Romantic Desire Research Articles

Theorizing checkpoints of desire: multilingualism, sexuality and (in)securitization in Israel/Palestine

ABSTRACT In this article, we explore how people in conflict-affected societies use language to navigate the affective constraints that political conflicts impose. Specifically, we consider the role of multilingualism in enabling sexual and romantic intimacy between Jewish and Palestinian Israelis in Israel/Palestine. Our data are drawn from a close examination of the speech of Fadi Daeem, one of the protagonists in the 2015 documentary Oriented. Building on studies of (in)securitization and everyday bordering, we show how the ongoing armed conflict between Israel and Palestine serves to instantiate a regime of affective checkpoints, a space in which sexual and romantic relations between Jewish Israelis and Palestinians are discursively blocked. We describe how Fadi and his friends use strategic instances of code-switching between Arabic, Hebrew, and English to navigate this ideologically fraught terrain. Our primary goal is to demonstrate how multilingualism can be employed as a resource for managing affect and desire in a conflict-ridden context like Israel/Palestine. In doing so, we further highlight how the intimate domain of romantic desire is inevitably situated within a broader matrix of power and constraint.

How and why to compare incomparables: The Great Gatsby and La Règle du jeu

Abstract Comparing The Great Gatsby with any of its adaptations invariably promotes the novel over its derivatives and is far less fertile than putting it alongside Jean Renoir’s La Règle du jeu. During the interwar period, these incomparable masterpieces exhibit strikingly similar plots to address the moral decline of the upper class. Renoir directly borrowed this template from Musset’s 1833 Les Caprices de Marianne, a hallmark of Romanticism. The competing forces of romantic desire, aristocratic values, and aesthetic modernism make these works comparably difficult to classify. The article introduces Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane, which had already been compared to The Great Gatsby and was also filmed at the outset of WWII. Watching Welles’ film beside Renoir’s confirms André Bazin’s view that cinema became modern at just this moment, by taking on a role comparable to that commanded by post-WWI American novels like Fitzgerald’s. And examining Renoir beside Fitzgerald highlights the styles and strategies of both masterpieces as they pursued a large public and an authentic social critique. The article concludes by enumerating reasons and ways to compare ‘original’ works that bear similarities, whether mythic and universal or historical and particular.

The Dating Dupe―The Limits of Biosocially Unfriendly Sociology

Curington, Lundquist, and Lin’s book, The Dating Divide: Race and Desire in the Era of Online Romance, demonstrates the limits of a moralizing sociological approach to courting behavior shorn of biosocial insight. In this essay, I summarize the book’s central findings and claims regarding the roots of systematic, racially exclusionary patterns in online dating. I question the adequacy of their social constructionist, power analytic explanation of such patterns; and I suggest additional interpretations from a multidimensional, biosocial perspective. I argue that reducing dating discrimination to “racism,” based on a totally constructed view of romantic desire, is both scientifically and politically shortsighted in today’s polarized ideological environment.

Diagnosing Desire: Imaginative Experiments with Sexuality and the Nerves.

American fiction often tells us that there is something sick about romantic desire. But the writers who I discuss in this article told their readers this even as they critiqued the medical profession's pathologization of women's desires and non-normative sexual subjectivities. In particular, this article looks at two literary responses to the medical notion that marriage was a cure for hysteria and other nervous disorders: Oliver Wendell Holmes's A Mortal Antipathy (1885) and Elizabeth Stuart Phelps's Doctor Zay (1886). While the medical rhetoric of nervous pathology could be repressive and stigmatizing, these fictions sought to reclaim and reimagine the medical treatment of nervous desire in subversive ways.

Exploring the Connections between Romantic Desire and Mental Imagery

Exploring the Connections between Romantic Desire and Mental Imagery

Cummings of Altyre and the search for an ancient genealogy

An illuminated pedigree roll, ink on paper, possibly a draft for a more finished version, is analysed as a symbol of how the Cummings of Altyre, Moray, asserted their claim to be patrilineal descendants of the medieval Red Comyns of Badenoch, during the 18th–19th centuries. This article explores the family’s interactions with historians and antiquaries, and the tensions generated between the rational search for documented historical fact against the romantic desire to maintain epic tradition, conveying local bardic tales into the fixity of print. The descent claims are considered through six notions or ‘memes’ that elevated the family’s stature by rooting it in antiquity, but lacked compelling historical evidence. A close reading of documents from the era reveals the family’s role in influencing the creation of historical narratives, its own members emerging across the period as the chief authors of their ‘official story’.

Initial impressions of compatibility and mate value predict later dating and romantic interest

Romantic first impressions seem to linger, but why? Few studies have investigated how romantic desire during initial interactions predicts later relational outcomes (e.g., later romantic interest, contact attempts) using a design that can tease apart different possible mechanisms (e.g., mate value, selectivity, compatibility). Across three speed-dating studies (n = 559) with longitudinal follow-ups (including college and community samples, and a sample of men who date men), we investigated whether different components of initial romantic impressions predicted later romantic outcomes and relationship initiation. Using the social relations model, we partitioned initial desire at speed dating (determined from 6,600+ total dates) into partner effects (a date's consensual desirability, e.g., mate value), actor effects (a participant's general desirousness, e.g., selectivity), and relationship effects (a participant's unique liking for a date over and beyond partner and actor effects, e.g., compatibility) to predict later evaluations (romantic interest, physical attraction, and desire to know better) and behaviors (direct messaging and going on dates). Meta-analyses across the three studies showed that, across 6,100+ follow-up reports, partner and relationship effects were especially strong predictors of relationship initiation variables. Consistent with evolutionary models of human pair bonding, these findings suggest that both consensually desirable traits and unique impressions of compatibility have lingering effects on relationship development, even from the moment that two potential partners meet.

Cinco Rimas Fantasmales de Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer

Observing how a specific theme emerges within the work of a poet leads to greater appreciation of stylistic technique and to a better understanding of human experience. In this paper we study the poetry of Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer to perceive how a lover’s passion transforms itself into an autonomous entity that travels through space. Relevant connections between poems must be carefully traced. We start by examining the nostalgia evoked by remembrance of past love in Rhyme LIII. We then see in Rhyme LXXV the lament over absence of the beloved develop into an intimation of whether in sleep we may penetrate a dimension where other spirits dwell. The wonderment grows in the related Rhyme LXXI as it expresses the amazing premonition of a friend’s death. In order to comprehend this memorable lyric we next explore the transformation of romantic desire into the wandering phantom lover of the beguilingly repetitive and intricate Rhymes XVI and XXVIII.

Desire and the Construction of Masculine Identities Among Young Japanese Men with International Experiences

This article uses qualitative interview data to analyse how young Japanese men with international experience spoke about (un)desirable masculine identities in relation to their sojourns. Specifically, this study investigates how ideas of desire and akogare (longing for something unattainable) were integral in the construction of ethno-national Japanese heterosexual male identities. By analysing intersections of race, ethnicity, gender, language and desire, this study argues that many participants perceived a hierarchy of desire abroad that elevated Western notions of hegemonic masculinity while simultaneously marginalizing heterosexual Asian masculinity. This was further complicated by participants who viewed host community women (who were often described as white native English speakers) as embodying ideal femininity. Japanese men’s subordinate masculinity was viewed as a barrier to romantic access to host community women, although for many participants, this group of women were seen as desirable romantic partners. This study also presents the stories of a small group of men who resisted marginalized masculine identities through criticism of the women in their host communities by assigning them a deviant femininity. This article illustrates how romantic desire can be used as a lens to analyse how Japanese male returned sojourners may replicate and challenge racial and gendered power structures.

The differentiation between consumers of hentai pornography and human pornography

The study aimed to investigate if hentai consumers differed from other pornography consumers regarding their attachment style, attraction to, and desire for romantic relationships with anime characters and humans. Pornography consumers were categorized into three groups. The first group consumed both hentai and human pornography (hentai consumers), the second consumed human pornography but not hentai (non-hentai), and the third did not consume hentai or human pornography (non-porn). Two hundred and eight participants completed an online study that involved self-report surveys and an image rating task. The results revealed that hentai consumers did not differ from non-hentai or non-porn consumers on avoidant attachment. However, among females, hentai consumers were higher on anxious attachment compared to non-porn consumers. For the image rating task, hentai consumers rated anime characters more attractive than non-hentai and non-porn consumers. However, there were no group differences for the image ratings of real people. Hentai consumers indicated stronger romantic desire towards anime characters compared to non-hentai and non-porn consumers; there were no group differences in romantic desire for humans. The findings highlight the importance of differentiating individuals who consume hentai and those who do not.

Sinophonic Detours in Colonial Burma

Abstract Following his 1925–1931 overland trek across southwestern China to colonial Burma, Ai Wu's 1935 Travels in the South (the author's canonical collection of autobiographical travelogue fiction) represents a Sinophonic detouring of the key literary impulses of the author's May Fourth forebears and his left-wing literary contemporaries, especially with its social realist expressions of gendered frontier primitivism, interethnic romantic desire, and international leftist solidarity. Ai Wu's southbound transborder itinerary and “street education”—marked by a repetition of trespasses and evictions—develop a “counterpoetics of trespass” blurring boundaries between social realist fiction and autobiographical travelogue while intertextually rerouting romantic primitivism in depictions of indigenous women through counterpoetically anemic prose. Initially taking his cue from Lu Xun, Ai Wu similarly inscribes his literary mission as one of national redemption but in a way that conforms to the leftist internationalist ideals of the League of Left-Wing Writers, which Ai Wu joined after he was forcibly repatriated to China by British colonial authorities in 1931. Ai Wu's Sinophone transborder counterpoetics activate latent self-reflections on the narrator's own male Han-centric exoticism toward indigenous Shan and Burman women and on his unfulfilled desire to forge meaningful relationships with them. Rather than assimilating or subordinating his depictions of these women into a projection of a Chinese leftist national cause, Ai Wu ultimately sublimates his romantic desires into an allegory for Burma's anticolonial resistance movement.

The cruel optimism of digital dating: heart-breaking mobile romance among rural migrant workers in South China

ABSTRACT Based upon thirteen months of ethnographic fieldwork in South China, this study employs Lauren Berlant’s concept of cruel optimism to examine how Chinese rural migrant workers – an economically and culturally disadvantaged group – use digital dating services and select dates. It juxtaposes the rural migrant workers’ encouraged engagement with digital dating with interview accounts which reveal that digital dating presents a large sum of obstacles to the fulfilment of sexual and romantic desire. Our research shows that these obstacles (both ‘virtual' and ‘real') are highly gendered, which is partly related to a cultural shift towards materialism in the Chinese society. Specifically, rural migrant men have described themselves as being harshly excluded or exploited on the dating scene, whereas rural migrant women have reported that they have unwittingly dated men with deceptive profiles or developed romantic relationships that were dashed by economic turmoil. Hence, the study empirically extends the literature on digital dating beyond its traditional focus on Western contexts. It also clearly demonstrates that, while digital dating ignites a sense of possibility and desire, particularly among individuals of lower socioeconomic status, it fails to support these users in tackling the structural inequalities obstructing realization of their desire.

Fraternelle mélancolie: Melville et Hawthorne, une passion

Fraternelle mélancolie: Melville et Hawthorne, une passion

Study abroad as a space where akogare (??) circulates

This study explores the complex dynamics of akogare, a Japanese concept describing a strong attraction to something or someone unattainable. Prior research on the dynamics of akogare in English language learning studies has largely been limited to the consideration of Japanese women’s sexual or romantic desire for the West. The classical hypothesis of gendered akogare arising from this research has led to a disproportionate representation of akogare as Japanese women’s active sexualised agency. This study scrutinises narratives derived from semi-structured interviews with seven Japanese students, male and female, who participated in study abroad programmes in the UK. Drawing from theoretical understandings of ‘materiality’ and ‘space’, the analysis observes how multifaceted akogare circulates in a study abroad setting that is influenced by learners’ linguistic and gendered relations to the West. The analysis suggests that the study abroad setting serves as a multidimensional space to (re)construct oneself through the lens of akogare as a discerning English learner who asserts cognitive distance from Western hegemony.

Partners’ Daily Love and Desire as Predictors of Engagement in and Enjoyment of Sexual Activity

Romantic love and sexual desire have often been seen as two distinct constructs and studied separately. However, in most romantic relationships love, desire, and sex are intertwined. The purpose of the present study was to examine whether daily feelings of love and desire influence engagement in and enjoyment of sexual activity. Ninety mixed-sex couples (N = 180) completed a 30-day daily diary. The results were analyzed using hierarchical linear modeling and showed that both love and desire significantly predicted engagement in and enjoyment of sexual activity with desire being a stronger predictor. Clinical implications and future directions are discussed.

A Passion for the Past: History, Narrative and Desire in Stendhal and Tanizaki

A Passion for the Past:History, Narrative and Desire in Stendhal and Tanizaki Roderick Cooke There is a literary-historical relationship between the two works under discussion here: Stendhal's L'Abbesse de Castro (The Abbess of Castro, 1839) and Jun'ichirō Tanizaki's1 Yoshino kuzu (Arrowroot, 1931). Tanizaki translated part of Stendhal's novella into Japanese in 1928, at the same time as he was working on the initial version of Arrowroot (Chambers, "A Study of Tanizaki's Yoshino kuzu" 488).2 However, what connects the two is not simply this detail but also, and more significantly, the shared narrative and thematic features between them. It will emerge that L'Abbesse de Castro and Arrowroot are strikingly similar not because of Tanizaki's translation, but because both use distinctive narrative techniques to present the same idea: that the individual's relationship to the past must be mediated by romantic desire in order to acquire meaning. Both authors use this precise structure to build their plots, but the settings they choose in order to do so are diametrically opposed: where Stendhal sets his romance in the confines of a moral dystopia, Tanizaki will instead wrap it in a utopian space. Somewhat counterintuitively, I will examine Arrowroot before addressing L'Abbesse de Castro, then bring the two works together for a discussion of their common and contrasting features. The reason for treating the later text first is that Tanizaki's use of character delineates the major points of this analysis in clearer fashion than Stendhal's, and approaching them in this order will allow a firmer understanding of the questions the two works raise. Tanizaki's translator and critic Anthony H. Chambers noted that "the narrative technique of […] Arrowroot […] seems to have been inspired by Stendhal's The Abbess of Castro" ("Introduction" viii) in introducing the translated text in 1982. However, his comparison rests on a small but important inaccuracy, namely the claim that "the narrator of Stendhal's story, much like the narrator of Arrowroot, travels to a remote part of Italy to search out the truth of a story that has been covered up by partisan historians" (viii). In fact, as I will discuss in greater detail below, Stendhal's narrator does not assert or achieve the goal of resolving the past mystery through travel; he uses manuscripts found in Rome and Florence, not Castro itself. Rather, the features of Arrowroot that can better establish a comparison [End Page 235] with L'Abbesse de Castro are the distinctions between different means of accessing and representing the past, and especially the individual subject's relationship to those varied sources. Let us summarize the novella's plot before examining how Tanizaki connects character and tradition. Two men journey into the remote and mountainous region of Yoshino, in the Kii peninsula to the south of Osaka. The narrator immediately informs us that (3) ["some twenty years have passed since I traveled to the interior of Yoshino in Yamato. It was around 1912, at the end of the Meiji period or the beginning of Taishō" (145)].3 The significance of the date in Japanese history is, as the narrator underlines, its representing the transition between two imperial eras, as the Meiji emperor died that year. His death marked the end of the first modernization period which had begun in 1868, and its mention alerts us to the fact that the wheels of Japan's national history are turning in the background of Arrowroot's plot. Furthermore, the displacement of the framed narrative recounting the journey to Yoshino twenty years into the past from the point of view of the narrating self is a first indication of the multiple layers of time present in the text.4 The reader quickly learns that the narrator is a writer, who is undertaking the journey in preparation for a historical novel on the Southern Court of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries: a pretender to the Imperial throne known as the 'Heavenly King' by his followers had taken refuge and then made his last stand in Yoshino, and the narrator hopes to find (4) ["the lingering traces of the Heavenly King" (146)] to inspire his writing. He...

Romantic Love: Mechanism for Feminist Empowerment or Orientalist Legacy?

In this article, I analyze the romantic desire of non-Korean – particularly Western – women for the fictional Korean male characters depicted in transnationally popular Korean television dramas. This article is divided into two sections: first, it examines the transnational popularity of the South Korean television drama series, My Love from Another Star, and its depiction of a particular type of romantic Korean masculinity called kkonminam (flower boy) masculinity. Here, I argue that these fictional stories problematize hypersexual masculinity through their representations of romantic masculinity. The second section of the article extends the analysis by deploying ethnographic interviews and participant-observations of Western fans of Korean television dramas who, believing that the kkonminam depicted in the dramas are true reflections of Korean men, travel to Korea to form romantic relations with Korean men in real life. Using feminist theories of love, such as those propounded by bell hooks and Lauren Berlant, and the theory of the erotic by Audre Lorde, I argue that these fans, while romantically desiring Korean kkonminam, also co-opt the discourse of romantic love and Korean romantic masculinity to articulate and essentialize cultural differences between the East and West.

Investigating and Extending Variation among Friends with Benefits Relationships: Relationship Maintenance and Social Support

ABSTRACTThe considerable diversity in friends with benefits relationships (FWBR) is largely unexplored. Therefore, this investigation focuses on differences in the communication of relationship maintenance and social support across FWBR types. Given that communication influences relationship initiation, maintenance, and termination, the frequency of maintenance and support behaviors should differ dramatically across FWBR types. Large differences appeared across five of seven relational maintenance, and all five social support, dimensions, which further validate differences among FWBR types and place communication at the heart of these differences. To overcome limitations of FWBR types, a two-dimensional model of FWBRs (closeness and romantic desire) is introduced to more simply explicate diversity. Finally, we discuss practical and theoretical implications of both the results and the dimensional perspective.

Foreword

Viewed from a historical perspective, the twentieth century appears to have largely broken with the fundamental traits that marked the nineteenth century. In some respects, however, certain specific characteristics were enhanced. This is particularly true of the emphasised subjectivism and the drive to innovate. Both of these premises arise from the Romantic desire for the characteristic, for that which is new each time and subjectively marked.

Effect of interpersonal orientation and gender role on romantic desire

Effect of interpersonal orientation and gender role on romantic desire