Discourse Of Love Research Articles

Byron: The Sanity or Madness of Same-Sex Love

Byron lived through a period of transition in politics but also in attitudes to sexuality. This essay argues that Byron’s ambivalent attitudes towards same-sex love derived from conflicts between his education in the Greek and Roman classics and the spreading normative psychopathology of his age. It examines Byron’s self-fashioning within classical discourses of same-sex love, the role played by his Calvinist upbringing in inducing guilt and considers the extent to which he associated madness with offences against established sexual norms. It shows that Byron’s conflicting views were very much consistent with those of his time.

On the Boundaries Between Good and Evil: Constructing Multiple Moralities in China

This essay discusses three contrasting versions of the relationship between good and evil in contemporary China: a spirit medium who maneuvers between them, a charismatic Christian group that forges an identity by defending the border between them, and an official state and religious discourse of banal goodness and universal love that seeks to annihilate evil. Each defines good and evil differently, but more importantly, each imagines the nature of the boundary itself differently—as permeable and negotiable, clear and defensible, or simply intolerable. These varied conceptions help to shape alternate views of empathy, pluralism, and the problem of how to live with otherness.

“Nwuna׳s body is so sexy”: Pop culture and the chronotopic formulations of kinship terms in Korean

This paper examines the indexical and chronotopic meanings of two Korean kinship terms, oppa ‘older brother of woman’ and nwuna ‘older sister of a man’, as they emerge in South Korean popular culture. These kinship terms are commonly used in South Korean society not just to address siblings, but in a tropical sense to address intimates of superior age to the speaker, extending to romantic contexts. The paper demonstrates that oppa and nwuna become chronotopic spaces for negotiation between traditional Korean morals and gender roles tied up in the status and intimacy indexed by these forms, and new competing discourses of gender equality, free love, consumerism and enlightenment. Crucially, the analysis shows that the underlying kinship metaphors contained in oppa and nwuna play a crucial role in negotiating the balance between modernity and tradition, particularly in the depiction of sex and romance in Korean popular culture. By packaging romance and sex within the idiom of kinship, sexual desires and fantasies are rendered innocent and pure, or obscured altogether, thus allowing Korean popular culture to escape censure for being overtly sexually provocative.

The Theory and Phenomenology of Love

This second issue of Interfaces: A Journal fo Medieval European Literatures addresses the subject of The Theory and Phenomenology of Love. It brings together readings of medieval representations and explanations of love as an affection, passion, sentiment, attraction, or tension, with work on the connections between literary discourses of love and the history both of emotions and gender roles. Approaching the subject of the nature of love, and the ways it manifests itself, the authors create links between scientific and poetic discourse and highlight the relationship between the experiences of love, described and treated in literary texts, and the specific historical, cultural, and social environments in which those texts were produced. Not only do the articles reach original results within their fields; taken as a whole, the dossier, ranging as it does from the Late Antiquity to the fifteenth century, and across a Europe situated within a wider Eurasian space, offers deep insights into social history, the history of emotions, and the study of gender and sexuality.

Sensuality and Altering Anthropology in Artificial Intelligence and Transhumanism

ABSTRACTResponding to the 2015 J.K. Russell Fellow Noreen Herzfeld, this paper develops three themes: love, anthropology, and sin. The first section extends Herzfeld's treatment of the incarnation to her discussion of love. Appealing to Reinhold Niebuhr's theological anthropology, the second section examines how AI and transhumanism could affect human nature. The final section provides a complementary approach to Herzfeld's discussion of sin as pride by applying Niebuhr's understanding of sin as sensuality to AI and transhumanism.

The second best bed, or the female unique? Germaine Greer’s unlikely championing of love and marriage in Shakespeare’s Wife

ABSTRACTGermaine Greer’s remarkable career has obscured her original vocation as a Shakespeare scholar. Her drama criticism stands as a corrective check to the conservative, still male-biased, established word on the popular perception of Shakespeare’s legacy. As we perversely celebrate the four-hundredth anniversary of Shakespeare’s death, it is instructive to re-visit Greer’s contribution to our understanding of what his life and work meant, as well as exploring who best hears his voice today. It would have been an easy thing for Greer to let the world forget her formative years as a Shakespeare scholar, and accept the identity of feminist icon. However, with the publication of Shakespeare’s Wife (2009) she reasserted her scholarly and critical identity in a profoundly stimulating way, re-focusing the discussion of love and marriage she broached in The Female Eunuch back to Shakespeare. The most fascinating element of Greer’s biography of Ann Hathaway is her ability to shake us back to the fore play of Shakespeare studies with rigorous historical detail. This article explores the points of harmony and contradiction between Greer’s Shakespeare criticism and her oft-quoted views on society, sex, marriage and love.

ROMANTIC TERRORISM? AN AUTO-ETHNOGRAPHIC ANALYSIS OF GENDERED PSYCHOLOGICAL AND EMOTIONAL TACTICS IN DOMESTIC VIOLENCE

This paper draws on the theoretical arguments outlined in Hayes (2014) to frame critical analyses of two real life domestic violence narratives. The authors are both academic criminologists and victims/survivors of domestic violence, but within differing contexts – one a conventional heterosexual relationship, the other a female same-sex relationship. Their experiences are intertwined in an extensive collaborative auto-ethnographic analysis that spans seven years of working and socializing together, in which each provided a sounding board and support for the other. The analysis therefore documents two personal journeys. Auto-ethnography is a methodology that “seeks to describe and systematically analyze (graphy) personal experience (auto) in order to understand cultural experience (ethno)” (Ellis, Adams, and Bochner, 2011). The methodological approach taken by the authors is analytic rather than evocative, in the sense that we focus on collaboratively analyzing our dual experiences, rather than simply narrating them. We occupy the dual role of researcher and researched, and turn our gaze both inward and outward (Olson, 2004: 6). The academic and theoretical are intertwined with the personal and subjective to elicit an evocative and yet empirically validated study. The theoretical underpinnings of romantic love distortion, misogyny and sexism are used to frame these experiences of domestic violence and the differing sexualities of the authors provide a rich context for exploring the ways in which domestic violence victimization experiences are impacted by gender, sexuality, and heteronormative discourses of love, sex and relationships.

Civility and Politicized Love in Gandhi

Gandhi presents a discourse of politicized love which draws heavily from a Christian conception of agape but which does not reduce to the latter. Such love is politicized through a requirement that the best kind of dissenting agents, satyagrahees (the agents called upon to engage in civil disobedience and noncooperation) are also called upon to love their enemies or, if they have none of the latter, at least their opponents. In his most famous political tract, Hind Swaraj (1909), Gandhi equates their struggle, satyagraha, with a politicized ‘love-force’, although this is not quite a definition, given that he also equates satyagraha with many other things. Moreover, there is also an occasional doubling of Gandhi’s account of political agency. Alongside the requirement for love, a requirement which is simultaneously political and spiritual, there is (again occasionally) a more minimal conception of civility from which, I will suggest, a plausible contemporary approach to civil disobedience may be constructed. The contemporary relevance of such a civility based account will then be shown through its application to the phenomenon of self-immolation, which Gandhi did not comment upon in detail but which his attitude towards civility can help us to understand. The point of this inclusion is to show that Gandhi’s approach towards civility extends effectively into new contexts.

Getting behind discourses of love, care and maternalism in early childhood education

Discourses of love, care and maternalism affect the everyday lives of children enrolled in early childhood education. These discourses bear witness to the ontological transformation that has occurred since the Romantic era that birthed the kindergarten movement to today. Reflecting on historical discourses of love, care and maternalism from the Romantic era, this article considers how the historical development of these discourses affects our professional understandings of love, care and maternalism in early childhood education.

“Modern Monsters,” Old Habits

Abstract The interrelationships among nature, humans, and technology in John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath reveal the characters' responsibility for the destruction of nature in the novel. The critique of technology is explicit: throughout the narrative, technology is portrayed as possessive of monstrous qualities, emphasized as something “uncanny” disrupting the familiar landscape. Implicitly, however, the novel criticizes the tenants' attitudes toward the land. By exposing the migrants' contradictory behavior toward nature, the novel lays bare the irony behind the tenants' pastoral discourse. The incoherence of the pastoral ideal preached by the tenants emerges in several passages that show, for instance, that despite the discourse of love and respect for the land, they regard the earth as something to be used and exploited as well. Drawing from a number of scholars that have looked into the environmental aspects of Steinbeck's work, Sigmund Freud's theories on the “Uncanny,” and Leo Marx's concept of “pastoralism,” my discussion suggests that the novel presents a critique of both technological and human interactions with the environment, showing both driven by a self-protective capitalist instinct, however differently manifested they might be.

Afterwords: Forms of Death

Responding to this volume on genre, and especially to the Introduction, “Forms-of-life”, this Afterword contemplates genre as it is uttered through forms of semantic death: truisms, clichés, and dead metaphors. Taking its cue from Jacques Derrida’s essay “Living On,” from Bakhtin on speech genres, and Samuel Beckett’s bilingual “La Fin/The End,” it turns to love lyric writing by the English poet John Gower and his older contemporary Guillaume de Machaut. It argues that Gower uses the genre of the ballade sequence, in the wake of Machaut’s own novel explorations, to explore the dead but potent lacunas between one utterance and another, between one ballade and another, and between one language and another. In the process he works with the capacity of love discourse to offer truths even into old age (a major preoccupation of his love poetry): truths about how language might be shown to respond to language as it lives on from one cliché to the next.

Similar and equal relationships? Negotiating bisexuality in an enduring relationship

In the public debate in Finland, same-sex couples’ right to legal recognition is routinely defended by stressing their sameness to heterosexual couples within the discourse of romantic love. This article explores how bisexual women and their partners use these discourses. The five couple interviews were analyzed by implementing discourse analysis. The results highlight how, when taking positions within the discourse of the enduring couple relationship, the interviewees drew on the discourse of romantic love. Woman’s bisexuality disappeared easily in this talk. Although it seemed effortless at first sight, negotiations and affective tensions arose when the interviewees tried to fit their relationship into the normative discourse: Is our relationship like traditional heterosexual relationship or is it more equal? Are we similar or are we different? What role does woman’s bisexuality have in our relationship? Close reading of these negotiations revealed the hierarchies and norms related to gender and (bi)sexuality that constitute the enduring relationship discourse.

Keeping It Real? Authenticity, Commercialisation and Family in Australian Country Music

Keeping It Real? Authenticity, Commercialisation and Family in Australian Country Music

Discourses of Love, Compassion, and Belonging: Reframing Christianity for a Secular Audience

Religious plurality has implications for religious organisations active within the public realm. Using semi-structured interviews, I examine how Christians and Christian organisations are framing faith discourses so that they resonate with religiously neutral discourses dominant in the public sphere. There are indications of a shift towards the use of profane terms instead of sacred terms to explain aspects of the Christian faith and Christian teachings of love, compassion, and belonging are amplified to counter criticisms that Christianity is a threat to liberal rights and beliefs. This article conceptualises these discourses as two social action frames: the ‘Love Frame’ and the ‘Inclusivity Frame’. I do not refute claims that the social significance of religion is declining but argue that Christians and Christian organisations are working within the confines of secular discourses to disseminate their messages in order to build credibility as egalitarian public service providers.

How Zulu-speaking youth with physical and visual disabilities understand love and relationships in constructing their sexual identities

Popular socio-medical discourses surrounding the sexuality of disabled people have tended to subjugate young people with disabilities as de-gendered and asexual. As a result, very little attention has been given to how young people with disabilities in the African context construct their sexual identities. Based on findings from a participatory research study conducted amongst Zulu-speaking youth with physical and visual disabilities in KwaZulu-Natal, this paper argues that young people with disabilities are similar to other non-disabled youth in the way they construct their sexual identities. Using a post-structural framework, it outlines how the young participants construct discursive truths surrounding disability, culture and gender through their discussions of love and relationships. In this context, it is argued that the sexual identities' of young people with physical and visual disabilities actually emerges within the intersectionality of identity discourses.

Modern Traditionalism: Consanguineous Marriage in Qatar

Consanguineous marriage, or matrimony between biological relatives, is commonplace and on the rise in Qatar, an ethnically heterogeneous Middle Eastern country. Previous studies have demonstrated that modernization often reduces traditional forms of marriage, such as arranged and consanguineous matrimony. Qatar's rapid modernization, however, has coincided with increased rates of endogamy. In this article, the authors examine the social processes that shape normative consanguineous marriage formation and progression in Qatar. On the basis of in‐depth interviews (n = 35) with men and women engaged or married to a cousin, they detail the categorical schemas that lead to consanguineous matrimony: reservation, joking, filtering, engagement, and courtship. In describing these social exchanges, the authors illustrate 2 key features embedded within them: (a) their distinct tempo and (b) how participants frame their experiences using discourses of romantic love. Reflecting larger cultural practices and attitudes in Qatar, the authors found an amalgam of contemporary and conventional that they label modern traditionalism.

Discourses of Love and Newspapers Advice Columns in Ghana

Discourses of Love and Newspapers Advice Columns in Ghana

Justice as a Family Value: How a Commitment to Fairness is Compatible with Love

Many discussions of love and the family treat issues of justice as something alien. On this view, concerns about whether one's family is internally just are in tension with the modes of interaction that are characteristic of loving families. In this essay, we challenge this widespread view. We argue that once justice becomes a shared family concern, its pursuit is compatible with loving familial relations. We examine four arguments for the thesis that a concern with justice is not at home within a loving family, and we explain why these arguments fail. We develop and defend an alternative conception of the justice‐oriented loving family, arguing that justice can—and, for the sake of justice, should—be seen as a family value.

“Cries and cracks”: “animal” rhythms in Ezra Pound’s translations from Arnaut Daniel

This article looks at Ezra Pound’s translation of the troubadour Arnaut Daniel’s canso “L’aura amara” as a way of studying what Pound’s practice of translation shows us about his conception and practice of rhythm. According to Pound, the interest in Daniel’s canso lies in its onomatopoeia, its imitation of birdsong; this view accords with suggestions in Pound’s writings that rhythm in language is a manifestation of physiology. But Pound also sees rhythm through the prism of translation, suggesting for example that foreign-language poems may be a source of rhythms for English verse. The article thus looks at the way Pound’s translation builds on the sound patterning of Arnaut’s canso to distort and specify the rhythms of English. The purpose of the article is to show that rhythm in Arnaut Daniel’s canso may be described as the interaction of phonemic composition, accentual prominence, and syntax; and that Pound’s translation works with several aspects of Arnaut’s writing—the use of short lines, enjambment, and the specific prosodic treatment of the pronoun mi—to make his translation a prosodic experiment, inseparable from contemporary work on the possibilities of free verse. In that it makes English speech rhythms “unnatural” and ambiguous, Pound’s “L’aura amara” invents a specific subject of self-estrangement refracted through the discourse of courtly love, a translating subject.

Getting a Head in the Renaissance: Mementos of Lost Love in Boccaccio and Beyond*

AbstractThis essay offers a historian’s reading of Boccaccio’s tale of Lisabetta da Messina (4:5), rethinking it in terms of fourteenth-century ways of understandingvirtùand identity. In analyzing the tale in the context of theDecameron,while reading it against archival material from the period, the deeper context of its discussion of love suggests a reading that makes the tale central to the tragic stories of the fourth day and highlights a lesson about the dangers of passion that make it fit powerfully as the day’s central tale. In the end, love offers many things in theDecameron,but Boccaccio’sbrigataof storytellers and his readers could appreciate a danger more difficult to see today — that the powerful passions associated with lost love and mourning without the support of the groups that surrounded and sustained one’s sense of identity also threatened in the most profound way the negation of self: death.