“When we talk about love between people we call it romantic love, but I would rather call it sexual love, since I conceptualize it not primarily as an idea but as something we do, a human power and practice that has consequences”, Anna Jónasdóttír explains.

Professor of Gender Studies at the Centre for Feminist Social Studies, Örebro University (Sweden) and co-director of GEXcel (see blogroll) Jónasdóttír is now leading for the latter the research theme “Love in our time – A question for feminism”, aiming to investigate the apparently growing interest in love as a “serious subject”.

She is a pioneer on the issue. Her interest towards love, in fact, began in 1980 when attempting to explain why patriarchy still dominates contemporary western societies that are characterized by formal gender equality and women’s relative economic independence.

As many feminists, she used Marx’s historical materialism as a method of social analysis, sure as she was (and still is) not only that historical feminist analysis of contemporary societies have much to gain from studying it but also that practically all who had dealt with him before “have run into an impasse resulting either from work fixation –in social feminist theory- or violence fixation –in radical feminist theory,  lacking of ‘an essential’ identification of the sociosexual relationship and a specific creative activity generated in and occurring in this relationship involving a power over the use and control of which certain group of people struggle”, all elements “without which no sex-gender specific structure can be understood.

This power, that she does not equate with dominance or oppression but instead defines as an exploitable capacity, is none other than what she called love power, “a sociosexual capacity of human beings to make and remake ‘their’ kind, not only in the procreation and socialization of children but also in the creation and recreation of adult people as socio-sexual individuated and personified existences”.

In the same way capitalist derives its force from exploitation and accumulation of the creative power of labour, “men” derive their authority from exploitation of women’s sociosexual capacities, their love power (heterosexual relationships are the main focus of this approach not as the only valid ones but as the dominant form of sexual organization affecting, as such, also people engaging other forms of sexual encounters). read more »