicle. Mainstream advertising and media appeals to our deepest needs and desires, and then commodifies them.
To summarize, relationships, romantic ones, in particular, involve questions of power dynamics and cannot ever be considered outside the political, social and cultural frameworks they are a part of.
3) My fm approach to love is NOT a set of instructions. Relationships are objective, but immaterial. Relations are also relationAL, meaning that they are highly contextual and impossible to understand as isolated phenomena. An ideal fm theory of love would provide us with certain paradigms for thinking about dating, and romantic relationships, but would not dictate specific behavior. Any attempt to give you concrete rules that hold up universally would be silly and not materialist.
I will try as much as possible to give anecdotal or illustrative examples of what the applied theory would look like, or how I envision its application, but I can’t possibly give a definite dictum about what someone should do in any specific instance.
K That’s it for now. :) Stay tuned, as I will be developing this and broadening it over the weeks and months. Hope this wasn’t too abstract. I welcome comments.
