Contemporary Love Studies in the Arts and Humanities: What's Love Got To Do With It? 3031260546, 9783031260544

Table of contents :
About This Book—Or Our Love Story: Finding Love in the Arts and Humanities
References
Acknowledgements
Contents
Notes on Contributors
List of Figures
Chapter 1: The Love Ethic: Love and Activism for Ecosocial Justice
Introduction
Love and Activism
Love in Practice
The Love Ethic
Case Study: The Love Ethic as Hope
Conclusion
References
Chapter 2: The Power of Love: Love in Peace and Conflict Studies
Introduction
Peace and Love Studies
The Power of Love
Yogic Peace Education
Love Transforms
Conclusion
References
Chapter 3: Love and Hospitality: Love, Refugees, and Challenging Indifference
Introduction
The Absence of Love in Contemporary Asylum Policy
The Role of Agape Love
Hospitality on a Spherical Earth
Cultivating Love through Hospitality
Conclusion
References
Chapter 4: Romantic Love across Borders: Marriage Migration in Popular Romance Fiction
Introduction
Why Migrate?
Love is Essential
Love > Migration
Migration Metaphors
Conclusion
References
Chapter 5: The Heart of the Matter: Love and Care in Health Humanities
The Heart as the Seat of Love
Therapeutic Love-as-care: The Heart in Health Humanities
Love and Care in Shakespeare
Love and Care in Contemporary Heart Health
Caregivers and Therapeutic Love-as-care
Therapeutic Love as Self-care
Conclusion
References
Chapter 6: Queering Love: Love in Literary and Media Studies
Love’s Story/ies
Upcycling Love: Novel Transformations
Amour fou: The Drive of Love Till Death in Film
Romance Rebooted: Teen Love on TV
Never-ending Story/ies?
References
Chapter 7: Embracing Intimate Civility: Love of Kith and Kin
Introducing Intimate Civility
Separations of Civility
Separations of Friendship
Defining Intimate Civility
Current Research on Intimate Civility
Intimate Civility: Attachment and Construction
How to Embrace Intimate Civility
Think Dialectically
Imagine Friendship
Grow by Looking
Divining Humanism: The Look of Love
References
Chapter 8: The Tyranny of Love: Love and Psychology
Introduction
Love as Suffering
Tragic Love
Loving Humans
Modern Love: Overburdened Presumptions
A Reconsideration of Love
References
Chapter 9: Consensuality: Love and Sex Post #Metoo
Some Notes on Positionality and Theorising
Consensuality and Somatic Inquiry: Theorising a Psychology of Consent
States of Play, Imagination, and Creativity
Moral Injury and Repair: A Case for Imaginative Ethics and Ethical Imagination
The Art of the Interaction: Aesthetics, Fiction, Representation, and The Imaginary
Ending Here?
References
Chapter 10: Love of Process: Intimacy and Attention Within Painting, Life, and Art
Introduction
Part One: Phenomenology as Process in Love and Art
Walking Blind
Painting and the Material Imagination
Part Two: Dyadic Relations—A Correspondence Between Love and Paint
Conclusion
References
Chapter 11: Conclusion: The Fire of Love
The Fire Within
The Dawning of New Era: A Time for Love
Love to Reclaim Joy
Ubuntu: I am Because We Are
References
Index

Citation preview

Contemporary Love Studies in the Arts and Humanities What’s Love Got To Do With It? Edited by Madalena Grobbelaar Elizabeth Reid Boyd Debra Dudek

Contemporary Love Studies in the Arts and Humanities

Madalena Grobbelaar Elizabeth Reid Boyd  •  Debra Dudek Editors

Contemporary Love Studies in the Arts and Humanities What’s Love Got To Do With It?

Editors Madalena Grobbelaar School of Arts and Humanities Edith Cowan University Joondalup, WA, Australia

Elizabeth Reid Boyd School of Arts and Humanities Edith Cowan University Joondalup, WA, Australia

Debra Dudek School of Arts and Humanities Edith Cowan University Mount Lawley, WA, Australia

ISBN 978-3-031-26054-4    ISBN 978-3-031-26055-1 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-26055-1 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

About This Book—Or Our Love Story: Finding Love in the Arts and Humanities

What’s love got to do with it? That was the question we posed to our colleagues for the first Love Studies Symposium in the School of Arts and Humanities at Edith Cowan University, in Perth, Australia in February 2021. Our goal was to establish a network and to bring together research in the area, as well as to increase knowledge of Love Studies and its growing application in research and teaching content. We wondered if we would be lonely hearts, or if others would share our passion. Academics from every discipline in our School (Social Work, Counselling, Literary and Media Studies, Communication, Journalism, Cultural Studies, Psychology, Social Science, Criminology, Law and Justice Studies, and the Creative Arts) responded and soon, more joined. Mapping the field, we discovered research in areas as diverse as popular romance studies to border criminology, from sexology to peace studies, with multidisciplinary connections that gave strength to Love Studies as a vital new field of knowledge in the Arts and Humanities. We also reached out to researchers at other institutions including the new Australian cross-­ university initiative, the Heart of the Matter Health Humanities Project, which aims to deepen our understanding of the heart and improve human well-being through fostering dialogue and innovation across the fields of health, medicine, engineering, philosophy, literary studies, and the humanities. This book is the shared result. It brings together recent research on love and takes it in important and unexpected new directions.

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ABOUT THIS BOOK—OR OUR LOVE STORY: FINDING LOVE IN THE ARTS…

Current definitions of love include words such as profound affection, passion, tenderness, attachment, and devotion (www.dictionary.com; www. merriam-­webster.com). Strike “love” followed by “sex” on search engines, and love yields billions of hits, double that of sex! Erich Fromm (1957) proposed that the central desire in individuals is for an interpersonal union: “It is the most fundamental passion, it is the force which keeps the human race together, the clan, the family, society. The failure to achieve it means insanity or destruction—self-destruction or destruction of others” (22). Humankind’s awareness of the transient nature of life and the separateness of each person arouses anxiety. To be separate means we are born and we die. Against our will, we die before those we love, and we are helpless before the forces of nature. A prison of isolation and aloneness may lead to insanity, a withdrawal of the self from the external world so that separation dissolves. The continuation of humanity is because of love. This love that we could not do without, that appeases our existential anxiety, is multifaceted, leading May (2011) to propose that throughout history “love has been captive to an obsession with opposites. It is either self-seeking or self-giving; either possessive or submissive; either illusion creating or truth-seeking; either conditional or unconditional; either inconstant or enduring; either mired in fantasy or a privileged window onto reality” (235). This ideological Manichean territory of good and bad persists for most people through their ideal of love as situated to the right of each of these splits: self-giving, truth-seeking, submissive, unconditional, enduring; anything to the left is the antithesis of genuine love. Past research across cultures has concluded that love is an emotion that is experienced throughout historical eras, in all cultures by the majority of the world’s population (Karandashev 2015). However, expressions and manifestations of love vary as culture influences how one thinks, feels, and behaves in loving and intimate relationships. Symbiotic union, our entry into the world, is the biological preserve of the pregnant mother and the foetus (Fromm 1957), where there are two beings, yet only one. Herein exists a physical as well as a psychological symbiosis, a way to “at-­onement” (Fromm 1957, 16). To conform, to dominate, to control, to self-sacrifice, to withdraw, to defend, or to destroy represent ways of attempting to fuse with another and ease our existential conundrum—the awareness of death’s inevitability and our wish to continue to live—but do these states describe love? This collection of contemporary essays on love reveals a revaluing and deeper understanding of the complexity and sophistication of love and its

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cultural expressions. It includes analyses of the multiple ways love has been constructed, and hence shapes our ways of being and knowing. It goes beyond these ideas to explore love and desire in intimate relationships, and it shows how love shapes and it is shaped in diverse dynamics and domains, both public and private, and across the lifespan. This collection is both a reflection and a call for a greater understanding of the complexity and importance of love in our lives, and in our world, and as such is integral to broad applications in the arts and humanities. The collection begins with “The Love Ethic: Love and Activism for Ecosocial Justice” by Naomi Joy Godden and Shajimon Peter. This chapter broadly defines different manifestations of love and then moves to a more specific outline of a love ethic modelled on the interconnectivity and cyclical process illustrated in a tree and its saplings. In this arboreal metaphor, love as action, process, and result stem from roots through trunks, branches, and fruit, in a cycle of transformational inter-relationality. Godden’s research with three communities defines this love ethic, which is then imagined in practice with Transnational Social Workers who engage in global practice. Janine Joyce also writes about the connection between people and place in her chapter “The Power of Love: Love in Peace and Conflict Studies.” In this essay, Joyce calls for a suturing of love studies with peace and conflict studies, which she argues would invite peace studies scholarship to shift away from efforts to end war and structural violence and towards an equal valuing of the inner transformation of the individual in a relationship with all forms of life. An interrogation of the love of the nation state comes to the foreground in Jamal Barnes’s chapter, “Love and Hospitality: Love, Refugees, and Challenging Indifference.” In his essay, Barnes—like Joyce—draws upon the concept of agape love to suggest that, “love can be practised through hospitality, or welcoming of the stranger,” which encourages empathy for refugees and a “political culture of love for others.” The next three chapters take interdisciplinary approaches to analyse how love is represented in literature. Amy Burge’s “Romantic Love across Borders: Marriage Migration in Popular Romance Fiction” may be read fruitfully alongside Barnes’s essay in their combined interest in the intersection between love of country and romantic love. Burge’s essay combines migration and literary studies to analyse how migration features in two 2019 romance novels. In this chapter, Burge demonstrates how migration functions as both an element of the romance plot and as a metaphor for the protagonists’ journey towards love. In “The Heart of the

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Matter: Love and Care in Health Humanities,” connections between love and the heart are examined through the disciplines of literary studies and biomedical engineering. Analysing the technology of the artificial heart alongside the representation of the heart in Shakespeare’s King Lear, Bríd Phillips, Michael Stevens, and Claire Hansen show how the heart is considered as both a body part and a site of care. “Queering Love: Love in Literary and Media Studies” continues to interrogate how love is represented in literary studies, including adaptations of Shakespeare, but expands this focus to analyse how love is queered in novels, film, and serial television. Debra Dudek, Julia Wexler, and Tania Visosevic summarise how love initiates plot, sustains narrative, and ends stories, but the main focus of the chapter is to show “how love works within narrative progression and audience obsession to queer its own story, especially in its powers of resolution and closure.” Intimate civility, a code of conduct based upon mutual respect to guide interpersonal relationships, is a concept referenced in several chapters in this collection. In her chapter “Embracing Intimate Civility: Love of Kith and Kin,” Elizabeth Reid Boyd, who first coined and developed the term intimate civility with Abigail Bray in 2005, utilises “kith (friendship, or philia) to expand the model of intimate civility, as a resource for those for whom kin (family) represents less than loving relationships.” In “The Tyranny of Love” Madalena Grobbelaar and Eyal Gringart—both of whom also conduct research to develop the construct of intimate civility—examine a tension between love and freedom to ask, “how loving is love”? They pose answers to this question by looking at how love manifests in a variety of binaries that lock love into its own destruction. Instead, they suggest a reconsideration of love that does not rely on opposites— such as good and bad, selfless and selfish—but rather accommodates a spectrum of love states. Rose Williams, a creative arts psychotherapist, attends to the close connection between self and world as she maps scholarship about consensuality, an idea originally used to describe a child at play as “imaginative and creative absorption,” but which Williams links to intimate civility. Williams’s goal in her chapter “Consensuality: Love and Sex Post #Me too” is “to contribute to theorising a psychology of consent as an essential component of love studies.” In “Love of Process: Intimacy and Attention within Painting, Life, and Art,” Paul Uhlmann and Gregory Pryor draw upon a framework of phenomenology to posit a connection between the process of creating art and the act of becoming a love dyad

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and to “underscore the importance of close attention as a form of love within creative process.” They highlight the importance of resisting a separation between self and world as key to love as inter-relationality, which recalls the opening chapter’s love ethic and Iris Murdoch’s notion of attention, as discussed by Reid Boyd. The collection concludes with a poetic, political, personal essay by Pearl Proud. “The Fire of Love” calls back to many of the concepts, ideas, and provocations from the previous chapters, and it also moves forwards and upwards in its affirmations and invitations and in its invocation of Ubuntu, a Zulu way of life that is “a ‘seeing’ of the other, an extending of a humanity and generosity of spirit to the other [that] has love at its core.” Madalena Grobbelaar Elizabeth Reid Boyd Debra Dudek

References Fromm, Erich. 1957. The art of loving. London: Allen & Unwin. Karandashev, Victor. 2015. A Cultural Perspective on Romantic Love. Online Readings in Psychology and Culture 5, 4: 3 https://doi.org/10.9707/2307-­ 0919.1135 Mai, Nicola, and Russell King. 2009. Love, Sexuality and Migration: Mapping the Issue(s). Mobilities 4, 3: 295–307. May, Simon. 2011. Love: A History. Yale University Press. http://www.jstor.org/ stable/j.ctt5vm43t

Acknowledgements

We are committed to reconciliation, and we recognise and respect the significance of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples’ communities, cultures, and histories. We acknowledge and respect the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples as the traditional custodians of the land. Thank you to Camille Davies at Palgrave Macmillan, London, for her enthusiasm and encouragement of the Love Studies project. Thanks also to Sujatha Mani, project coordinator at Springer Nature for her support and guidance. Thank you to Barbara Campbell and Kylie Wrigley, who assisted with the formatting and referencing of this book. With respect to the research programme being conducted at Edith Cowan University, Western Australia, regarding the construct of intimate civility, thanks are due to the supervisors leading the research: Associate Professor Eyal Gringart and Dr Madalena Grobbelaar; as well as to the students who have conducted or are conducting research with this concept, Barbara Campbell, Nigel Healy, and Alise Bender. To colleagues who have supported and been part of our growing Love Studies Network, we extend our thanks as well as our hopes that we continue this research collaboration. Our final thanks go to the School of Arts and Humanities at Edith Cowan University, including Craig Speelman the Associate Dean (Research), for supporting the Love@ECU Love Studies Network through a Research Culture Fund grant and a Research Support Fund grant.

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Contents

1 The  Love Ethic: Love and Activism for Ecosocial Justice  1 Naomi Joy Godden and Shajimon Peter 2 The  Power of Love: Love in Peace and Conflict Studies 15 Janine Joyce 3 Love  and Hospitality: Love, Refugees, and Challenging Indifference 27 Jamal Barnes 4 Romantic  Love across Borders: Marriage Migration in Popular Romance Fiction 39 Amy Burge 5 The  Heart of the Matter: Love and Care in Health Humanities 51 Bríd Phillips, Michael Stevens, and Claire Hansen 6 Queering  Love: Love in Literary and Media Studies 63 Debra Dudek, Julia Wexler, and Tanya Visosevic 7 Embracing Intimate Civility: Love of Kith and Kin 75 Elizabeth Reid Boyd

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8 The  Tyranny of Love: Love and Psychology 87 Madalena Grobbelaar and Eyal Gringart 9 Consensuality:  Love and Sex Post #Metoo 97 Rose Williams 10 Love  of Process: Intimacy and Attention Within Painting, Life, and Art109 Paul Uhlmann and Gregory Pryor 11 Conclusion:  The Fire of Love123 Pearl Proud Index131

Notes on Contributors

Jamal Barnes  is a lecturer in the School of Arts and Humanities at Edith Cowan University. Amy Burge  is a Senior Lecturer in Popular Fiction at the University of Birmingham. Debra  Dudek  is an academic in the English Program at Edith Cowan University. She has published widely in the area of visual and verbal texts for young people and a focus on love and ethics informs her research more generally. She is the lead Chief Investigator on the ARC Discovery Grant “A comparative investigation into Australian adolescents’ perceptions of harm from accessing online sexual content” and the author of The Beloved Does Not Bite: Moral Vampires and the Humans Who Love Them (2017). Naomi  Joy  Godden  is a Vice-Chancellor’s Research Fellow at Edith Cowan University’s School of Arts and Humanities and Strategic Research Centre for People, Place and Planet. Eyal  Gringart is an Associate Professor and the Coordinator of Psychology, International Programs within the School of Arts and Humanities. Madalena Grobbelaar  (she/her) is an academic, a clinical psychologist and clinical psychosexual therapist in private practice (http://www.womensexualityaustralia.com.au/). She is a lecturer in the Counselling and Psychotherapy programmes at Edith Cowan University, and has taught into the Master of Sexology at Curtin University. Madalena’s area of interxv

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est and research is in sexuality, intimate relationships, and interpersonal violence. Her work and therapeutic orientation is informed by the role of dysfunctional attachments in adult sexuality and intimacy, as well as the role of sexual socialisation, attitudes, and beliefs and how these contribute to the intergenerational cycle of intimate partner violence, areas she has recently published in. Claire  Hansen is a Lecturer in English at the Australian National University, a researcher on the Shakespeare Reloaded project, an award-­ winning educator and Fellow of the Higher Education Academy and holds an honorary virtual Fellowship with the Centre for the History of Emotions. Janine  Joyce  is an Associate Professor of Social Work at Edith Cowan University’s School of Arts and Humanities. Shajimon  Peter  is a Senior Lecturer of Social Work at Edith Cowan University’s School of Arts and Humanities. Bríd Phillips  is a research Fellow at The University of Western Australia. She has extensive background in clinical nursing and holds a PhD in English and Cultural Studies. Pearl Proud  is the Chair of CANWA and ConnectGroups, NE Director, Senior Consultant (Diversity|CaLD). She is also a Psychologist, AHPRA Accredited Supervisor, Governance Mentor and Executive Coach. Gregory Pryor  is a Visual Arts Lecturer within the School of Arts and Humanities at Edith Cowan University. Elizabeth Reid Boyd  (she/her) is an academic in the School of Arts and Humanities at Edith Cowan University. On the topics of gender, culture, romance and etymology, Elizabeth has published widely and as a media commentator. She writes fiction as Eliza Redgold, based upon the Gaelic meaning of her name. After Naked: A Novel of Lady Godiva was published she is currently in script development as feature film GODIVA. She also writes historical romances. Michael  Stevens is a Senior Lecturer in the Graduate School of Biomedical Engineering at UNSW Sydney.

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Paul  Uhlmann is a Senior Lecturer within the School of Arts and Humanities at Edith Cowan University, where he is the Course Coordinator of the Bachelor of Arts and coordinator of the Visual Arts and Printmaking and Artists’ Books Studio. Tanya Visosevic  is the major coordinator for Screen Production in the School of Arts and Humanities at Edith Cowan University. Julia  Wexler  is a Senior Learning Adviser in the School of Arts and Humanities at Edith Cowan University. Rose Williams  is a Lecturer and Clinic Director, and she holds a Masters in Creative Arts Therapies within the Discipline of Counselling. She works in the College of Science, Health, Engineering and Education (SHEE) at Murdoch University.

List of Figures

Fig. 1.1 Fig. 10.1 Fig. 10.2 Fig. 10.3 Fig. 10.4

The love tree 8 Paul Uhlmann, everything is movement 2022, oil on canvas 55 × 35 cm. (Photography: Christophe Canato) 113 Paul Uhlmann, life is movement 2022 oil on canvas, 55 × 35 cm. (Photography: Christophe Canato) 114 Gregory Pryor. They followed a star to meet under the trees. 2019, oil on wood panel, 60 × 39.6 cm. (Photography: Eva Fernandez)116 Gregory Pryor. This is the place of skin and bones (detail). 2019 oil on wood panel, 60 × 39.6 cm. (Photography: The artist) 117

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CHAPTER 1

The Love Ethic: Love and Activism for Ecosocial Justice Naomi Joy Godden and Shajimon Peter

Abstract  In “The Love Ethic: Love and Activism for Ecosocial Justice,” Godden and Peter position themselves as part of a growing movement of social work practitioners and scholars who claim love as an ethic and praxis; particularly in the spaces of critical activism, community work, and ecosocial work. They contend that love assists activists to understand the complex relationships and interconnectedness among humans and between humans and nature and to spur inclusive activism for justice and wellbeing for all species. They explore the love ethic as activism for structural change. They examine the teachings of bell hooks, Thich Nhat Hanh, and other scholars and activists, and propose the Love Ethic, drawing on Godden’s research about love-based community work in Timor-Leste, Australia, and Peru. Peter then shares a case study that demonstrates how the Love Ethic could be practiced to address the challenges faced by transnational social workers in their transition to host countries. They argue that love provides

N. J. Godden (*) • S. Peter Centre for People, Place and Planet, and School of Arts and Humanities, Edith Cowan University, Bunbury, WA, Australia e-mail: [email protected]; [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. Grobbelaar et al. (eds.), Contemporary Love Studies in the Arts and Humanities, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-26055-1_1

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a powerful framework for ecosocial activists to resist and transform structures of injustice in solidarity with communities and ecological systems for a fairer world. Keywords  Activism • Love • Ethics • Justice • Structural change

Introduction Between December 2021 and January 2022, the world bid farewell to two great scholars of love: African-American feminist bell hooks, and Vietnamese Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh. Their works, individually and jointly, provided a compelling argument for love as an ethic of collective action for justice. We are part of a growing movement of social work practitioners and scholars who claim love as an ethic and praxis—particularly in the spaces of critical activism, community work, and ecosocial work. Naomi is a female, white social worker from Australia and Shajimon is a male social worker of colour from India. We both live and work on Wardandi Boodja, the Country (land) of the Wardandi Salt Water Aboriginal peoples in south-west Western Australia.

Love and Activism As social workers, we take a love-based activist approach with individuals, communities, and institutions to understand and redress injustices such as widening inequities and the social, cultural, economic, and environmental injustices of climate change. We align with bell hooks’ (2000) position that love is an antidote to oppressive human-made systems of colonialism, neoliberal capitalism, white supremacy, and patriarchy. Indeed, biologists Maturana and Verdan-Zoller (2008) argue that humans have the innate capacity to practice love to transform our world. They explain that the origin of humanness is not competition and aggression but love and mutual trust. This claim is evidenced by humans’ evolutionary history of parental care for children and the human propensity for sensual and tender affection, friendship, sexuality, human co-operation, and ethical concerns. Maturana and Verdan-Zoller identify that Western patriarchy diverted humans from our biological foundation of love through pastoralisation, shifting from interdependent coexistence between humans and animals to human control of animals and land. As such, human competition and

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aggression are political and cultural constructs that underlie our current systems of oppression, domination, and inequality, while our natural tendency is love. Academic, philosophical, spiritual, and popular literature theorises love as an emotion (Lewis et al. 2001); a verb (Bauman 2003; Fromm 1957; hooks 2000); spirituality (hooks 2000; Tolstoy 1970); all-encompassing (Fromm 1957; Tolstoy 1970); connection (Fromm 1957); dialogue (Freire 1989); compassion (His Holiness the Dalai Lama 2000); nonviolence (Gandhi 2005; Hanh 1993; King Jr. 1963; Tolstoy 1970); and revealing one’s full humanity (Gaita 1999). Bauman argues that love is making “an ‘other’ into a quite definite ‘someone’” (2003, 20), while Gaita (1999) situates love in knowing and recognising the full humanity of another. Mackay (2013, 207) argues that, “a good life is a loving life” through taking other people seriously, respecting them, and acknowledging their desire for proper recognition. Fromm (1957) and hooks (2000) frame love as other-centred action of giving not receiving. Scholars also suggest that love encompasses a range of practices, including trust, commitment, care, respect, knowledge, responsibility, compassion, giving, nonviolence, justice, forgiveness, and altruism (Fromm 1957; Gandhi 2005; Hanh 1993; His Holiness the Dalai Lama 1996; hooks 2000; King Jr. 1963; Tolstoy 1970). Although love is an orientation to all (Fromm 1957), there are many forms of love: self-love; eros (romantic/ erotic love); storge (parental love; love between parents and offspring); intergenerational love; philia (love between friends); love for clients; love for colleagues; community love; agape (neighbourly love; love for humanity; other-regarding love); environmental love; and love for the Divine (see Andolsen 1981; Bauman 2003; Butot 2007; Caldicott 1992; Fromm 1957; Gaita 1999; Hanh 1993; His Holiness the Dalai Lama 1996; hooks 2000; Kurio and Reason 2022; King Jr. 1963; Lewis 1960; Martuwarra River of Life et al. 2021; Rose 2008; Templeton 1999). Nestled within this diverse literature, bell hooks’ seminal works highlight the emancipatory potential of love to transform oppressive systems of power such as patriarchy, racism, and capitalism (hooks 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003). hooks (2000) maintains that love is an action and a choice, requiring honest and open communication, forgiveness, and giving: “If we were constantly remembering that love is as love does, we would not use the word in a manner that devalues and degrades its meaning. When we are loving we openly and honestly express care, affection, responsibility, respect, commitment, and trust” (hooks 2000, 13–14). hooks brings a

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critical feminist lens to the myriad philosophies of love. She argues that love builds communalism and connectedness, and “when small communities organise their lives around a love ethic, every aspect of daily life can be affirming for everyone” (hooks 2000, 99). Her conceptualisation of love as activism is reinforced by Mackay’s stance that love is “the most powerful, creative and fruitful force for good in the world” (2013, 128). Meanwhile, Hanh and others stress that love is the core of nonviolence. Nonviolent theory promotes raising the consciousness of oppressors through activism led by the conscience of a common humanity (Hanh 1993; King Jr. 1963; Tolstoy 1970). Hanh (1993) argues that nonviolent activism is an ethical and spiritual process rather than a dogma, involving peaceful rebellion, resistance, civil disobedience, and protest through a lens of love. Nonviolent activism rejects retribution and encompasses love, compassion, and forgiveness, including towards oppressive regimes (Hanh 1993). hooks and Hanh promote love as collectivist action to transform systems of inequality and power for a world of peace, equity, justice, and wellbeing for all living species. They argue that community is fundamental for confronting the complex and overwhelming challenges of our time (hooks and Hanh 2017): bell hooks: I think that we best realize love in community… Thich Nhat Hanh: …and then we learn to operate as a community and not as individuals… We are brothers and sisters living together. We try to operate like cells in one body. bell hooks: I think this is the love that we seek in the new millennium, which is the love experienced in community, beyond self.

However, pervasive neoliberalism threatens community and other-­ centeredness, because “solidarity is the first casualty of the triumphs of the consumer market” (Bauman 2003, 76). Community development, once a radical challenge to patronising welfare models of social change, is “increasingly influenced and co-opted by a modernist, soulless, rational philosophy—reducing it to a shallow technique for ‘solving community problems’” (Westoby and Dowling 2009, back cover). As such, although many activists locate love as a core motivation (or even modus operandi), the global progressive movement has largely discarded the critical reflection and inclusion of love within our vocabularies, theories, and practices (Godden 2017a; Morley and Ife 2002). Love is taboo in the lecture

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theatres of academia, in the corridors of government and civil society organisations, and in the circles of activist collectives—a trend that we attempt to disrupt.

Love in Practice To explore love in practice, Naomi led feminist participatory action research with 22 community workers, volunteers, and activists (15 women, 7 men) within three rural communities of Liquica (Timor-Leste), Margaret River (Australia), and Lobitos (Peru) (see Godden 2017b, 2018, 2021). The research considered two general questions: what is love in international rural community work; and, how can love transform structural inequality. The methodology involved co-operative inquiries, whereby a group of co-researchers engage in systematic cycles of action and reflection to non-hierarchically and democratically explore a collaboratively developed research topic (Heron 1996). Each inquiry culminated in a collaborative drawing that reflected a consensual theory of love-based community work. The first co-operative inquiry was held in Liquica, Timor-Leste, a coastal community of 20,938 people located 35km west of Dili, the nation’s capital. Ten co-researchers developed the launching statement, Aproximasaun domin hatudu ba komunidade liu husi serbisu no hahalok [The ways that love is expressed to the community through work and actions]. The six-week co-operative inquiry process considered the themes: what is love; love in the family; love in the community; expressions of love; and working through love. This process led to the formation of a definition and collective model of love-based community work: Domin mak hanesan hahalok nebe ita hatudu liu husi manera oi-oin hodi ema seluk bele sente ho diak: liberdade, demokrasia, toleransia, moris, adaptasaun, unidade no felisidade (Love is actions that we show through a variety of ways so that other people feel freedom, democracy, tolerance, alive, adaptation, unity and happiness).

As explained elsewhere (Godden 2018), love in community work was articulated in a collaborative drawing of a tree, whereby the tree roots represent love as action, and the tree trunk and branches are love-based processes of demokrasia (democracy), unidade (unity), paciencia

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(patience), serbisu hamutuk (working together), rona malu (listening to each other), fiar malu (trusting each other), and respeita (respect). The fruits of the tree are the results of this process, namely felicidade (happiness). As fruit and leaves fall from the tree, love enables liberdade (freedom) and grows new tree saplings, the jerasaun foun (new generation) of trees, which represents the cyclical and ongoing nature of love. The second co-operative inquiry was held in Margaret River, Australia, a coastal community on Wardandi Boodja of 6,550 people. Also over a six-week process, 10 co-researchers explored the collaboratively developed launching statement, Concepts of love, experiences of love in community work, and taking it forward. The organic, democratic process explored the following themes: how can we draw on love to enhance our community work; how is the love ethic generated; concrete examples of receiving and giving love; and, through stories, identify love in community work and use these examples to transform practice. The group did not develop a collaborative definition of love, but collectively produced a drawing to communicate a theory of practice. Similar to Liquica, the Margaret River group expressed love in community work as a tree. As detailed elsewhere (Godden 2017b), the tree roots represent the values of the love ethic, such as respect, equal rights, self-love, generosity of spirit, hope, and non-exploitation. The tree trunk represents the process of the love ethic, with symbiotic connectedness between people and nature, transforming structures of inequality, open communication, flexibility, a participatory and democratic approach, sacrifice, humility, and forgiveness. Fruit, foliage, and flowers of the tree represent the intended outcomes of love-based community work, including reconciliation, structural transformation, joy, and wellbeing. Tree saplings reflect the cyclical and reciprocal nature of love, as action through love enables others to give and share love. The third co-operative inquiry was held in Lobitos, Peru, a coastal community of 1506 people. This co-operative inquiry involved four co-­ researchers, with a collaboratively developed launching statement: Como practicar y difundir el amor fraternal en el trabajo comunitario? (How do we practice and share love in our community work?). The four-week process considered the themes of self-reflections of love, love in action, community of equality, and a theory of practice. As shared elsewhere (Godden 2021), the group defined love as follows:

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El amor fraternal es un sentimiento profundo que nos ayuda e impulsar a actuar y proporciona igualdad de derechos y deberes por el bienestar de los demás sin recibir nada a cambio (Love is a deep feeling that supports and motivates us to act for universal equality, rights and responsibilities to ensure the wellbeing of all, without receiving anything in exchange).

Founded in the collective definition of love, the group’s framing of community work through love involves fair work conditions, being an example, advocacy, programmes that promote equality, capacity building, and consciousness-raising. This framework encourages societal transformation for a system of equality, which involves a society of rights of people and planet, non-discrimination, shared power, nonviolence, interconnection, and sustainability. Such a system provides bienestar (wellbeing), which involves peace, tranquillity, happiness, prosperity, and hope.

The Love Ethic The process and outcomes of these three co-operative inquiries, combined with philosophical literature, inform a proposed framework of the Love Ethic for ecosocial justice activism. We define love as follows: Love is relationship-based action for equity, rights, and interconnected flourishing of people and nature. Love is a conscious choice and a symbiotic process of unconditional, other-centred giving.

Love holistically includes love for self, intimate partners, families, friends, communities, colleagues, humanity, nature, and the cosmos. It is based on the premise that by loving others, our own spiritual wellbeing is nurtured. The four main features of the Love Ethic are: • It is values-based and upholds the universal rights of humans and nature; • It promotes participatory, democratic, just, and transformative processes that intertwine people and planet and actively challenge structures of power and inequality; • It aims for structural change that enables universal wellbeing for people and planet; and, • Love-based action is reciprocal and cyclical.

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Fig. 1.1  The love tree

The image of a tree (Fig. 1.1) assists us to understand these features: Values of interconnectedness, justice, nonviolence, and hope: In the image, the roots of the tree represent the values of the Love Ethic. A key value is the interconnected rights and wellbeing of people and nature for current and future generations. Practiced for millennia by First Nations peoples, philosophies of interconnectedness recognise places as living entities and support symbiotic, relational responsibility (Gay’wu Group of Women 2019; Martuwarra River of Life et al. 2021; Redvers et al. 2022). The Latin American Indigenous paradigm of buen vivir promotes a harmonious relationship between people and nature through structures such as an economy of solidarity, social and environmental justice, decolonisation, and transcending the material dimension to spirituality and affection (Gudynas 2011; Villalba 2013). The value of justice challenges inequality,

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discrimination, and sexism which manifest within dominant societal and economic structures that prioritise power and profits over people and planet. In contrast, the Love Ethic embraces a radical paradigm that critiques, resists, and transforms structural inequities for a global order of fairness, rights, and equity. For activists, this model involves a personal and ethical commitment to challenge privilege and inequality and to embody conscious love-centred action in solidarity with those marginalised by dominant systems. The value of nonviolence is a deliberate commitment to intentionally not harm others in the pursuit of justice. Nonviolence also involves forgiveness of the self and others—a generosity of spirit that gives and forgives with humble self-awareness and other-centeredness. Finally, the Love Ethic embodies hope that an alternative world is possible and that equity and peace are achievable. Hope supports collective and intergenerational solidarity and commitment to long-lasting change. Process of the Love Ethic, participatory, inclusive, democratic: The trunk and branches of the tree represent the process of practicing the Love Ethic. Core to the Love Ethic is embodying equity by collectively understanding and actively redistributing privilege and power. This process requires continual ethical reflexivity for our attitudes, discourses, and behaviours to reflect the world for which we strive. To practice love, we must give time, energy, and effort to build nonviolent relationships of honesty, patience, trust, forgiveness, and open communication (hooks 2000). We honour the inherent worth of all living entities and act in solidarity to challenge oppression, exploitation, and structural inequities. These participatory processes for structural change transfer power to grassroots, place-based communities, such as self-organising feminist collectives. Love-centred participatory processes deliberatively promote equity through inclusivity, safety, and democratic decision-making. Practical examples include distributing resources for people with caring responsibilities to participate, elevating the leadership of people with lived experience of injustice, rotating facilitation responsibilities to challenge hierarchical structures, and applying nonviolent dialogue (Freire 1989) and consensus decision-making. In practice, the Love Ethic is playful, joyful, invigorating, and challenging. We celebrate emotional and cultural expression, and we connect through safe humour. We take risks to embody radical change and to challenge societal, economic, and cultural norms that oppress and exploit people and planet. Intended outcomes of the Love Ethic: The leaves, flowers, and fruit of the tree represent the intended outcomes from applying the Love Ethic

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in activism for ecosocial justice. This world is one of universal wellbeing, freedom, happiness, joy, peace, tranquillity, safety, and flourishing, whereby all living beings enjoy their equal rights, duties, opportunities, and outcomes. There is no violence, no corruption, and no inequalities of power. We hold a collaborative vision of social, economic, environmental, and cultural structures that sustainably benefit all. Reciprocal and cyclical nature of the Love Ethic: The small saplings growing from the seeds of the fully grown tree demonstrate how love is reciprocal, cyclical, and ongoing. When activists act through love, we inspire, motivate, and propagate others to love.

Case Study: The Love Ethic as Hope The potential for the Love Ethic is illustrated in the case study of Transnational Social Workers (TSWs) who are professionals who engage in cross border practice, that is, in any other country than the one in which they were trained and qualified. Social workers often move to other countries to fill occupational shortages and to seek global opportunities (Bartley and Beddoe 2018; Brown et al. 2015; Hussein 2014). Shajimon’s study involving two other colleagues in New Zealand found that, except for direct recruitment, TSWs’ transition is a painful journey as they negotiate multiple challenges such as arrival and securing employment in the host country, settling in, and navigating the professional context (Peter et al. 2020). Despite these challenges, internationally there are no coherent profession-wide strategies for facilitating TSW’s transition, whereby transition into host countries is an insufficient, ad hoc arrangement between the employer and employee (Peter et al. 2019). The Love Ethic could be an antidote to the disadvantage and powerlessness that TSWs experience, through transformed relationships. As Foucault (1981) suggests, power is not something that we possess, seize, or share, but rather power is relational, and it manifests only when social relationships occur. Internationally, no professional social work bodies have intervened to facilitate the transition of TSWs, which puts the onus on TSWs to manage their own transition. This lack of support creates a binary of deserving citizens and undeserving migrants in line with the neoliberal assumption of normative and non-normative citizens in which the former is an active participant and contributor to the market economy while the latter is blamed for their situation irrespective of the impact structures and systems have on them (Bryson 2021).

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The Love Ethic provides a possible model of meaningful relationship between professional bodies of social work and TSWs to enable TSWs to transition in a manner that meets their transitional needs personally and professionally. A love-based relationship would be grounded in dialogue, nonviolence, interconnectedness, reflexivity, shared power, and solidarity (Godden 2017a) and it would encompass cultural humility, reciprocal deep listening, honouring, and acting to uphold the full humanity of TSWs. It would involve analysing how discriminatory power marginalises TSWs, honouring the capabilities and lived experiences of TSWs, and amplifying their voices. Collective activist strategies of solidarity, such as consciousness-raising and policy advocacy, could be applied to actively redress structural disadvantages by challenging organisational practices, professional norms, and legislative impediments. Through relational activism, professional bodies and TSWs could actualise the Love Ethic to address structural injustices.

Conclusion In this chapter, we have examined the Love Ethic as a practice framework of activism to collectively critique and challenge oppressive structures of power in our collective quest for ecosocial justice. The Love Ethic supports organic, flexible, and cyclical practice that celebrates and strengthens symbiosis between people, planet, and cosmos. It is unapologetically ambitious and hopeful. It rests on the conviction that the spirit and intelligence of humans and our non-human kin have the wisdom and power to collectively transcend entrenched systems of inequality and embody a brave new world order. As Arundhati Roy (2003) reminds us, “Another world is not only possible, she’s on her way. And on a quiet day, if you listen very carefully, you can hear her breathing.”

References Andolsen, Barbara Hilkert. 1981. Agape in Feminist Ethics. The Journal of Religious Ethics 9 (1): 69–83. Bartley, Allen, and Liz Beddoe. 2018. Transnational Social Work: Opportunities and Challenges of a Global Profession. Policy Press. Bauman, Zygmunt. 2003. Liquid Love: On the Frailty of Human Bonds. Cambridge: Polity Press.

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Brown, Marion, Annie Pullen Sansfacon, Stephanie Ethier, and Amy Fulton. 2015. A Complicated Welcome: Social Workers Navigate Policy, Organizational Contexts and Socio-Cultural Dynamics Following Migration to Canada. International Journal of Social Science Studies 3 (1): 58–68. Bryson, Stephanie A. 2021. An Ethic of Care? Academic Administration and Pandemic Policy. Qualitative Social Work 20 (1): 632–638. https://doi. org/10.1177/1473325020973386. Butot, Michele. 2007. Reframing Spirituality, Reconceptualizing Change: Possibilities for Critical Social Work. In Spirituality and Social Work Selected Canadian Readings, ed. John Coates, John R. Graham, Barbara Swartzentruber, and Brian Ouellette, 143–159. Toronto: Canadian Scholars’ Press Inc. Caldicott, Helen. 1992. If You Love This Planet: A Plan to Heal the Earth. New York: W.H. Norton and Company. Foucault, Michel. 1981. The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1: The Will to Knowledge. London: Penguin. Freire, Paulo. 1989. Pedagogy of the Oppressed. New York: Continuum. Fromm, Enrich. 1957. The Art of Loving. London: Unwin Books. Gaita, Raymond. 1999. A Common Humanity: Thinking About Love and Truth and Justice. Melbourne: Text Publishing. Gandhi, Mohandes K. 2005. All Men Are Brothers: Autobiographical Reflections. New York: Continuum. Gay’wu Group of Women. 2019. Songspirals: Sharing Women’s Wisdom of Country Through Songlines. Australia: Allen & Unwin. Godden, Naomi J. 2017a. The Love Ethic: A Radical Theory for Social Work Practice. Australian Social Work 70 (4): 405–416. https://doi.org/10.108 0/0312407X.2017.1301506. ———. 2017b. A Co-Operative Inquiry About Love Using Narrative, Performative and Visual Methods. Qualitative Research 17 (1): 75–94. https://doi. org/10.1177/1468794116668000. ———. 2018. Love in Community Work in Rural Timor-Leste: A Co-Operative Inquiry for a Participatory Framework of Practice. Community Development Journal 53 (1): 78–98. https://doi.org/10.1093/cdj/bsw022. ———. 2021. Community Work, Love and the Indigenous Worldview of Buen Vivir in Peru. International Social Work 64 (3): 354–370. https://doi. org/10.1177/0020872820930254. Gudynas, Eduardo. 2011. Buen Vivir: Today’s Tomorrow. Development 54 (4): 441–447. Hanh, Thich Nhat. 1993. Love in Action: Writings on Nonviolent Social Change. Berkeley: Parallax Press. Heron, John. 1996. Co-Operative Inquiry: Research into the Human Condition. London: Sage.

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His Holiness the Dalai Lama. 1996. The Good Heart: A Buddhist Perspective on the Teachings of Jesus. Boston: Wisdom Publications. ———. 2000. Ancient Wisdom, Modern World. Ethics for the New Millennium. London: Abacus hooks, bell. 2000. All About Love: New Visions. London: The Women’s Press Ltd. ———. 2001. Salvation. Black People and Love. New York: Perennial. ———. 2002. Communion. The Female Search for Love. New York: William Morrow. ———. 2003. Teaching Community: A Pedagogy of Hope. New York: Routledge. hooks, bell, and Thich Nhat Hanh. 2017. Building a Community of Love: bell hooks and Thich Nhat Hanh. Lions Roar. https://www.lionsroar.com/bell-­ hooks-­and-­thich-­nhat-­hanh-­on-­building-­a-­community-­of-­love/. Accessed 26 October 2022. Hussein, Shereen. 2014. Hierarchical Challenges to Transnational Social Workers’ Mobility: The United Kingdom as a Destination Within an Expanding European Union. British Journal of Social Work 44 (Suppl. 1): i174–i192. https://doi.org/10.1093/bjsw/bcu050. King, Martin Luther, Jr. 1963. Strength to Love. New York: Harper and Row. Kurio, Jaqueline, and Peter Reason. 2022. Voicing Rivers Through Ontopoetics: A Co-Operative Inquiry. River Research and Applications 38 (3): 376–384. https://doi.org/10.1002/rra.3817. Lewis, Clive Staples. 1960. The Four Loves. New York: Harcourt, Brace. Lewis, Thomas, Fari Amini, and Richard Lannon. 2001. A General Theory of Love. New York: Vintage. Mackay, Hugh. 2013. The Good Life. What Makes a Life Worth Living? Sydney: Macmillan. Martuwarra River of Life, A. Pelizzon, A. Poelina, A. Akhtar-Khavari, C. Clark, S.  Laborde, E.  Macpherson, K.  O’Bryan, E.  O’Donnell, and J.  Page. 2021. Yoongoorrookoo. Griffith Law Review 30 (3): 505–529. https://doi.org/ 10.1080/10383441.2021.1996882. Maturana, Humberto, and Gerda Verdan-Zoller. 2008. The Origin of Humanness in the Biology of Love. Exeter: Imprint Academic. Morley, Louise, and Jim Ife. 2002. Social Work and a Love of Humanity. Australian Social Work 55 (1): 69–77. Peter, Shajimon, Allen Bartley, and Liz Beddoe. 2019. Transnational Social Workers’ Transition into Receiving Countries: What Lessons can be Learned from Nursing and Teaching? European Journal of Social Work 22 (1): 16–29. Peter, Shajimon, Liz Beddoe, and Allen Bartley. 2020. Navigating the Territories of Transition: An Exploration of the Experiences of Transnational Social Workers in Aotearoa New Zealand. International Social Work 65 (5): 856–869. Redvers, Nicole, Yuria Celidwen, Clinton Schultz, Ojistoh Horn, Cicilia Githaiga, Melissa Vera, Marlikka Perdrisat, et al. 2022. The Determinants of Planetary Health: An Indigenous Consensus Perspective. The Lancet Planetary Health 6 (2): 156–163. https://doi.org/10.1016/S2542-­5196(21)00354-­5.

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Rose, Deborah Bird. 2008. “Love in the Time of Extinctions”. The Australian Journal of Anthropology 19 (1): 81–84. Roy, Arundhati. 2003. Confronting Empire (speech). Online video from YouTube, “Arundhati Roy at the World Social Forum, Porto Alegre 2003”. http://www. youtube.com/watch?v=uu3t8Z-­kavA. Templeton, John. 1999. Agape Love: A Tradition Found in Eight World Religions. Pennsylvania: Templeton Foundation Press. Tolstoy, Leo. 1970. The Law of Love and the Law of Violence. New  York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston. Villalba, Unai. 2013. Buen Vivir vs Development: A Paradigm Shift in the Andes? Third World Quarterly 34 (8): 1427–1442. Westoby, Peter, and Gerard Dowling. 2009. Dialogical Community Development: with Depth, Solidarity and Hospitality. West End: Tafina Press.

CHAPTER 2

The Power of Love: Love in Peace and Conflict Studies Janine Joyce

Abstract  Fully engaging with the power of love and the transformative paradigm expands our understanding of peace and conflict studies. In this chapter, “The Power of Love: Love in Peace and Conflict Studies,” Joyce extends traditional definitions concerned with efforts to end war, structural violence, and establishing strong values within civil society structures towards including the importance of the individual and their inner transformation. The micro and the macro are woven together and interconnected. The cultivation of a consciousness of love potentially entrains a society to value character, values, and behavioural changes which contribute to building cultures of peace. This chapter explores the role of peace education practices, including Yogic Peace Education and its intrinsic links to love studies. It considers the bridge towards love studies within conflict.

J. Joyce (*) School of Arts and Humanities, Edith Cowan University, Joondalup, WA, Australia e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. Grobbelaar et al. (eds.), Contemporary Love Studies in the Arts and Humanities, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-26055-1_2

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Keywords  Love • Peace/conflict studies • Yogic Peace Education • Transformation • Justice

Introduction Love is a multifaceted concept. For some people, the focus may be on chemical response, for others it is framing as a virtue, an energy, a feeling, a social bond, a call to action, a moral pathway, or even a bridging social capital (Cunningham et  al. 2013; Steen-Johnsen 2020). hooks (2001) identifies the range of love-actions as, “affection, recognition, respect, commitment, and trust, as well as honest and open communication” (5). Lanas and Zembylas (2015) go further and offer love as a transformational political concept, with six useful perspectives: love as an emotion, love as choice, love as response, love as relational, love as political, and love as praxis. In this chapter, I expand the field of love studies by viewing love as an interconnected flow and energy which, whether we are aware or not, enhances our experience of being engaged and embraced by life, allowing for a deeper sensitivity for interspecies, interplanetary, and intercultural relating (Standish and Joyce 2017). By bringing this form of love awareness into the field of peace and conflict studies, it allows us to refine our focus intentionally. By re-constituting love within peace studies, we intentionally reorient the focus away from efforts to end war and structural violence and to establish strong values within civil society structures (Rogers 2007). Instead, we move towards the equal importance of the individual inner transformation as we consciously build a depth of relating with all forms of life including our planet and building the civil and global infrastructures that subsequently reflect that caring. The micro and the macro are woven together and interconnected. The cultivation of a consciousness of love in peace allows us to prioritise a focus on character, values, and behavioural changes which contribute to a culture of peace. This chapter explores these concepts drawing upon the role of peace education practices, including Yogic Peace Education and its intrinsic links to love studies, and building the skills to increase love.

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Peace and Love Studies Peace, like love, can take many forms of expression. It can be an outcome (absence or cessation of violence), a process (efforts to negotiate freedom from violence through creating social bonds), a human disposition; a culture (as distinct from cultures of violence and fosters a sense of global citizenship), and alongside love energy, it can be part of building a transformative consciousness (Csikszentmihalyi 2013). Whilst it is beyond the scope of this chapter to specifically define a transformative consciousness, it appears to be a combination of love, flow state, intrinsic motivations, capacity for joy, and the inner neuro-psycho-biological changes that certain states entrain. Flow is often described as state beyond presence moving towards a losing of yourself in the moment. Usually, in flow, your abilities are well matched to the activity, and often it is an activity that you love. In this state, the world around you quietens, and you can lose awareness of time. A flow state encourages creativity and cultivates innovative thinking, and the ability to be in this state whilst considering global issues potentially has much to offer both peace and love studies scholars (Pearce and Conger 2002). Johan Galtung (1964) defined the two central concepts of contemporary Peace Research as follows: negative peace, as “the absence of violence, absence of war” and positive peace as “the integration of human society” (2). Positive peace rests upon the sometimes-underappreciated idea that human beings are capable of deep empathy, group cooperation, capacity for mutual aid, amity, and mutual commitment (Galtung 1969). Democratic peace adds an extension of the political regime of states, hypothesising that two democracies never wage war against each other (Russett 1993). Democratic peace builds on Immanuel Kant’s (1795) ideas of a perpetual peace through building trust in future encounters between nations. Lederach (1997) introduced Peace Education to the Pyramid Peacebuilding Model which emphasised the importance of relational aspects. He identified four central elements within reconciliation processes: truth, justice, mercy, and peace. The elements mercy and peace entail concepts which are often but not always easier to manifest from a place of love including acceptance, forgiveness, compassion, and respect. However, love is not so easily implicated with justice and truth. Lederach’s work reminds us that love on its own is not enough to create harmony after

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violent conflict. However, it can be a strong motivating and strengthening force. Galtung (2012) identifies hard and soft aspects of religion which can work for violence or for peace. He suggests viewing love as an encourager for building a form of social capital between religious groups in conflict zones. Steen-Johnsen (2020) extends Galtung’s ideas by considering how “love as a religious value might contribute to bridging social capital, meaning social bonds between groups who have experienced conflict. However, without simultaneously addressing questions of justice, which is often necessary in violent conflicts, creating social bonds through references to love constitutes a weak contribution to peace” (434). Whilst peace researchers have focused more upon negative peace and the phenomenon of violence (Gleditsch et al. 2014; Wiberg 1981), peace scholars have recently called for a reorientation whereby peace studies focus upon humanity’s potential for peace and the development of resources to encourage this (Liu and Spiegel 2016). Other researchers have expanded upon the role of emotions and friendship as a form of positive peace (Hutchison and Bleiker 2014; van Hoef and Oelsner 2018). Whilst Katz (2020) reminds us that “the epistemology of peace is a promise for a better future, that its ontology is the ability to find refuge in the present, and that its ethics is remembering but also moving past the traumas of the past” (1). An earlier scholar Thomas Aquinas suggests that peace is the effect of love, but this rendition of his scholarship is overly simplistic.

The Power of Love Within peace studies, the concept of love enters predominantly through the activities of peace education and through the embodiment of individuals committed to a series of practices and activities aimed at creating change: “Those who work for peace in the world must themselves be striving for a sense of inner harmony” (Harris and Morrison 2013, 15). The resulting peace intelligence is “associated with a deep love for all lives, a deep compassion for all existences, a courage and a conviction for unconditional forgiveness and reconciliation” (Lin 2006, 68). Within this conceptualisation, the power of love is non-romantic and is transformational at both the individual and group levels. However, to know about the values, emotions, and consequently to develop peace intelligence is not enough within peace studies: “it is only complete when it actively fosters

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the commitment to peace and takes shape in concrete strategies” (Pureza and Cravo 2009, 6). Love alongside critical analysis, intentional justice, and equity practice creates a transformative peace praxis. At an interpersonal level, the ongoing project of entraining each other towards a co-created peace is an example of the power of love energy. Within the heart we have a complicated interconnected electrical and endocrine system that regulates our own bio-psycho-social system alongside co-regulating others. Peace is thought to be an inner capacity within the heart of most humans (Liu and Spiegel 2016; Odorisio 2014). It is mediated through complicated bio-psycho-social mechanisms alongside special forms of love-relating such as relationships that expand from Aristotle’s pleasure-friendship, towards notions of virtue-friendship (van Hoef and Oelsner 2018). Within virtue-friendship, the other’s whole character is loved, and the friendship focuses upon the mutual recognition and reinforcement of good character and striving towards the common good. Everyday peace practice from a place of love is a choice and daily practice at the micro or individual level that is recommended and often helpful (Katz 2020). Within a co-created methodology, building internal positive peace capacity includes a multifaceted form of relating based on presence, love energy, and metacognitive awareness. Extending into the everyday experience of political peace requires peace of mind. It requires specific moments that ensure that the world is a good and safe place, and the media has a strong role potential responsibility to share these examples (Katz 2020). Including a lens of love and care reorients the peace and conflict studies focus and interest “from an individualistic and neoliberal understanding of peace and violence and toward a more relational understanding of both harm and survival” (Stites et al. 2021, 2721). Situating love and violence together creates different questions, potentially elicits different war stories, different family stories and different understandings of trauma. Love, care, loss, harm, and pain are simultaneous and are often the silent stories carried by women and children and worth careful study. This connection between love and conflict invites a holistic novel expansion of the peace field including, as examples: a gender exploration of green city development, potential innovations in our global market systems, and humanity’s relationship with the wider ecosystem and circular economies.

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Yogic Peace Education Yoga, and the Peace it creates, has the ability to banish human conflicts and the horror of war and bring about peace and understanding on earth. Having felt the inner peace that yoga reveals, one feels the desire for peace externally—peace in neighbourhoods, nations and between races. (Paramahansa Yogananda n.d.)

This strong claim is made by the respected Yoga teacher Paramahansa Yogananda. Its manifestation is hypothesised to require a critical mass of human beings entrained in peace values, peaceful inner condition, peace actions, and love. Alongside a strong understanding of modern civil society and infrastructure and the ways to create structural change, Yogic Peace Education describes the components of building these capabilities. The five principles and practices of Yogic Peace Education include connection, non-violence, simplicity, integrity, and consciousness (Standish and Joyce 2017). The underlying base is developing the capacity of “recognising, generating, conserving, and securing prana [energy/ love]” (115). The purpose of such practices initially is to become a human being capable of transforming such energy into a consistent embodiment of non-­ animosity capable of acting for peace within the organisations and groups to which one belongs. Many traditions associated with and valuing love recommend practices of contemplative learning (Olivero and Oxford 2019). For the yogic peace builder, as awareness practice deepens over time, all actions come from an embodiment of conscious presence, an intention of wellness or goodness and a commitment to thoughtful kindness (Standish and Joyce 2017), or in the words of Patanjali’s Yoga Sutra 2:35: “Ahimsa Pratistayam tat sannidhu vaira tyagah” [When a person is established in non-violence, those in his/her vicinity cease to feel hostility] (Vivekananda 1899). In many ways, this state of being is the entrainment and skill acquisition of love. Yogic peace education bridges love studies and peace studies through its attention to practices that build an individual’s capacity for love alongside training and development in morals, non-violence, and community mindedness. Often yogic peace education practitioners spend time immersed within an ashram environment to practice all aspects of yoga, including meditation, and embody the resultant learning in the real world by learning to live harmoniously alongside strangers. It is not easy to

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become non-violent in word, thoughts, and action. In an autobiographical analysis of ashram training as a form of yogic peace education, The learning experiences were embodied, sociocultural and spatial immersion in the Raja Yogic tradition which led to my direct experiencing of inner peace, interconnectedness with all beings, nonviolence, and other ways of being and ways of thinking emphasized in peace education. (Joyce 2020, 263)

This awareness becomes politicised as a commitment to reduce others’ suffering, which aligns with the realisation of the importance of justice and equity. Yogic science, however, goes further into a deep transformation that opens to the possibility of dropping the identification of self with all the ideas and emotions gathered within the mind and body. Once free of these identifications and attachments, spiritual peacefulness and joy are said to be natural.

Love Transforms At a simpler level, as we bring a consciousness of love (agape) into our everyday lives, it allows us to detach and re-consider our social structures, our accepted cultural norms, and the civil infrastructure that we exist within (Wiggin 2011). Krystalli and Schulz (2022) step into this invitation by reflecting on their research with communities affected by violence through asking the critical question: How can centring practices of love and care illuminate different pathways for understanding the remaking of worlds in the wake of violence? They continue by stating that when love and care is researched carefully “it renders visible multiple practices, relations, dilemmas, and tensions that are attentive to the complex, intertwined, and often unruly dimensions of violence and its wake” (Krystalli and Schulz 2022, 21). As we subsequently realign our critical analysis, the questions that we consider and who we listen to expands from a space of love consciousness. We may actively ask what is required to build harmonious global systems and ecologically sustainable life for all creatures. Our studies develop to interrogate the experience of new forms of emerging structures presenting in the socio-eco-cultural milieu (e.g. Nation states trialling circular economies).

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We ask what is required to build systems based on prioritising compassion and sustainability for all beings, including our planet. What can we trial? What pilot programmes need to be set up, evaluated, and scaled up? How do we build from the ground up as many human beings are becoming adept at attuning and experimenting with creating a consciousness of love, gratitude, and kindness? How do we want to live? How are we choosing to live now? What social structures are emerging? What will be the new socio-cultural norms going forward? For the peace studies scholar, it is a time of great potentiality. As we focus on building a harmonious, sustainable future, we go deeper into our capacity to entrain each other to manage strong emotion and to develop the communication skills required for exploring conflict. Further, we develop the capacity to come together to co-create new systems and processes which serve humanity better. This process extends to what some scholars call revolutionary love where it is seen as a more powerful force than anger for promoting political change and provides a moral and strategic compass for concrete individual and collective actions in critical education (Lanas and Zembylas 2015). Other authors consider the possibility of co-creating a loving revolution, where we transform from within our current institutions, organisations, and civil structures (Chabot 2008). Love studies refines peace and conflict studies to allow a broader application of peace education and the role of inner transformation in creating change. Peace studies remind us of the importance of speaking truth to power and seeking justice when healing or transforming violent regimes: A valuing of love and associated care expands our knowledge associated with remaking a world, draws attention to the simultaneity of harm and care, sheds light on the textured meanings of politics and political work, and highlights ethical and narrative dilemmas regarding how to capture these political meanings without reducing their intricacies. (Krystalli and Schulz 2022, 1)

Conclusion To conclude, the intersectional space between peace and conflict studies and love studies has much to offer both fields. Peace studies expand concepts of love from romantic-eros and/or selflove-philautia, to include the non-sentimental brother-sisterly-philia and the transcendent love-agape. It allows a lens of critical politicisation of the key concepts, which invites a

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deeper examination of what it means to be human and the myriad of ways in which we love and co-create together at neuro-psychological, socio-­ biological, and social-global-political levels. Love studies alongside peace studies steps into analysing the love of space, the love of place, the love of political work, the love for life. Indeed, we may find that an engagement with the role that love plays in deepening our collective empathy may be proven to be critical in co-­ creating sustainable life: We are at the cusp, I believe, of an epic shift into a climax global economy and a fundamental repositioning of human life on the planet. The ‘Age of Reason’ is being eclipsed by the ‘Age of Empathy’. The most important question facing humanity is this: Can we reach global empathy in time to avoid the collapse of civilization and save the Earth? (Rifkin 2009, 3)

The practical steps of learning to co-create love and the conditions for harmonious peace are described within Yogic peace education and other traditions embedded in the role of contemplative entrainment and moral commitment to evolving a just and equitable humanity.

References Chabot, Sean. 2008. Love and Revolution. Critical Sociology 34 (6): 803–828. Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly. 2013. Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience. New York: Random House. Cunningham, William A., Kirsten A.  Dunfield, and Paul E.  Stillman. 2013. Emotional States from Affective Dynamics. Emotion Review 5 (4): 344–355. Galtung, Johan. 1964. An Editorial. Journal of Peace Research 1 (1): 1–4. ———. 1969. Violence, Peace, and Peace Research. Journal of Peace Research 6 (3): 167–191. ———. 2012. Religions Hard and Soft. In The Ashgate Research Companion to Religion and Conflict Resolution, ed. Lee Marsden, 247–263. Farnham: Ashgate. Gleditsch, Nils, Jonas Nordkvelle Petter, and Håvard Strand. 2014. Peace Research—Just the Study of War? Journal of Peace Research 51 (2): 145–158. https://doi.org/10.1177/0022343313514074. Harris, I., & Morrison, M. (2013). Peace Education. Peace and Change: A Journal for Peace Research, 41(3): 398–400. hooks, bell. 2001. All About Love: New Visions. New York: William Morrow.

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Hutchison, Emma, and Roland Bleiker. 2014. Theorizing Emotions in World Politics. International Theory 6 (3): 491–514. https://doi.org/10.1017/ S1752971914000232. Joyce, Janine. 2020. Ashram Pilgrimage and Yogic Peace Education Curriculum Development: An Autoethnographic Study. Journal of Peace Education 17 (3): 263–282. https://doi.org/10.1080/17400201.2020.1818064. Kant, Immanuel. 1795. Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Essay. G.  Allen & Unwin Limited. Katz, Yuval. 2020. Interacting for Peace: Rethinking Peace Through Interactive Digital Platforms. Social Media & Society 6: 2. https://doi. org/10.1177/2056305120926620. Krystalli, Roxani, and Philipp Schulz. 2022. Taking Love and Care Seriously: An Emergent Research Agenda for Remaking Worlds in the Wake of Violence. International Studies Review 24 (1): 1–25. https://doi.org/10.1093/ isr/viac003. Lanas, Maija, and Michalinos Zembylas. 2015. Towards a Transformational Political Concept of Love in Critical Education. Studies Philosophy Education 34: 31–44. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11217-­014-­9424-­5. Lederach, John P. 1997. Building Peace: Sustainable Reconciliation in Divided Societies. Washington: United States Institute of Peace Press. Lin, Jing. 2006. Love, Peace and Wisdom in Education: A Vision for Education in the Twenty-First Century. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Education. Liu, Cheng, and Egon Spiegel. 2016. Peace Science: Orientation and Reorientation. Polish Political Science Year Book 45: 245–256. Odorisio, David M. 2014. The Alchemical Heart: A Jungian Approach to the Heart Center in the Upanisads and in Eastern Christian Prayer. International Journal of Transpersonal Studies 33 (1): 27–38. Olivero, Maria Matilde, and Rebecca L.  Oxford. 2019. Implementing and Assessing Transformative, Multidimensional Peace Language Activities Designed for Future Teachers and Their Students: Educating for Peace. In Promoting Peace Through Practice, Academia and the Arts, ed. Mohamed Walid Lufty and Cris Toffolo, 184–206. Hershey: IGI Global. Paramahansa Yogananda. n.d. Heart of Yoga. Accessed 1 November 2022. https://www.heartofyoga.com/peace-­project. Pearce, Craig L., and Jay A. Conger. 2002. Shared Leadership: Reframing the Hows and Whys of Leadership. Thousand Oaks: Sage Publications. Pureza, Jose Manuel, and Teresa Cravo. 2009. Critical Edge and Legitimation in Peace Studies. RCCS Annual Review 0: 1–17. https://doi.org/10.4000/ rccsar.77. Rifkin, Jeremy. 2009. The Empathic Civilization: The Race to Global Consciousness in a World in Crisis. New York: Jeremy P. Tarcher / Penguin.

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Rogers, Paul. 2007. Peace Studies. In Contemporary Security Studies, ed. Alan Collins, 36–43. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Russett, Bruce. 1993. Grasping the Democratic Peace: Principles for a Post-cold War World. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Standish, Katerina, and Janine M.  Joyce. 2017. Yogic Peace Education: Theory and Practice. Jefferson: McFarland Press. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ Peace_education. Steen-Johnsen, Tale. 2020. The Rhetoric of Love in Religious Peacebuilding. Journal of Contemporary Religion 35 (3): 433–448. https://doi.org/10.108 0/13537903.2020.1810972. Stites, Elizabeth, Alex Humphrey, and Roxani Krystalli. 2021. Social Connections and Displacement from South Sudan to Uganda: Towards a Relational Understanding of Survival during Conflict. Journal of Refugee Studies 34 (3): 2720–2739. Van Hoef, Yuri, and Andrea Oelsner. 2018. Friendship and Positive Peace: Conceptualising Friendship in Politics and International Relations. Politics and Governance 6 (4): 115–124. Vivekananda, Swami. 1899. Raja Yoga. Kolkata: Advaita Ashrama. Wiberg, Hakan. 1981. JPR 1964–1980. What Have We Learnt About Peace? Journal of Peace Research 18 (2): 111–148. Wiggin, Joy L. 2011. The Search for Balance: Understanding and Implementing Yoga, Peace, and Democratic Education. FactisPax: Journal of Peace and Education and Social Justice 5 (2): 216–234.

CHAPTER 3

Love and Hospitality: Love, Refugees, and Challenging Indifference Jamal Barnes

Abstract  In 2022, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) reported that 89.3 million people had been forcibly displaced worldwide, which includes 4.6 million people seeking asylum and 21.3 million refugees (UNHCR 2022). Despite this widespread displacement, countries have failed to develop appropriate responsibility sharing mechanisms to assist in the resettlement of refugees, and they have also implemented border controls. These border controls have made it harder for people to claim asylum and have resulted in a political climate that has become indifferent to the suffering of people on the move. This chapter “Love and Hospitality: Love, Refugees, and Challenging Indifference” examines the role that love can play in creating more inclusive refugee policies and challenging indifference to harm. Drawing upon the notion of agape love, Barnes argues that love can be practiced through hospitality, or welcoming of the stranger. Hospitality can help expand the moral

J. Barnes (*) School of Arts and Humanities, Edith Cowan University, Joondalup, WA, Australia e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. Grobbelaar et al. (eds.), Contemporary Love Studies in the Arts and Humanities, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-26055-1_3

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community beyond sovereign borders and also help develop care and empathy for refugees that better support a political culture of love for others. Keywords  Refugee • Displacement • Borders • Migration • Moral • Hospitality

Introduction In 2022, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) reported that 89.3 million people had been forcibly displaced worldwide, which includes 4.6 million people seeking asylum and 21.3 million refugees (UNHCR 2022).1 Despite this widespread displacement, countries have not only failed to develop appropriate responsibility sharing mechanisms to assist in the resettlement of refugees, but they have also implemented border controls (Fitzgerald 2019) that have securitized and criminalized migration movements (Franko Aas and Bosworth 2013; Gray and Franck 2019). These border controls have made it harder for people to claim asylum and have resulted in a political climate that has become indifferent to the suffering of people on the move. This chapter examines the role that love can play in creating more inclusive refugee policies and challenging indifference to harm. Drawing upon the notion of agape love, I argue that love can be practiced through hospitality, or welcoming of the stranger. Hospitality can help expand the moral community beyond sovereign borders and also help develop care and empathy for refugees that better support a political culture of love for others.

The Absence of Love in Contemporary Asylum Policy Since the 1980s, high income industrial democracies in Europe, North America, and Australia have implemented non-entrée or migration deterrence policies that have aimed to deter asylum seekers and refugees from arriving on their shores and claiming asylum. These policies have included visa controls, airline sanctions, physical barriers, pushbacks of people on land and at sea to their point of departure, and financing third countries to stop asylum seekers from reaching their destination countries (Fitzgerald 2019; Gammeltoft-Hansen and Hathaway 2015; Mountz 2020). These policies have made it harder for people to access asylum and have

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undermined the 1951 Refugee Convention and its 1967 Optional Protocol by weakening refugee protections and safeguards for refugees worldwide. Non-entrée asylum policies have also made migration journeys more dangerous (Jones 2017). As states push their territorial borders outward, implementing more and more barriers to accessing asylum, refugees have resorted to unsafe migration routes to evade border security policies, making them more vulnerable to human rights abuses. European pushbacks and pullbacks over the Mediterranean Sea and in the Balkan region have led to refugees being detained in inhumane detention centers, tortured, raped, sold into slavery rings, or returned to countries where they are at risk of human rights abuses (Barnes 2022b; Border Violence Monitoring Network 2020). In Australia, refugees have been sent to indefinite offshore detention in Papua New Guinea and Nauru, where they have been subjected to torture, inhumane treatment, and suffered serious mental harm (see Barnes 2022a). At the US-Mexico border, US officials have pushed people back to Central America, even when they face significant risks of harm by violent gangs (Human Rights Watch 2014). Not only have these policies resulted in harm, but they have also produced wider psychological effects, such as indifference to suffering (see Barnes 2022a, b). In 2013, Pope Francis visited the Italian island of Lampedusa, which is a destination of migrants and refugees departing Northern Africa to Europe. In his sermon, he decried what he called “the globalization of indifference” to the suffering of refugees. Pope Francis stated, “In this globalized world, we have fallen into globalized indifference. We have become used to the suffering of others: it doesn’t affect me; it doesn’t concern me; it’s none of my business!” (The Holy See 2013). For Pope Francis, ‘“The other’ is no longer a brother or sister to be loved, but simply someone who disturbs my life and my comfort” (The Holy See 2013). The indifference to the suffering of migrants and refugees has also been acknowledged by the former UN Special Rapporteur on Torture, Nils Melzer. Documenting the risk of torture and cruelty people on the move face on their migration journeys, Melzer (2018) argued that “no one feels responsible” for the human rights abuses suffered by migrants and refugees, which has resulted in “the worst cruelty of all: our own indifference.”

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The Role of Agape Love How can this indifference be challenged? Although scholars have focused on how to reform the refugee system (Betts and Collier 2018) or strengthen international legal protections (Gammeltoft-Hansen 2011), little attention has been paid to the role that political emotions, such as love, can play in challenging discriminatory and harmful policies. Nussbaum (2013) has been a prominent proponent of the need to include an analysis of emotions in political life. Nussbaum argues that cultivating a political culture of love can not only reinforce political stability but also create an inclusive political culture. Although political love can often be dangerous when “love of country” leads to racist, xenophobic, and nationalistic policies, Nussbaum (2013, 213) argues that dismissing the emotions in political life ignores the important role they have played in progressive international normative and legal developments, such as abolishing slavery and promoting human rights. The type of love that is cultivated, and what it aims to promote, is therefore important to both promoting a humane political culture and generating support and stability for political institutions. The love advocated by Nussbaum (2013) is a love that aims to be inclusive, stands up to injustices, accepts vulnerability, and is willing to be critical of one’s own country. That is, it is a love that is self-reflective and is able to be strong enough to criticize one’s own political institutions when they have failed to live up to its ideals. However, while political love is particular in the sense that it is local, it must also be general enough to be inclusive and encompass humanity more broadly. This inclusivity is important in regards to refugees, where the capacity for love must extend beyond sovereign borders. Although there are certainly tensions between love for the particular and the universal, it is possible to practice both. As Nussbaum (2019) argues, “such a life, loving the near and far, is a life that displays the richness of human commitment that makes a life worth living” (96). The challenge, then, is to cultivate a political love that can be embraced by citizens, that avoids nationalistic jingoism, and that is inclusive of outsiders. A love that has been utilized in the political realm, and is critical in the way identified by Nussbaum, is what Martin Luther King Jr. called agape love. King argued, following the Greeks, that there are three different types of love: Eros, or erotic love; philia, or reciprocal love seen in friendships; and agape, or god’s love for humanity (King 1957; Cherry 2018,

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157). When referring to agape love, King (1957) states that, it is “nothing sentimental or basically affectionate” but rather It means understanding, creative, redeeming goodwill for all men. It is an overflowing love which seeks nothing in return. It is not set in motion by any quality or function of its object. It is purely spontaneous, unmotivated, groundless, and creative. It is the love of God operating in the human heart. When we rise to love on the agape level, we love men not because we like them, not because their attitudes and ways appeal to us, but we love them because God loves them.

Although King used agape love within a religious context, a secular version—and the one adopted here—is an attitude of unconditional love (Cherry 2018, 158). Agape love is not based on reciprocity, but on loving people in and of themselves. Moreover, for King, agape love was a key element of resistance. Loving others also means targeting practices and institutions that produce injustice and reforming them to better promote respect for others (King 1957; Cherry 2018, 158). Agape can provide the creative and imaginative attitude to challenge injustice by placing one in someone else’s shoes to understand their experiences, and in doing so, help generate respect and empathy for that person. Agape love can be utilized in challenging refugee policies that are building physical and psychological barriers that aim to keep asylum seekers and refugees out of both sovereign territory and governments’ circle of concern. One way agape love can be applied to expand the moral concern for refugees is through the practice of hospitality.

Hospitality on a Spherical Earth Hospitality is the welcoming of strangers. Stretching back to the time of the Greek city states, hospitality has been a crucial cosmopolitan principle and practice in the development of international law. Vitoria, Grotius, Pufendorf, Wolff, Vattel, and Kant all wrote about the importance of practicing hospitality and the fact that governments are under an obligation not only to facilitate the free movement of people (within limits) but also to provide safe haven for people, such as refugees (Cavallar 2008; Kant 1991). Although these philosophers understood hospitality in their own way, they did have a number of elements in common that can help challenge today’s migration deterrence policies.

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First, there was a recognition that states have obligations to those outside of the state, such as refugees. To deny someone in need of hospitality was a moral wrong. For Vitoria, unless the stranger sought to harm, denial of hospitality was “inherently evil” (Chetail 2016, 904). For Pufendorf, being inhospitable was “the true mark of a savage and inhuman temper” (Chetail 2016, 911), while Wolff argued that even if a state could refuse hospitality legitimately under the law, it was still morally wrong to do so (Chetail 2016, 914). These ideas all reinforce the equality of human beings and recognize that we are part of a global moral community that transcends sovereign borders. Second, practicing hospitality is about balancing obligations both to citizens and to wider humanity. That is, sovereignty and obligations to humanity are intertwined (Chetail 2016, 922). Although the above scholars embraced cosmopolitan principles, none of them argued for a policy of open borders. Rather, there was the recognition that the state should continue to maintain the sovereign right to restrict entry to outsiders under certain conditions (Cavallar 2008). Hospitality, therefore, is an important principle that reinforces cosmopolitan obligations. For Immanuel Kant, hospitality provided the main pillar for his cosmopolitan right. He argued that obligations under hospitality were based on the common ownership of the earth. Kant (1991, 172) argued that we are all stuck on a spherical planet with limited space. This interdependence, and the fact human beings cannot avoid one another, means that we must learn how to share the planet, tolerate one another to get along, and recognize that we all have a right to a place on this earth. According to Huber (2017), sharing a spherical earth structures a moral relation to one another whereby “the right to be somewhere grounds a kind of cosmopolitanism that does not come with a substantive list of pre-political entitlements that people bring to bear in their interactions, but describes a certain quality of interaction: how we ought to deal with one another globally” (19). Kant’s insight that we all live in a confined space invites us to reflect on how we treat others and how we want to structure social relations. Huber (2016) argues, To think of the earth as possessed in common illustrates the requirement, directed at each particular agent, to take a reflexive stance towards their own existence as an embodied agent in a world of limited space. It is a standpoint through which we acknowledge our ability to locate ourselves vis-à- vis

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everyone else, and from which we act and interact with others with the aim of negotiating justifiable terms of coexistence. (244–245)

Although individuals do not have a right to settle in another’s country without consent, and Kant did set limits on who could enter another country, he did argue that our interdependence means we should not treat someone with hostility if they turn up on our door or turn them away if it is going to result in harm. As Kant (1991) argued, “In this context, hospitality means the right of a stranger not to be treated with hostility when he arrives on someone else’s territory. He can indeed be turned away, if this can be done without causing his death, but he must not be treated with hostility, so long as he behaves in a peaceable manner in the place he happens to be in” (105–106). It recognizes that citizens have obligations to those outside of their sovereign territory and that their wellbeing is the responsibility of all. Furthermore, hospitality also provides a means to express agape love by showing respect to individuals and their dignity by offering those in need of safe haven a place on this earth.

Cultivating Love through Hospitality States can practice hospitality through adherence to the 1951 UN Refugee Convention and its 1967 Protocol. The Refugee Convention already provides protections that can be embedded within the domestic laws of states to help uphold the dignity and rights of refugees. The Convention includes ensuring that all people have access to asylum and they are not discriminated against based on “race, religion or country of origin” (art. 3). Second, it involves upholding the non-refoulement principle. Article 33 of the Refugee Convention states, “No Contracting State shall expel or return (‘refouler’) a refugee in any manner whatsoever to the frontiers of territories where his life or freedom would be threatened on account of his race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion” (UNHCR 2010). Although there are exceptions to this principle in that an individual that is deemed to be a threat to national security can be deported, if there is a risk an individual could face torture on their return, the non-refoulement principle under international human rights law is absolute (United Nations 1984). There are no exceptions. This principle recognizes the significant harm torture does to people and upholds the absolute prohibition against the practice. Moreover, the Refugee Convention places obligations on states to ensure that once

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refugee status is determined, they are provided support in their place of safety and can gain access to employment, education, housing, social security, and other forms of support to help them re-build their lives (UNHCR 2010). Adherence to the refugee regime assists in building cosmopolitan obligations to outsiders by promoting equality and respect for human dignity and the universality of rights. It can also help cultivate agape love. Building a common humanity is done through practice, by adhering to and reinforcing the refugee regime. As Staub (2018) argues, “people learn by doing” (96). It not enough to state that one must change their mindset to recognize and support agape love. One must also practice it. Doing so will not only reinforce the Refugee Convention but also aim to bring about a psychological transformation of empathy for the suffering of others. Kant’s argument that human beings share a spherical earth, forcing us into a position of self-reflectiveness and seeing the world through the eyes of others, along with agape’s emphasis on a shared humanity, can help build empathy for others. According to Bandura (2016), Seeing common humanity in others arouses empathy and compassion toward them. It also instills a sense of shared responsibility for the quality of life in a society. The sense of common humanity is developed through shared relational experiences that link one’s own well-being to the well-being of others. Commitment to humanitarian causes greater than oneself can further build commonalities. These interpersonal conditions are essential to the development of inclusive, socially just, and humane societies. (446)

Incorporating these hospitality principles into domestic laws helps build a culture that is open and welcoming to others. However, efforts also need to be made in creating a political culture of love that strengthens the emotional support for human rights principles. As Nussbaum (2013) argues, “respect grounded in the idea of human dignity will prove impotent to include all citizens on terms of equality unless it is nourished by imaginative engagement with the lives of others and by an inner grasp of their full and equal humanity… The type of imaginative engagement society needs…is nourished by love” (379–380). Love, in short, helps to sustain support for rights protections by generating an emotional attachment to them. Creating a political love through practicing hospitality does not mean a policy of open borders. As mentioned above, it represents an intertwining

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of international obligations with sovereign rights to manage entries into one’s country. However, by cultivating love, and building a common humanity, the emotional transformation can help challenge perceptions of refugees as security threats, criminals, or as illegal by encouraging self-­ reflexive behavior to understand why people are fleeing harm and imagining how one would like to be treated themselves if they too were a refugee. Furthermore, it can help to challenge the indifference to suffering that Pope Francis and the UN Special Rapporteur on Torture condemned in the international community. As Murphy (2018) has argued, “Indifference to the suffering of others is a reflection of the undermining or absence of love, and specifically of love’s capacity to care about and be responsive to certain individuals or members of certain groups” (177). Cultivating agape love through hospitality aims to create a political culture that recognizes that helping asylum seekers and refugees is an important obligation states have today and that to continue to show indifference to suffering undermines respect for human dignity and a failure to empathize with others.

Conclusion Practicing hospitality to asylum seekers and refugees can not only help challenge the restrictive and harmful immigration policies of states but can also help cultivate political love. Hospitality may extend agape love to those outside the sovereign state, such as refugees, by recognizing international obligations and a common humanity. In doing so, practicing hospitality could help cultivate emotions that can bring about an imaginative transformation to encourage empathy and compassion for refugees. However, this task will not be easy. Non-entrée immigration policies pose a challenge to love in that they promote selfishness and a narrow circle of empathy. As Nussbaum (2013) notes, love is a struggle and “is threatened by narrowness, partiality, and narcissism” (384). This struggle is more urgent than ever. Efforts to promote both hospitality and agape love should be encouraged to help produce a cosmopolitanism that makes it harder to strip refugees of their humanity, to push them back into harm’s way, or to be indifferent to their suffering.

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Note 1. This chapter defines ‘refugee’ according to article 1 of the UN 1951 Refugee Convention (UNHCR 2010).

References Bandura, Albert. 2016. Moral Disengagement: How People do Harm and Live with Themselves. New York: Worth Publishers. Barnes, Jamal. 2022a. Suffering to Save Lives: Torture, Cruelty, and Moral Disengagement in Australia’s Offshore Detention Centres. Journal of Refugee Studies. https://doi.org/10.1093/jrs/feac041. ———. 2022b. Torturous Journeys: Cruelty, International Law, and Pushbacks and Pullbacks over the Mediterranean Sea. Review of International Studies 48 (3): 441–460. Betts, Alexander, and Paul Collier. 2018. Refuge: Transforming a Broken Refugee System. London, UK: Penguin Books. Border Violence Monitoring Network. 2020. The Black Book of Pushbacks: Volume 1. https://acrobat.adobe.com/link/track?uri=urn%3Aaaid%3Ascds%3AUS% 3A3f809f15-­b ada-­4 d3f-­a dab-­f 14d9489275a&viewer%21megaVerb=g roup-­discover. Cavallar, Georg. 2008. Vitoria, Grotius, Pufendorf, Wolff and Vattel: Accomplices of European Colonialism and Exploitation or True Cosmopolitans. Journal of the History of International Law 10 (2): 181–210. Cherry, Myisha. 2018. Love, Anger, and Racial Injustice. In The Routledge Handbook of Love in Philosophy, ed. Adrienne M. Martin, 157–168. New York and Oxon: Routledge. Chetail, Vincent. 2016. Sovereignty and Migration in the Doctrine of the Law of Nations: An Intellectual History of Hospitality from Vitoria to Vattel. European Journal of International Law 27 (4): 901–922. https://papers.ssrn.com/ sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2912130. Fitzgerald, David Scott. 2019. Refuge Beyond Reach: How Rich Democracies Repel Asylum Seekers. New York: Oxford University Press. Franko Aas, Katja, and Mary Bosworth, eds. 2013. The Borders of Punishment: Migration, Citizenship, and Social Exclusion. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Gammeltoft-Hansen, Thomas. 2011. Access to Asylum: International Refugee Law and the Globalisation of Migration Control. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Gammeltoft-Hansen, Thomas, and James C. Hathaway. 2015. Non-Refoulement in a World of Cooperative Deterrence. Columbia Journal of Transnational Law 53 (2): 235–284.

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Gray, Harriet, and Anja K. Franck. 2019. Refugees as/at Risk: The Gendered and Racialized Underpinnings of Securitization in British Media Narratives. Security Dialogue 50 (3): 275–291. Huber, Jakob. 2016. Theorising from the Global Standpoint: Kant and Grotius on Original Common Possession of the Earth. European Journal of Philosophy 25 (2): 231–249. ———. 2017. Cosmopolitanism for Earth Dwellers: Kant on the Right to be Somewhere. Kantian Review 22 (1): 1–25. Human Rights Watch. 2014. “You Don’t Have Rights Here”: US Border Screening and Returns of Central Americans to Risk of Serious Harm. https:// www.hr w.org/r epor t/2014/10/16/you-­d ont-­h ave-­r ights-­h er e/ us-­border-­screening-­and-­returns-­central-­americans-­risk. Jones, Reece. 2017. Violent Borders: Refugees and the Right to Move. London and New York: Verso. Kant, Immanuel. 1991. Kant Political Writings. 2nd ed. Edited by H.S.  Reiss. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. King, Martin Luther, Jr. 1957. The Christian Way of Life in Human Relations, Address Delivered at the General Assembly of the National Council of Churches, December 4. https://kinginstitute.stanford.edu/king-­papers/ documents/christian-­way-­life-­human-­r elations-­address-­delivered-­general-­ assembly-­national. Melzer, Nils. 2018. The Worst Cruelty is Our Indifference. Thomson Reuters Foundation News, December 10. https://news.trust.org/ite m/20181207135242-­bvi7l. Mountz, Alison. 2020. The Death of Asylum: Hidden Geographies of the Enforcement Archipelago. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Murphy, Colleen. 2018. Love and Political Reconciliation. In The Routledge Handbook of Love in Philosophy, ed. Adrienne M. Martin, 169–179. New York and Oxon: Routledge. Nussbaum, Martha C. 2013. Political Emotions: Why Love Matters for Justice. Cambridge, MA and London, UK: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. ———. 2019. The Cosmopolitan Tradition: A Noble but Flawed Ideal. Cambridge, MA and London, UK: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Staub, Ervin. 2018. Preventing Violence and Promoting Active Bystandership and Peace: My Life in Research and Applications. Peace and Conflict: Journal of Peace Psychology 24 (1): 95–111. The Holy See. 2013. Homily of Holy Father Francis. Visit to Lampedusa: “Arena” Sports Camp, Salina Quarter, 8 July. https://www.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/homilies/2013/documents/papa-­francesco_20130708_omelia-­ lampedusa.html.

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UNHCR. 2010. Convention and Protocol Relating to the Status of Refugees. Geneva: UNHCR. https://www.unhcr.org/en-­au/3b66c2aa10. ———. 2022. Figures at a Glance. https://www.unhcr.org/en-­au/figures-­at-­a-­ glance.html. United Nations. 1984. Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment. General Assembly Resolution 39/46, December 10. https://www.ohchr.org/en/instruments-­mechanisms/instruments/convention-­against-­torture-­and-­other-­cruel-­inhuman-­or-­degrading.

CHAPTER 4

Romantic Love across Borders: Marriage Migration in Popular Romance Fiction Amy Burge

Abstract  In “Romantic Love across Borders: Marriage Migration in Popular Romance Fiction,” Amy Burge focuses on two romance novels published in 2019 to explore how they combine migration, intimacy, and romantic love. Helen Hoang’s The Bride Test tells the story of Esme/Mỹ Tran, a Vietnamese American single mother, who is invited by the hero’s mother, Cô Nga, to travel to the USA from Vietnam to seduce him. Although Esme and the hero, Khải, eventually fall in love, at the end of the novel, she is naturalised through her relationship with her newly found father rather than through marriage. Bautista’s You, Me, U.S. features Filipina Liza, who is pursuing a green-card marriage with her American fiancé, Christopher. However, Liza breaks up with Christopher and stays in Manila to pursue a relationship with her best friend Jo. In these novels, migration via marriage is clearly shown as a possible route out of precarity and poverty, but it is not a route that either character chooses. However, the insistence that marriage migration must be directed by romantic love

A. Burge (*) University of Birmingham, Birmingham, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. Grobbelaar et al. (eds.), Contemporary Love Studies in the Arts and Humanities, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-26055-1_4

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represents a mainstream yet conservative view of marriage migration, which frames a notion of authentic romantic love in accordance with western cultural convention. Keywords  Popular romance • Marriage • Migration • Cross-border love • Popular fiction

Introduction Kinship, procreation, cohabitation, family, sexual relations, love—indeed all forms of close affective encounter—are as much matters of state as they are matters of the heart. (Oswin and Olund 2010, 62)

It has long been clear that love and movement are linked. As migration patterns have shifted in the twenty-first century, marriage migration— migration that occurs between a foreigner and a citizen as a result of their marriage relationship—is at the forefront of public discourse and research on migration and movement. Such “love migrations” (Mai and King 2009) remain a major route for movement, even while policies have become increasingly restrictive around the world. For many migrants, love is key to living a better life. As Mai and King argue, “[l]ove, whether it is for a partner, lover or friend, or for a child, parents or other kin, is so often a key factor in the desire and the decision to move to a place where one’s feelings, ambitions and expectations emotional, sexual, political, economic, hedonistic etc.—can be lived more fully and freely” (2009, 296). Marriage migration brings together ideas around citizenship and intimacy with culturally specific articulations of romantic love. Ken Plummer is credited with developing the concept of “intimate citizenship” which “positions issues of gender, family choices, sexual autonomy and reproduction at the heart of citizenship as an embodied and inclusive practice” (Odasso 2021, 76; Plummer 2003). Or, as Abrego puts it, “citizenship and its associated legal consciousness are developed through interactions and communication with others,” especially the family (2019, 664). Bonjour and de Hart posit that, “migration and citizenship should be analysed as the product of intersecting politics of belonging and intimacy” (2021, 8). When it comes to marriage migration, legal frameworks around the world stipulate that love—specifically western, romantic love—should be the only reason for migration via marriage. However, as Andrikopoulos

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points out, most cross-border marriages involve some element of personal motivation, which does not mean that the relationship is false or a “sham” (2021). Migration scholars draw on Giddens’ definition of the “pure relationship,” as one “entered into for its own sake” (Giddens 1992, 58) to identify how “[t]he ideal of marriage as a pure relationship is arguably the norm according to which cross-border marriages are assessed by the state” (Andrikopoulos 2021, 346). As Scheel notes, a “particular (Western) understanding of love as devoid of any material interest […] features as vehicle for practices of government for the regulation of marriage migration to Europe” (2017, 402, italics original). Thus, any “attempt to polarize love and pragmatics and to represent them as discontinuous represents a particularly western perspective and bias” (Constable 2003, 128). A key source for articulations of sexual, romantic love in the western world is the romance novel. Extant in its modern form since the early twentieth-century, today’s popular romance fiction “center[s] around a love plot that holds the promise of a future with a unified emotional life for two or more protagonists” (Kamblé et al. 2021, 2). Romance genre texts are heavily concerned with intimate relationships. When romance novels concern themselves with migration, it is often presented in terms of how it impacts on intimate relationships, for example through marriage migration. There is alignment between the “heteronormative modes of intimacy at the heart of the modern liberal state” (Turner and Espinoza 2021, 371), seen in visa processes and in the intimate relationships depicted in twenty-first century romance novels. This chapter focuses on two romance novels, published in 2019, and their combining of migration, intimacy, and romantic love. Helen Hoang’s The Bride Test tells the story of Esme/Mỹ Tran, a Vietnamese American single mother, who is invited by the hero’s mother, Cô Nga, to travel to the USA from Vietnam to seduce him. Initially planning to use the trip to locate her American biological father, Esme and the hero Khải eventually fall in love. However, Esme refuses Khải’s offer of a “marriage of convenience” and, at the end of the novel, is naturalised through her relationship with her newly found father rather than through marriage. Bautista’s You, Me, U.S. concerns Filipina Liza, who is pursuing a green-card marriage with her American fiancé, Christopher. However, over the course of the novel, she falls in love with her Filipina best friend, Jo. Liza ultimately breaks up with Christopher and stays in Manila to pursue a relationship with Jo. These novels are interested in how economics and romantic love are coupled in marriage migration and reveal a range of reasons why

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characters might pursue cross-border relationships. The texts use romance tropes to articulate the marriage migrations in their plots and draw on migration metaphors to bolster the developing intimate relationship.

Why Migrate? Both The Bride Test and Me, You, U.S. are realistic about the multiple, overlapping, and sometimes conflicting reasons why migration via marriage is sought. An early rationale for Esme to accept Cô Nga’s offer is to find her own father, an American citizen. The Bride Test explores multiple methods for migration to the USA, affirming the preference of gaining a student visa or naturalisation, via Esme’s long-lost American father, over marriage migration, given that the couple remain unmarried at the end of the book. Economic benefits of marriage migration are acknowledged, although to differing degrees. In You, Me, U.S., marriage to her American fiancé Christopher represents economic security for Liza and her family. Liza’s life is characterised by precarious employment. She and her friends form an online dating club as a way to escape economic precarity— Christopher represents an end to her “endo trouble” (Bautista 2019, chap. 1).1 The club also represents an escape; the “weekly get-togethers” became “[a] pop of color in their monotonous lives, an escape to a world where they could be anyone they wished” (Bautista 2019, chap. 2). Liza sees herself as her family’s “ticket to a better life” (Bautista 2019, chap. 13). When Liza’s family hear she is marrying Christopher, they declare that she “did good” and Liza remarks that her father had not been “this excited in years” (Bautista 2019, chap. 12). When Liza decides not to marry Christopher (and thus not migrate to the USA), her father articulates the specific desire and duty Liza feels: What’s love got to do with it? You think—you think love sends your brothers to school? Puts food on the table? You had a chance to make something of your life, Liza! You had the ticket to get us out of here, to America, like we always dreamed, and you blew it. All because of what? Love?” He spat that last word out like a bullet straight to Liza’s chest. Blunt force, internal bleeding. “You disappoint me,” Mang Carding said, clicking his tongue before walking out. (Bautista 2019, chap. 16)

Mai and King argue that economic reasons for migration cannot be separated from emotional ones, asking “how productive and possible is it

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to separate a migrant’s desire to improve the economic well-being of her/ his family from the feelings of love, loyalty and respect this elicits, or from existing gendered understandings of responsibility, morality and care?” (Mai and King 2009, 297) In You, Me, U.S., even Jo is aware of Liza’s sense of obligation to put “family first” (Bautista 2019, chap. 17). Esme, too, feels this responsibility in The Bride Test as she imagines her family’s “disappointed” (Hoang 2019, chap. 21) response to her decision not to marry Khải for a green card. The messaging from parents in both novels is that marriage migration is a good idea. When Esme mentions Khải’s mother’s request that she attempt to marry Khải, Esme’s mother asks, “Is he older than your grandpa? Does he look like a skunk? What’s wrong with him?” (Hoang 2019, chap. 1). The assumption is that unless he is very old, or very ugly, he will be a good romantic prospect. When she sees a picture of Khải, Esme’s mother “stared at the picture for the longest time”, and then “[a] disgusted sound came from the back of her […] throat. ‘I can’t believe you need to think about this. You have nothing to lose.’” (Hoang 2019, chap. 1). The inference is that Esme has everything to gain.

Love is Essential While migration for economic benefit is acknowledged, and while Esme admits, “[s]he was in this for marriage” (Hoang 2019, chap. 15), these novels work hard to dissociate marriage from economics. Esme is not a “gold digger” and her “reasons for pursuing Khải had nothing to do with money” (Hoang 2019, chap. 15). When they first meet, Khải’s mother offers Esme $20,000 if she agrees to become pregnant by Khải. Esme refuses and is deemed to have passed “a test” (Hoang 2019, chap. 1). Indeed, Khải’s wealth is alluded to throughout the novel, but Esme never realises he is rich, even (improbably) in the epilogue, which takes place three years later. Khải implicitly acknowledges the benefits of marriage migration, stating, “He could give her every thing she wanted, a green card, real diamonds, his body, but love?” (Hoang 2019, chap. 21). When Esme decides to propose to Khải, she does so on the basis that “she wanted him” and “she loved him” (Hoang 2019, chap. 24)—and not because she wanted a green card. While, when she first arrived, she had “[l]ots of reasons” to marry him and “got close” to him “for those reasons”, as she “got to know” him, her reasons for marriage shifted from migration to romance (Hoang 2019, chap. 21). Esme tells Khải “[a] lot of times, I

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forget my reasons. Because I’m happy. With you” (Hoang 2019, chap. 21). For Esme, the fact that “she loved him” is precisely why she can’t enter a marriage of convenience. A similar situation arises for Liza. Early in the novel, she hopes a then-­ boyfriend is “the one” (Bautista 2019, chap. 1), indicating that marriage for Liza is primarily about love, not simply migration. When a man Liza is chatting to online turns out to be 80 years old (rather than 30 years) she tells Jo, “Of course I said no! He was three coughs away from death!” (Bautista 2019, chap. 2). While Liza actively seeks marriage with an American, clearly not any American will do. Furthermore, she has to be in love. As she falls in love with Jo, Liza rethinks her relationship with Christopher. Although “everything is all set”—“[t]he visa, the house, the papers”—Liza maintains, “I don’t want to marry you like this, Christopher” (Bautista 2019, chap. 16, my emphasis), by which she means, without love. Liza eventually breaks off her engagement to Christopher, remarking that if she had married him, it would have been for “obligation” (Bautista 2019, chap. 16), “Guilt,” “Comfort,” or “Convenience […] not love” (Bautista 2019, chap. 16). Both texts frame cross-border marriage as a union requiring love above all else. If love is not present, then marriage cannot take place. Esme concedes that “a one-sided love would destroy [her], not to mention set a horrid example for her daughter to follow” (Hoang 2019, chap. 21). Here, the novels follow romance logic: that love is essential for marriage. Both texts are clearly invested in marriage and long-term romantic partnership as a bond between two people who love each other, regardless of citizenship status and both protagonists choose love and turn away from a green-card marriage.

Love > Migration In fact, the novels conform so readily to the idea that marriage must be for love, and that love is the most important outcome for their protagonists, that they reframe the romantic love relationship as the primary goal. Love replaces the goal of migration for Liza and rewards Esme with settled status only after her love goal has been achieved. In both texts, the USA is associated with opportunity: “a world where they could be anyone they wished” (Bautista 2019, chap. 2). For Liza, “it’s the U.S. or nothing” and the nation is embedded as a third partner in the title—you, me, and the U.S. The given name of the Vietnamese American migrant heroine in The Bride Test—Mỹ—“was … how you said America in Vietnamese” (Hoang

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2019, chap. 2). Regardless, Liza resolves to stay in the Philippines, choosing her relationship with Jo over her “dream of someday living in the U.S.” (Bautista 2019, chap. 2). While the idea that the “west (especially the USA) is best” persists, these texts can be seen to be problematising this discourse. For instance, on the day she is scheduled to marry Khải’s brother to ensure she can stay in the USA, Esme muses, “[a]ny other girl back home would say this was a dream come true” (Hoang 2019, chap. 28). Liza uses the same phrasing for her planned marriage to Christopher: “a dream come true” (Bautista 2019, chap. 13). Marriage migration is identified as a route out of poverty in both novels (Hoang 2019, chap. 8), reminiscent of  neocolonial discourses of rescuing “women from ‘Third World’ poverty and men” (So 2006, 396). In You, Me, U.S., Liza’s friend Annie “had managed to transform her family’s shack in Laurel into a three-story house in pink and white” as a result of her marriage to “a Saudi local” (Bautista 2019, chap. 4). For Liza, “[f]or the longest time, Annie’s reality had been the stuff of Liza’s daydreams.” (Bautista 2019, chap. 1). When Annie manages to gain a job overseas, Liza bitterly remarks that, “[o]ne of them was living their dream, while the other was in retail hell” (Bautista 2019, chap. 2), although the domestic violence Annie is subjected to by her husband undercuts the fairy tale. Having grown up watching “neighbors leave for the U.S.”, “[t]he dream of someday living in the U.S. kept Liza going” (Bautista 2019, chap. 2). When Liza decides not to marry Christopher, her dreams “crumble,” but “turn to soft mud, ready to be shaped again” (Bautista 2019, chap. 16) into a desire for a relationship with Jo. Liza turns away from her dream of marriage migration to the USA and towards a recalibrated dream of a relationship with Jo. While Liza turns away from the USA by pursuing a relationship with Jo, Esme is rewarded through her developing relationship with Khải. As their growing intimacy strengthens the romantic connection between them as individuals, it simultaneously strengthens the relationship between Esme and the USA. The first meeting between hero and heroine is a key moment in a romance novel—one of the “essential elements” defined by Pamela Regis (2003). In the first chapter of the novel, when sent a photograph of Khải, Esme “didn’t want to look—she honestly didn’t care about this unknown man who lived in the paradise of California”—but […] “[w]hen she glanced at the photograph […] her body went still, just like the sky immediately before a rainstorm” (Hoang 2019, chap. 1). This typical “first meeting” reaction signals that this couple will end up happily together, more than likely resulting in Esme’s remaining in the USA.

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This signposting is further emphasised when the couple have sex. It is unusual, in romance, for either partner to have sex with anyone but each other due to the way romance novels combine sexual desire and romantic love, especially if one of the couple is a virgin (here it is Khải) (see McAlister 2020). Furthermore, it is highly unlikely, once the couple has had sex, they will not end up together at the end of the book. Given these conventions, the scene in which Khải and Esme sleep together is key. In this moment, their climax is featured in a single repeated phrase: “Her name, her name, her name, her name” (Hoang 2019, chap. 18). While the inference is that Khải is repeating Esme’s name in a moment of passion, because of the double meaning of her name, he is also saying “America, America, America, America.” The conventions of the romance novel are used to demonstrate that in having sex with Khải, Esme moves closer to her dream of remaining in the USA.  Sex and migration are linked here through romantic love, and Esme is rewarded with American citizenship because she prioritises genuine love and intimacy.

Migration Metaphors These novels further distance their romantic relationships from discourses of fake or sham marriage by using migration and movement metaphors to characterise the developing romantic relationships. In The Bride Test, Esme vows to “figure out how to close this distance” (Hoang 2019, chap. 9) between her and Khải. By the end of the novel, they embrace, “[l]ips to lips, hearts melting together, no distance between them, not even an arm’s length” (Hoang 2019, chap. 28). You, Me, U.S. uses travel and movement symbolism throughout the novel to map Jo and Liza’s relationship. Their relationship is described in navigational terms. Struggling to deny her growing feelings for Jo as they kiss for the first time, Liza “flinched and trembled, like a compass readjusting its bearings, circling back to its true north. Jo was a tangent, not the destination” (Bautista 2019, chap. 11). Tellingly, the kiss makes her lose “all sense of direction” (Bautista 2019, chap. 11), and Jo is thrown “off-orbit” when Liza chooses to remain with Christopher (Bautista 2019, chap. 13). Towards the end of the novel, after Liza has broken up with Christopher, she seeks out Jo and wonders, “[w]as this the tangent, the origin, or the destination?” (Bautista 2019, chap. 18). At the very start of the novel, Liza waits outside Jo’s house with “balikbayan boxes” (Bautista 2019, chap. 1). Derived “from the Tagalog words balik, to return, and bayan, town or nation […] these boxes are

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staples in the transnational existence of many Filipinos and have come to represent the balikbayans, or the returning persons, themselves” (Alburo 2007, 137). Liza is, from the beginning of the text, aligned with overseas Filipinos, even though she never actually migrates. This symbolism also associates her with return; she returns to Jo’s flat, to a closer friendship, and, in the end, to a romantic relationship with Jo. This moment is mirrored at the end of the novel, as Liza waits in Jo’s flat for her to return from her own domestic travels. While Jo had thought, “her life would set sail and anchor somewhere else,” she realises, back in her flat with Liza, that she is “home, at last” (Bautista 2019, chap. Epilogue). In both these novels, movement associated with migration is tied to the developing romantic relationship rather than to physical migration.

Conclusion In these romance novels, love is the necessary ingredient for marriage migration. Reflective of contemporary policy discourse, both texts adhere to the idea that marriage must be undertaken only for love reasons, although they do acknowledge the range of economic and family needs sitting alongside such decisions. Bringing migration into a love story connects economics with intimacy in ways that are not usually seen in “pure love” relationships (Attwood et  al. 2017). Attwood et  al. ask, “[w]hat happens to intimacy in a context in which neoliberalism has successfully privileged competitive, individualistic, market relations in all areas of social life? … What sorts of intimacies proliferate in these conditions: those which consolidate hetero-patriarchal power hierarchies or those which subvert them?” (250). These romance novels challenge the perception that international women are “buying into images of their own subservience and marrying out of economic desperation” rather than love (Constable 2003, 64). Both Liza and Esme choose not to accept the benefits of a marriage of convenience—“a green card, real diamonds, his body,” “[t]he visa, the house, the papers” (Hoang 2019, chap. 21; Bautista 2019, chap. 16)—instead choosing to prioritise romantic love. Esme does remain in the USA, with her family joining her, and she completes a long-­ desired university degree, but she and Khải remain unmarried at the end of the text. Liza stays in Manila with no significant change to her financial circumstances. Migration via marriage is clearly shown as a possible route out of precarity and poverty for both Liza and Esme, but it is not a route that either character chooses. Yet, the insistence that marriage migration

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must be directed by romantic love represents a mainstream yet conservative view of marriage migration, which frames a notion of authentic romantic love in accordance with western cultural convention.

Note 1. Derived from ‘end-of-contract’, endo “is a form of contractualization [in the Philippines] which involves companies giving workers temporary employment that lasts them less than six months and then terminating their employment just short of being regularized in order to skirt on the fees which come with regularization” (‘Endo Contractualization’ 2022).

References Abrego, Leisy J. 2019. Relational Legal Consciousness of U.S.  Citizenship: Privilege, Responsibility, Guilt, and Love in Latino Mixed-Status Families. Law & Society Review 53 (3): 641–670. Alburo, Jade. 2007. Boxed In or Out?: Balikbayan Boxes as Metaphors for Filipino American (Dis)Location. Ethnologies 27 (2): 137–157. Andrikopoulos, Apostolos. 2021. Love, Money and Papers in the Affective Circuits of Cross-Border Marriages: Beyond the “Sham”/“Genuine” Dichotomy. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 47 (2): 343–360. Attwood, Feona, Jamie Hakim, and Alison Winch. 2017. Mediated Intimacies: Bodies, Technologies and Relationships. Journal of Gender Studies 26 (3): 249–253. Bautista, Brigitte. 2019. You, Me, U.S. Amazon. E-book. ———. 2021. Intimate Citizenship: Introduction to the Special Issue on Citizenship, Membership and Belonging in Mixed-Status Families. Identities 28 (1): 1–17. Constable, Nicole. 2003. Romance on a Global Stage: Pen Pals, Virtual Ethnography, and ‘Mail-Order’ Marriages. Berkeley: University of California Press. Endo Contractualization. 2022. In Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/ index.php?title=Endo_contractualization&oldid=1108921159. Accessed 12 September 2022. Giddens, Anthony. 1992. The Transformation of Intimacy: Sexuality, Love, and Eroticism in Modern Societies. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Hoang, Helen. 2019. The Bride Test. London: Corvus. E-book. Kamblé, Jayashree, Eric Murphy Selinger and Hsu-Ming Teo. 2021. Introduction. In  The Routledge Research Companion to Popular Romance Fiction. Ed. by Kamblé, Selinger and Teo. London: Routledge, pp. 1–23. 

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Mai, Nicola, and Russell King. 2009. Love, Sexuality and Migration: Mapping the Issue(s). Mobilities 4 (3): 295–307. McAlister, Jodi. 2020. The Consummate Virgin: Female Virginity Loss and Love in Anglophone Popular Literatures. Palgrave Macmillan. Odasso, Laura. 2021. Family Rights-Claiming as Act of Citizenship: An Intersectional Perspective on the Performance of Intimate Citizenship. Identities 28 (1): 74–92. Oswin, Natalie, and Eric Olund. 2010. Governing Intimacy. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 28 (1): 60–67. Plummer, Kenneth. 2003. Intimate Citizenship: Private Decisions and Public Dialogues. Seattle: University of Washington Press. Regis, Pamela. 2003. A Natural History of the Romance Novel. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Scheel, Stephan. 2017. Appropriating Mobility and Bordering Europe through Romantic Love: Unearthing the Intricate Intertwinement of Border Regimes and Migratory Practices. Migration Studies 5 (3): 389–408. So, Christine. 2006. Asian Mail-Order Brides, the Threat of Global Capitalism, and the Rescue of the U.S. Nation-State. Feminist Studies 32 (2): 395–419. Turner, Joe, and Marcia Vera Espinoza. 2021. The Affective and Intimate Life of the Family Migration Visa: Knowing, Feeling and Encountering the Heteronormative State. Geopolitics 26 (2): 357–377.

CHAPTER 5

The Heart of the Matter: Love and Care in Health Humanities Bríd Phillips, Michael Stevens, and Claire Hansen

Abstract  This chapter, “The Heart of the Matter: Love and Care in Health Humanities,” investigates how the multiple meanings of the heart and of love can be brought to bear on a multidisciplinary investigation of love-as-care in literary studies (through the works of William Shakespeare) and in biomedical engineering (through the innovation of artificial hearts). In both cases, the heart is witnessed as both a physical body part and a site of love-as-care. In this chapter, Phillips, Stevens, and Hansen establish a basis for this approach, centring on a health humanities-informed concept of therapeutic love. Then, they apply this concept at a literary and a clinical

B. Phillips (*) The University of Western Australia, Perth, WA, Australia e-mail: [email protected] M. Stevens UNSW, Sydney, NSW, Australia e-mail: [email protected] C. Hansen Australian National University, Canberra, ACT, Australia e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. Grobbelaar et al. (eds.), Contemporary Love Studies in the Arts and Humanities, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-26055-1_5

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level, considering manifestations of therapeutic love in Shakespeare’s King Lear, before examining the role of love-as-care in the post-implantation management of patients with artificial hearts. Keywords  Health humanities • King Lear • William Shakespeare • Heart failure • Artificial hearts

The Heart as the Seat of Love The heart is physiological and figurative, a vital organ and a cross-cultural symbol. It is an organ whose functionality can be replaced by artificial devices—thanks to contemporary innovations in medicine and biomedical engineering—as well as a critical component of our sense of self and identity. It always carries the weight of multiple meanings, as both “the hollow muscular organ which performs the function of a pump in the circulatory system” and “the seat of love, attachment, or affection” (“heart, n., int., and adv.,” OED Online). As such, the heart “holds a special place in people’s imagination but also in science” (Biglino et  al. 2019, 76). As Fay Bound Alberti writes, “we ‘feel’ in the heart” because “emotions, the heart and the ‘self’ (however defined) have been linked in medical and popular consciousness for many centuries” (2010, 2). Although we “feel” in the heart, “those feelings originate in thought and cognition” (Bound Alberti 2010, 3). Why then is the heart such an enduring symbol of love? The association between the heart and romantic love has been well-­ established for centuries. The heart as the seat of affection and emotion stems from the Galenic medical tradition, transmitted into Western theory and classical ideas of the body and mind (Bound Alberti 2010, 3). Bound Alberti explains that “beliefs about the active status of the heart in producing emotions were linked to the physical, lived experience of emotions themselves: passions were felt in the breast” (2010, 4). These passions could physically affect the body, which is the integral link between the heart and love. While emotions were linked with the soul, there was also a need to pinpoint the physical location from which they emanated. Elizabeth Harvey notes, “the upper or spirited part of this soul (thymos) was associated with passion, courage and love and was housed high in the thoracic cavity. Its affiliation with breath, blood and the heart made it a natural physiological locus for medical figurations of the passions” (2020,

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39). The association of the emotion with the soul illustrates how love was linked with the chest and more specifically with the heart. Love and the heart are thus united through centuries-long associations of the heart as the seat of emotion and of the heart as integrally connected to the expression of love. Additionally, the connection between the heart and the emotion of love shares a similar complexity in how we define these concepts. The heart is, as Giovanni Biglino et al. observe, “multifaceted” (2019, 73). The meaning of the heart manifests differently across disciplines, its significance entirely distinct in its usage in literary studies in comparison to biomedical engineering. Like the heart, love itself is multifaceted. Writing on critical love studies, Amy Burge and Michael Gratzke point to the “irreducible multiplicity” of love as an indicator of the “richness” of this concept (2017, 1). While we may typically associate the heart with the emotion of romantic love, it is not limited to displays of intimate love but should be conceptualised among other “phenomenological descriptors” such as parental love, sibling love, or abstract loves for “community” or “country” (Burge and Gratzke 2017, 1). The heart is thus not only both an organ and a symbol of love, but love itself is multiple, extending beyond romantic love to encompass various forms of love-as-care. This chapter will investigate how the multiple meanings of the heart and of love can be brought to bear on a multidisciplinary investigation of love-as-care in literary studies (through the works of William Shakespeare) and in biomedical engineering (through the innovation of artificial hearts). In both cases, the heart is witnessed as both a physical body part and a site of love-as-care. In this chapter, we establish a basis for this approach, centring on a health humanities-informed concept of “therapeutic love”. Then, we apply this concept at a literary and a clinical level, considering manifestations of therapeutic love in Shakespeare’s King Lear, before examining the role of love-as-care in the post-implantation management of patients with artificial hearts.

Therapeutic Love-as-care: The Heart in Health Humanities In considering the heart as an organ and a symbol with multifaceted meanings across disciplines, this chapter adopts a health humanities approach to representations of the heart and love. Health humanities advance the role of humanities and arts in the pursuit of human health and well-being. It is

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“the fusion of a number of humane ways of seeing healthcare, derived from the humanities and arts” (Crawford et al. 2015, 18).1 Health humanities takes a wide scope, from the use of arts for mental health and the incorporation of poetry, art, and photography to support stroke recovery (Brand et  al. 2020) to creative therapies for health issues ranging from cancer to dementia (Crawford et al. 2015, 11). It is open to “all movements valuing the contribution of the arts and humanities to advancing health care, health, and well-being” (Crawford 2020, 3). There is extensive medical and health humanities scholarship on the heart, from historical overviews of its meaning (Goodhart 2014; Bound Alberti 2010) to specific investigations of its representation in literary texts and periods (Barclay and Reddan 2019; Blair 2006) to the response of the heartbeat to narrative (Pérez et al. 2021). Within narrative medicine—a field focused on patient and clinician storytelling (Zaharias 2018)—there is also evidence of a focus on the heart through the development of “narrative cardiology” (Biglino et al. 2019, 75). In approaching heart health through the lens of health humanities, we must account not only for the heart-as-pump, but also for the heart’s other meaning—the heart-as-emotion (Bound Alberti 2010, 3). In our work, we are guided by the following questions: What role does the therapeutic heart play in heart health? How might the heart as a love symbol be reimagined or reinterpreted within a healthcare setting where the heart-as-pump is central? What role might love-as-care play in heart health?

Love and Care in Shakespeare In Shakespearean drama, there are many instances of the heart actively engaged in the emotion of love. Romeo asks, “Did my heart love till now?” (Shakespeare 2016, 1.5.49). We can trace an explicit sense of love-­ as-­care in Shakespeare’s works as well. In King Henry V, Henry recognises the burden of love when the care that it motivates becomes too great: “Alas, your too much love and care of me / Are heavy orisons ‘gainst this poor wretch” (2.2.51–53). In Titus Andronicus, Marcus declares to Titus, “And, for our father’s sake and mother’s care, / Now let me show a brother’s love to thee” (3.1.181–182). Love indicates a complex network of meanings including those linked to duty and care. Indeed, David Schalkwyk notes that in Shakespeare “love is not so much an emotion as a set of attitudes and dispositions involving behaviour over time” (2020, 289).

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In King Lear, love-as-care is tragically demonstrated and misunderstood. Lear demands to hear words of love from his daughters but is unprepared for the way in which this love is presented. Tell me, my daughters Since now we will divest us, both of rule, Interest of territory, cares of state Which of you shall we say doth love us most? (1.1.46–49)

He is asking for love to be expressed in words. However, words will not afford him a reliable or measurable consideration of the love his daughters have for him. What Lear fails to understand is that love is best suited to attitudes and behaviours. It is demonstrated through the care that is transacted between him and his daughters. Goneril, his eldest daughter, replies first in a famously slippery answer: “Sir, I love you more than words can wield the matter” (1.1.53). She knows and says that words cannot do justice to love, but she then uses words to blind Lear into belief in her emotional declarations. During this exchange, Cordelia, the youngest daughter, whispers, “What shall Cordelia speak? Love, and be silent” (1.1.60). She thinks, erroneously, that her acts of love, her unfaltering duty, and her care for her father will be enough to demonstrate the depths of her feelings towards Lear. Regan, Lear’s second daughter, alludes to the fact that love is an action, saying “in my true heart / I find she names my very deed of love” (1.1.69–70). The elder daughters are aware of the transactional nature of love and the mutual care that is involved but knowingly use words to fool Lear about their own motivations. Cordelia, however, is convinced the true nature of her love for her father will prevail, and says in an aside to herself: Then poor Cordelia! And yet not so; since I am sure my love’s More ponderous than my tongue. (1.1.85–87)

What follows is Lear’s tragic misunderstanding of the nature and function of love. In her response to Lear’s request for more words to express her love for him, Cordelia says,

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Unhappy that I am, I cannot heave My heart into my mouth. I love your majesty According to my bond; no more nor less. (1.1.100–102)

Her heart, the seat of her love for her father, cannot move her mouth to shallow words. Lear does not appreciate the depth and honesty of a daughter who loves a father as deeply as her duty requires it. Her love is linked to duty, but this type of love does not lessen its intrinsic worth. Cordelia understands the complexities linking love, care, and duty. They cannot be exclusive and work as a paradigm within the expectations of multiple relationships. While romantic love is a common theme in Shakespeare, the link to love in the therapeutic relationship is often unacknowledged, despite its presence as a form of love in compassion and care. More recently, in the Handbook of Emotions, love is interpreted as an investment in the well-­ being of others which suggests that love conveys a caring orientation towards others (Fredrickson 2016, 850). However, Stephen Wright and Jean Sayre-Adams note, “[l]ove … is not universally accepted in the nursing repertoire” (2006, 22). They cite a 1995 study which indicated that nurses were “uncomfortable with ‘love’ to describe their practice, perhaps because of confusion about what kind of love is being described” (2006, 22). Despite this discomfort, Patrícia Silva Pereira and Maria Antónia Rebelo Botelho hypothesise that “[l]ove in nursing care is a driving force that compels us to do the best for the other, promoting the other’s highest value. The word “love” is polysemous, and its meanings may lead to different interpretations. Although love is ontological, there is some caution or even avoidance of its use in the professional setting” (2020, 110). This thinking opens the door to considerations of love as integral to the therapeutic relationship. Considering love-as-care in the therapeutic relationship suggests that love is also associated with action. The act of love-as-care is predicated on measures that are carried out in the execution of that care. According to Denise Tanner, the affective component of compassionate care is love, and the second component, the behavioural component, is the urge to act in response to the suffering of others (2021, 1689–1690). Furthermore, in research conducted with palliative patients, compassion was characterised as “motivated by unconditional love; altruistic; action-oriented, aimed at relieving suffering; and commonly including small acts of kindness that went ‘above and beyond’ what could be expected” (Sinclair et al in Tanner

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2021, 1693). We suggest love-as-care be considered much like empathy, not as a skill to be taught but re-envisioned as “an attribute, a way of being with patients” (Laughey et al. 2021, 401).

Love and Care in Contemporary Heart Health One major area in health care involving complex caring roles is the management of heart failure, one of the biggest killers in the developed world. While heart transplants remain the gold standard treatment, demand greatly outweighs supply. To keep patients alive while they await a transplant, clinicians turn to a type of artificial heart called a left ventricular assist device (LVAD). These devices are small implantable pumps designed to pump blood alongside the native heart, restoring function to the patient. The introduction of an LVAD into a patient improves their condition. However, once discharged, a significant burden of care is placed on the patient and their immediate family. Caregivers are “expected to respond to device emergencies 24 hours a day” (Kato et al. 2014). Once home, both patient and caregivers are must be able to: • Change dressings to prevent fatal infection; • Understand and maintain the LVAD and its external peripherals (batteries and controller); • Understand and respond to various alarms and warnings emitted by the controller, including emergency response, and • Prevent damage to the equipment through excessive movement or exposure to water. Research has focused recently on two main areas relating to care and LVADs: caregivers and self-care. Both recipients and caregivers can embrace a model of therapeutic love to manage their unique experiences of the artificial heart device. Caregivers and Therapeutic Love-as-care The practice of care for LVAD patients and their caregivers is complex and challenging. For the patient, “it can be difficult to share experiences and feelings around surgery and recovery and be fully understood, as there are few that can truly relate to their perspective” (Biglino et  al. 2019, 76).

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There are calls for scholarship to further consider patient experiences of congenital heart disease (McConville 2021, 594). Similarly, there are few people who could relate to the experience of a caregiver with responsibilities for an LVAD patient. These caregivers are often suddenly thrust into a stressful situation, having to simultaneously care for a loved one and to perform maintenance tasks on an unfamiliar and complex piece of medical technology (Marcuccilli et al. 2014). To understand these complex challenges, several investigations  have been conducted into the experience of caregivers of LVAD recipients. In 2010, Annemarie Kaan et al. identified four themes present amongst caregivers: fear and anxiety; loss; burden; and coping factors (2010). They identified the burden of care as a shock to the caregivers, who described it as a full-time job. For example, simple tasks such as showering became a two-hour ordeal for both patient and caregiver due to the need to keep the electronics completely dry. This duty of care put strain on relationships, and caregivers relied upon support from their own circle, extending the act of care in a ripple-effect well beyond the patient themselves. It was observed that “spouses described a greater feeling of burden in terms of caregiving than did parents” (Kaan et al. 2010, 146). This research exemplifies how the manifestation of love develops from an intimate, romantic love to a therapeutic love-as-care centred around the health of the heart.  More recently, Julie Bidwell and colleagues found that the quality of life of caregivers was shown to worsen significantly between pre- and post-­ implantation (Bidwell et  al. 2017). The development of a therapeutic love-as-care relationship due to the burden of LVAD caring responsibilities should be considered as a potential factor in changes to quality of life. Conversely, in their interviews with six caregivers, Linda Marcuccilli et al. highlighted that while the caregiving was a challenge, participants did not view it as a burden and had accepted it as part of their life (2014). This may be because this cohort was older and retired, and the LVAD was used for permanent therapy rather than as a bridge to a heart transplant. In many cases, carers reported putting aside their own feelings of overwhelm, as they felt compelled to help their loved ones. What is clear is that caregivers find themselves adapting a model of therapeutic love through caring for both their loved one and for an unfamiliar medical technological device. Most clinics do provide post-­ implantation care instructions; however, these instructions do not take into consideration how individuals react to and process the complex information that is required in their new role as caregiver. As health humanities

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scholarship notes, “Human beings seldom function in a way which is directly like computers as they process information or data” (Crawford et al. 2015, 5). Health humanities could provide a framework for LVAD patients and carers to discuss their unique experiences amongst other caregivers and health professionals, thus informing hospital training methods for caregivers. Therapeutic Love as Self-care While some LVAD care and maintenance tasks can be completed by both caregiver and recipient (battery changing, dressing, changing), patients also have a duty to incorporate additional behaviours into their self-care routine. These duties include self-monitoring for signs of dehydration and infection, adapting exercise, ensuring appropriate sleep (which may be difficult due to the cumbersome nature of the power cable, batteries, and controller) and taking medication (Kato et al. 2014). There are no global standards for teaching these behaviours to patients (and their caregivers) before they are discharged. However, studies have shown that applying structured pedagogical education ensured greater retention of knowledge of self-care skills (Barsuk et  al. 2019). A health humanities framework could be used to support self-care for LVAD patients and their carers through a focus on the concept of therapeutic love. As Crawford et al. observe, “[t]he human context of suffering and healing is uniquely susceptible to illumination by literature and the arts, irrespective of the particular health specialisms involved” (2015, 7). The “incorporation of multiple stories” around the heart (Crawford et  al. 2015, 7), as well as the patients’ experiences and healthcare information, might serve to enhance both self-care and caregiver experience, given that “healthcare is a joint construction” (Crawford et al. 2015, 7) and that care of the heart is co-constructed.

Conclusion Despite canvassing a time span of four hundred years and perhaps a bigger conceptual gap of literary and biomedical knowledge, the challenges of recognising and enacting therapeutic love remain and can have practical ramifications for our health and well-being. The examples from Shakespeare’s King Lear and from scholarship around self-care and caregivers of LVAD patients illustrates that love-as-care manifests in complex

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and challenging ways. It is not always apparent what love-as-care looks like, and from Shakespeare’s Cordelia to twenty-first-century caregivers, demonstrating love through care can be challenging to the caregiver and the patient. We have identified some gaps in the education and support of LVAD patients and their families. Our health humanities approach suggests that LVAD patients and carers would benefit from a multifaceted understanding of the heart, which understands heart health as encompassing the heart’s multiple meanings as physical organ and as emotional centre. LVAD patients and their caregivers could, in this model, take a holistic approach to self-care and caregiving that accounts for the physicality of heart health and the technical requirements of the LVAD, while also explicitly factoring in the emotional needs and complexities of the heart as  a site of love and care. Heart health in this perspective incorporates therapeutic love-as-care for the patient, caregiver, and the device. This idea aligns with Biglino et al., who write, “[f]rom the perspective of the healthcare professional, whilst medical knowledge enables cardiologists to understand patients’ signs and symptoms, it is their narrative, feelings and emotions, their metaphors and symbols that can also be revealing about each individual person, supporting any final diagnosis” (2019, 76). This health humanities approach offers a form of therapeutic love-as-care that enters into discourses of the heart and LVAD health and maintenance, enabling access to multiple manifestations of the heart as not only the damaged organ but also as a site of love and care.

Note 1. There are diverse views on health humanities in relation to medical humanities and narrative medicine. For more on the debates surrounding terminology, see Crawford et al. (2015), Crawford (2020), and Atkinson et al. (2015).

References Atkinson, Sarah, B.  Evans, A.  Woods, and R.  Kearns. 2015. The ‘Medical’ and ‘Health’ in a Critical Medical Humanities. Journal of Medical Humanities 36 (1): 71–81. Barclay, Katie, and Bronwyn Kate Reddan. 2019. The Feeling Heart in Medieval and Early Modern Europe: Meaning, Embodiment, and Making. De Gruyter.

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Barsuk, Jeffrey H., et  al. 2019. Simulation-based Mastery Learning Improves Patient and Caregiver Ventricular Assist Device Self-care Skills: A Randomized Pilot Trial. Circulation: Cardiovascular Quality and Outcomes 12 (10): 1–11. Bidwell, Julie T., et al. 2017. Quality of Life, Depression, and Anxiety in Ventricular Assist Device Therapy: Longitudinal Outcomes for Patients and Family Caregivers. Journal of Cardiovascular Nursing 32 (5): 455–463. Biglino, Giovanni, et  al. 2019. Towards a Narrative Cardiology: Exploring, Holding and Re-presenting Narratives of Heart Disease. Cardiovascular Diagnosis and Therapy 9 (1): 73–77. Blair, Kirstie. 2006. Victorian Poetry and the Culture of the Heart. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Bound Alberti, Fay. 2010. Matters of the Heart: History, Medicine, and Emotion. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Brand, Gabrielle, et al. 2020. Using MRI Art, Poetry, Photography and Patient Narratives to Bridge Clinical and Human Experiences of Stroke Recovery. Medical Humanities 46: 243–249. Burge, Amy, and Michael Gratzke. 2017. Special Issue: Critical Love Studies (Editors’ Introduction). Journal of Popular Romance Studies 6: 1–8. Crawford, Paul. 2020. Global Health Humanities and the Rise of Creative Publish Health. In The Routledge Companion to Health Humanities, ed. Paul Crawford, Brian Brown, and Andrea Charise, 1–7. London and New York: Routledge. Crawford, Paul, et  al., eds. 2015. Health Humanities. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Crawford, Paul, Brian Brown, and Andrea Charise, eds. 2020. The Routledge Companion to Health Humanities. London and New York: Routledge. Fredrickson, Barbara L. 2016. Love. In Handbook of Emotions, ed. Lisa Feldman, Michael Lewis, and Jeanette M. Haviland-Jones, 847–858. New York: Guilford Publications. Goodhart, Anna. 2014. The Relationship between Heart and ‘Inner Self’ from Aristotle to Current Clinical Practice. Medical Humanities 40: 61–66. Harvey, Elizabeth D. 2020. Medicine: King Lear, Macbeth, The Tempest. In Shakespeare and Emotion, ed. Katherine Craik, 34–48. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. “heart, n., int., and adv.” OED Online. September 2022. Oxford University Press. https://www.oed.com/view/Entry/85068?rskey=dCSCLe&result=1&isAdv anced=false. Accessed 13 October 2022. Kaan, Annemarie, et  al. 2010. Emotional Experiences of Caregivers of Patients with a Ventricular Assist Device. Progress in Transplantation 20 (2): 142–147. Kato, Naoko, Tiny Jaarsma, and Tuvia Ben Gal. 2014. Learning Self-care after Left Ventricular Assist Device Implantation. Current Heart Failure Reports 11 (3): 290–298.

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Laughey, William F., Megan E.L. Brown, Angelique N. Dueñas, Rebecca Archer, Megan R.  Whitwell, Ariel Liu, and Gabrielle M.  Finn. 2021. How Medical School Alters Empathy: Student Love and Break up Letters to Empathy for Patients. Medical Education 55 (3): 394–403. Marcuccilli, Linda, et al. 2014. Family Caregivers’ Inside Perspectives: Caring for an Adult with a Left Ventricular Assist Device as a Destination Therapy. Progress in Transplantation 24 (4): 332–340. McConville, Pat. 2021. Toward a Phenomenology of Congenital Illness: A Case of Single-ventricle Heart Disease. Medicine, Health Care and Philosophy 24: 587–595. Pérez, Pauline, et al. 2021. Conscious Processing of Narrative Stimuli Synchronizes Heart Rate between Individuals. Cell Reports (Cambridge) 36 (11): 109692. Schalkwyk, David. 2020. Love: Sonnets, A Midsummer Night’s Dream. In Shakespeare and Emotion, ed. Katherine Craik, 288–301. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Shakespeare, William. 2016. The Norton Shakespeare. Edited by Stephen Greenblatt, Walter Cohen, Jean E.  Howard, Katharine Eisaman Maus, and Gordon McMullan. 3rd ed., International student ed. New York: W.W. Norton & Company. Silva-Pereira, Patrícia, and Maria Antónia Rebelo Botelho. 2020. Love at the Core—The Phenomena of Love in the Therapeutic Relationship in Nursing. Pensar Enfermagem 24 (2): 87–113. Tanner, Denise. 2021. ‘The Love That Dare Not Speak Its Name’: The Role of Compassion in Social Work Practice. The British Journal of Social Work 50 (6): 1688–1705. Wright, Stephen, and Jean Sayre-Adams. 2006. Love Me Tender. Nursing Standard 21 (2): 20–22. Zaharias, George. 2018. What is Narrative-based Medicine? Narrative-based Medicine 1. Canadian Family Physician Medecin de famille canadien 64 (3): 176–180.

CHAPTER 6

Queering Love: Love in Literary and Media Studies Debra Dudek, Julia Wexler, and Tanya Visosevic

Abstract  Given that the question of how love signifies in narrative is ever-­ evolving, in “Queering Love: Love in Literary and Media Studies,” Dudek, Wexler, and Visosevic explore some non-conventional ways love is plotted in contemporary narratives including novels, films, and serial television for teens. The authors outline how love occupies a unique position in narrative progression in its ability to initiate plot; sustain narrative; and end stories. Readers are drawn to love plots in part because, while lived experience might warn us that love is scarce and possibly insufficient, each retelling sparks hope that we just haven’t got it right … yet. Narratives’ impulses to keep retelling plots animated by concerns of love is an ongoing project to diversify its forms and expand its boundaries. In this chapter, the authors focus on how love works within narrative progression and audience obsession to queer its own story, especially in its powers of resolution and closure. Keywords  Queer Love • Jane Austen • Thanatos • William Shakespeare • Romance • Adaptation D. Dudek (*) • J. Wexler • T. Visosevic Edith Cowan University, Joondalup, WA, Australia e-mail: [email protected]; [email protected]; [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. Grobbelaar et al. (eds.), Contemporary Love Studies in the Arts and Humanities, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-26055-1_6

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Love’s Story/ies Shakespeare’s (1600) Helena claims, “Love looks not with the eyes, but with the mind”; and Virginia Woolf’s ([1925] 1979) Sally Seton asks, “What does the brain matter […] compared with the heart?” (185). For the three centuries in between and beyond, storytellers in English across all narrative forms have been examining the power of eros to create meaning in human lives: how to find it, keep it, get out of it, recover from its loss, what exactly it is and how it should feel, where and when it should matter, and how much to admit it. Although, as Boone (1987) and DuPlessis (1985) show, there has been a counter-tradition embedded within the mainstream that interrogates conventional romance’s ideological promises with tragic outcomes for love’s failings, the suggested outline of the formula for “happily ever after” can be seen all the more clearly in relief when it is denied. Perhaps now more than ever, we see Darcy’s second proposal to Elizabeth and our hearts soar (Austen [1813] 1993), we smile along with Jane Eyre (Brontë [1847] 2006) as she begins her story’s conclusion with, “Reader, I married him,” and we learn not only how their stories ended, but also that love is the appropriate end goal, in some form or another, of all narrative. Given that the question of how love signifies in narrative is ever-­ evolving, in this chapter we explore some non-conventional ways love is plotted in contemporary narratives including novels, films, and serial television for teens. Academics often study these forms of media to analyse their proprietary formal techniques, but here we want to focus on affinities of how love works within narrative progression and audience obsession to queer its own story, especially in its powers of resolution and closure. Demory (2019) suggests an understanding of retelling through adaptation as inherently containing an element of queering, to render “strange or odd, but also to turn or transform” (1). In this way, the narratives’ impulses to keep retelling plots animated by concerns of love is an ongoing project to diversify its forms and expand its boundaries.

Upcycling Love: Novel Transformations As one example of such a transformation, consider how Jo Baker’s Longbourn (2013) upcycles the love plot of Pride and Prejudice (Austen  [1813] 1993) into one with a broader social conscience about class, race, and sexuality. Baker queers Austen’s classic by refocusing reader

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interest on its servants as main characters—including the homosexual husband of Mrs Hill—and ironically supplanting the Darcy and Wickham love interests with the illegitimate sons of the Bennet and Bingley households. Longbourn expands the narrative scope of the original with a longer timeframe that might be expected to entice Janeites with its description of the Darcys in marital afterglow. However, although Elizabeth’s character traits are consistent with Austen’s version of her, we glimpse the stressors of marrying well above one’s rank. Towards the novel’s end, she is pictured indoors, pregnant, and deeply uneasy about the loss of her favourite maid, acting as a foil to Baker’s protagonist Sarah, who, in a satisfying feminist reversal, quits her comfortable but dull position at Pemberley to go off adventuring in pursuit of her lost lover. Baker’s novel ends on a happy note, but Sarah’s pleasure, while tempered through grittier lessons than just overcoming her pride, seems more expansive than Elizabeth’s. Longbourn’s closure features Sarah, reunited with her true love, at peace with the discomforts of the road because of their freedom to roam and work at will. Although the final scene depicts them walking with their baby, the narrative passes quickly over this heteronormative signal of love, as though incidental, to focus on a younger housemaid’s delight at seeing them approach. They are on the cusp of a probably fleeting but deeply joyful reunion with Mrs. Hill and Polly, a form of kinship that can only exist outside of the stultifying concerns of the landed gentry. The narrator reminds us that happiness in love comes in many forms and it should be understood not as quiescent but as progressive: “It was not the end, of course; it was an end” (Baker 2013, 439). As a function in storytelling dynamics that both moves a plot along and maintains a reader’s interest (Brooks 1984; Phelan 2002), love occupies a rather unique position in narrative progression as being able to initiate plot (a lonely character seeks a mate, a broken relationship seeks healing); sustain narrative (audience interest is aroused and momentum grows through plot complications, we desire to know not only what happens but how); and end stories (when love delivers successfully, characters live happily ever after, and when love falters, they suffer). Readers are drawn to love plots in part because, while lived experience might warn us that love is scarce and possibly insufficient, each retelling sparks hope that we just haven’t got it right … yet. Perhaps a profoundly unique form of authentic eros is possibly—mysteriously—just around the corner. If we think in terms of love as a “plot event,” we might picture many scenes: a realisation of attraction, an expression of desire, a kiss, a sexual

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act, an exchange of “I love you,” a commitment, a reunion. However, literary critics often analyse traditional marriage plot closure as the resolving gesture par excellence because of how it matures an individual into adulthood by securing the couple into the social order with its promise that love enables happiness. One of the reasons this type of closure feels so satisfying to audiences is because it suggests continuity just as the narrative stops, creating a sense of aesthetic balance between the death of the story (Kermode 2000) and the conflated gesture of love/sex/progeny. Due to this overdetermination, love’s power as closure to restore disrupted equilibrium in a plot—even as it consoles readers that the story must come to an end—is unparalleled. Queer theorists have highlighted the deeply heteronormative shape of this coupled love: everlasting, monogamous, and procreative (i.e., most functional between a cis-gendered man and woman). Thus, the happily-­ ever-­after form of closure implies that romance in its deepest structure is a family-making enterprise, enacting successful resolution in how the individual joins a couple, which grows into a nuclear family, connecting to two extended families, and so on. Seen in this way, whatever individual members might do, the ever-growing family itself, by definition, can never end. As Judith Roof (1996) argues, in a kind of self-containing loop, the productive logic of romance suggests a reproduction of cultural order, while that order carries on creating more stories that re-inscribe The Story. She suggests one circumvention through structurally unfixed narrative dynamics that value eroticism produced by “a concatenation of edges, gaps, loss, and desire” (xxvi)—focused, in other words, on moments of bodily pleasures in lieu of endings shaped by love of continuation. We might also apply Halberstam’s (2005) theory of queer temporality as another antidote to the reproductive imperative to ask what forms love might take outside scripts that value family, longevity, and safety.

Amour fou: The Drive of Love Till Death in Film Gregg Araki’s film The Living End (1992) may be considered one such antidote. The film ushered in the New Queer Cinema movement of the 1990s that unapologetically presented positive portrayals of LGBTQ people. The Living End opens with Luke, an aimless, angry HIV-positive hustler, spray painting “Fuck the World” on a wall. After shooting dead three would-be gay bashers, Luke jumps into Jon’s car. Jon, a film critic who is wrestling with his AIDS diagnosis, takes Luke back to his apartment. The

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romantic coupling takes the doomed couple on a journey fuelled by a death drive that plunges all parts of the film into a death-impulse. Laura Mulvey (2006), through the work of Peter Brooks, allocates the death drive itself as narrative movement: “Death as a trope that embodies the narrative’s stillness, its return to an inanimate form, extends to the cinema, as though the still frame’s association with death fuses into the death of the story, as though the beautiful automaton was to wind down into its inanimate, uncanny, form. In this sense, endings present a different kind of aesthetic exchange between narrative and cinema” (70). Mad love, or amour fou, uncontrollable passion or infatuation, has long, and often subversively, been used in narrative and film to queer romance. In the case of The Living End, this amour fou is an exhilarating drive to death. Cinephilia is, also, an amour fou of sorts. The love of cinema, of film, is a queer transformational force. Cinephilia, according to Thomas Elsaesser, is “the love that never dies” because it connects the present with the past (2005, 41). The Living End adapts a compulsion to repeat through the intertextual reference of genre, film movements, directors, and icons of popular culture such as James Dean. The film itself participates in acts of queering, via its gay soft porn aesthetics, paying homage to the work of past camp directors and B-grade exploitation biker films. In The Living End, Luke is reminiscent of the alienated, yet charismatic, James Dean, who signifies the vulnerable, sensitive, self-destructive loner he played in Rebel Without a Cause. Dean symbolises recklessness and his appeal seems to come from him living life to the fullest. The Living End acquires a political appropriation of time via the character of Luke adapting a version of James Dean. The return to the 1950s is, perhaps, a compulsion to repeat without replication of the force of repression: a (doomed) romantic trope. David Bordwell (1985) states that heterosexual romantic love drives at least one line of action in most Classical Hollywood films (16). Director Nicholas Ray nevertheless incorporated a queer love story into Rebel without a Cause made in the homophobic 1950s. In 1955, the plot event of the scripted kiss between Jim (James Dean) and Plato (Sal Mineo) was suppressed and censored. Few straight lovers of the romance genre paid attention, distracted by the teen character Judy (Natalie Wood) and her confessions of love to Jim: “I love somebody. All the time I’ve been, I’ve been looking for someone to love me. And now I love somebody.”

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Meanwhile, generations of queer kids saw hope in Plato’s and Jim’s compassionate portrayal of same-sex teenage love on screen. The cinematic kiss—the plot event—is a persistent symbol of love in film (Feury 2000, 96), sealed with cultural and ideological investments (Feury 2000, 98–100). However, there is also an indeterminate and sinister aspect to the screen kiss (Feury 2000, 96–97). Feury notes how the kiss is “a volatile signifier” in the genre of film noir: “This is the kiss as it defers meanings, constantly leading to points as yet unseen or negotiated.” The kiss also connotes change (Feury 2000, 100–101). In The Living End, when Jon and Luke first kiss, the kiss becomes a symbol of doomed love, a love destined for death, and a love that is consummated through death. The kiss becomes the link between eros and thanatos: love and death. In Rebel Without a Cause, the kiss died before it even made it to the screen. Luke and Jon’s romance is a jouissance-fuelled ecstasy of doomed love, where they are reborn through death. The final shot of the couple on the beach is an extreme wide shot. Luke and Jon appear infinitesimal. The road movie’s symbolic status of the automobile, and the road it travels, allows for a visualisation of the protagonists’ death drive, a journey towards their end, which in The Living End leads to renewal in life by way of amour fou. Their insane love and desire may appear self-destructive and illogical, but it leads Jon and Luke to states that they may have not had otherwise, that “love makes us feel more alive” (hooks 2000, 191). From the 1950s Rebel Without a Cause to the 1990s The Living End, death drives the narrative of these two Romeo and Juliet-adapted tales.

Romance Rebooted: Teen Love on TV Perhaps no other love story merges love and death more explicitly than Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. Commonly accepted as one of the most famous love stories of all time, it is a tragic tale of passionate teen love thwarted by the lovers’ feuding families. Since its first performance in 1597, the play has inspired innumerable ballets, musicals, operas, songs, films, novels, and poems. One might go so far as to say it is the touchstone for every romance that tells the story of two lovers drawn to each other despite a world that says they should not be together. A vampire falls in love with a human. A human falls in love with a zombie. A girl from the valley falls in love with a guy from Hollywood. A Jet falls in love with a Shark. Despite the heteronormativity of Shakespeare’s sixteenth-century

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play, its subsequent adaptations and transformations twist and turn it— make it queer. One of the most recent retellings, the 2022 film Rosaline, queers Romeo and Juliet by refusing its resolution and closure, as well as by queering the character of Paris. Adapted from the novel When You Were Mine (Serle 2020), it focalises Romeo and Juliet through the character of Rosaline, the never-seen woman in Shakespeare’s play for whom Romeo pines before he meets Juliet. Rosaline (Booksmart’s Kaitlyn Dever) and Romeo (played by Kyle Allen, who also appeared in West Side Story as a member of the Jets gang) are secretly dating because she is a Capulet and he is a Montague. Early in the film, Rosaline tells Romeo she wishes they could live away from all the hate of their families, and Romeo agrees because then he could write poetry and she could take care of the house and the children. When Rosaline balks at this imagined future, Romeo replies that at least they would be together, and then he tells her for the first time that he loves her. Rosaline opens her mouth but cannot say the words back to him. Rosaline’s inability or unwillingness to express her love to Romeo points to how she implicitly understands that Romeo’s feelings for her do not satisfy what Martha Nussbaum (2001) categorises as the three normative criteria for love: compassion, reciprocity, and individuality (478–481). Romeo’s conception of love, his claim simply to “be together,” neither values Rosaline’s individuality, nor demonstrates compassion or reciprocity. At the resolution of the film, Rosaline helps Romeo and Juliet escape from their families. The final scene in the closing credits shows Romeo and Juliet alone on a boat in the middle of the sea heading towards the horizon. They sit on opposite sides of the boat, the mast separating them from each other serving as a visual metaphor for the divide between them. She does not like sports, and he does not like pizza, her favourite food. He likes veal, which causes her to look at him in disbelief. “Seven hours to go,” Juliet sighs. “And then the rest of our lives,” Romeo replies. Although Rosaline leans into the genre of young adult (YA) romantic comedy, the ending highlights and challenges the seriousness of what David Halperin (2019) calls the “very obliteration of identity … a persistent feature of the tradition of romantic love” (417). This stilted, awkward conversation between Juliet and Romeo invites a consideration of how Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet relies upon the obliteration of their identities—literally through their deaths—to characterise their love. Halperin explains this obliteration of identity and this inability to formulate and characterise love as “the standard queerness of romantic love” (417).

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If romantic love is queer because it does not “readily lend itself to language, conceptualization, or institutionalization, that forever escapes formulation” (417), then we might ask what small screen representations of teenage romantic love—either in made-for-TV movies or television series—have to do with love. To return to Roof’s idea of the self-containing loop that is the logic of romance, we suggest that streaming television is the perfect medium for this loop in its repetitions, adaptations, reboots, spinoffs, and series. For instance, as we write this chapter, the reboot of the hit 1990s Australian teen drama Heartbreak High is heating up television screens around the globe to become Netflix’s most watched show in Australia and is on the top ten list in 45 other countries. Vampire Academy—an adaptation of the popular six-book series by Richelle Mead and created by Julie Plec of The Vampire Diaries, The Originals, and Legacies—is streaming on Stan. Fate: The Winx Saga adapted from the long-running animated series Winx Club is streaming its second season on Netflix. Philia and eros—love between friends and erotic love—braids through and sustains the narrative in each of these series. To conclude this examination of queered stories, we turn to The Summer I Turned Pretty, which exemplifies this intertwining of philia and eros. Airing 17 June 2022 on Amazon Prime and co-produced by Amazon Studios, the nine-episode series—with a second season already confirmed—is created by Jenny Han and based on the first book of her trilogy of the same name. Following on from the huge success of the three Netflix film adaptations of Han’s To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before trilogy, which screened from 2018–2020 (and already has a spinoff series in production), The Summer I Turned Pretty also places teen love at the centre of the story. As the title suggests, the series backstory relies on a seasonal cycle, which may be read as a metaphor for the changing nature of love itself. The Summer I Turned Pretty suggests love is always death-marked, to quote Romeo and Juliet. In this series, the death may be the end of a season, a relationship, and/or the end of a life. The backstory to the narrative is that every year, Laurel and her two children, Steven and Belly, spend the summer at the huge New Hampshire home of Susannah and her two sons, Conrad and Jeremiah. The friendship between Susannah and Laurel anchors the show, for their friendship has lasted longer than their marriages, which serves as a cautionary tale about putting eros ahead of philia. Significantly, the summer in which the story is set is not only when Belly turns pretty (and16), but Susannah anticipates it will be her last summer

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alive. Susannah has decided not to undergo chemotherapy, so she organises the summer as though it is her last and plans to tell the children about her decision at the end of the summer. Unbeknownst to her, however, her oldest son, Conrad, who Belly says she has loved since she was 10, knows his mother is dying. His sadness permeates the series and affects his ability to reciprocate Belly’s feelings. In the final episode of the season, however, Conrad and Jeremiah convince Susannah to undergo chemotherapy trials. In the closing scene, with Taylor Swift’s song “This Love” accentuating the moment, Conrad and Belly finally kiss. While the kiss and Belly’s voiceover, “if this can happen, then maybe anything can,” ends the season with a normative happily ever after, the ambiguity of the “this” also queers the ending in its refusal to formulate a future certainty.

Never-ending Story/ies? In this chapter, we have placed love stories at the heart of our analysis. In her book What Love Is—And What It Could Be, philosopher Carrie Jenkins (2017) reminds us, “the representation of romantic love in our cultural products is no mere shadow, or reflection, of what love is. What we see on our screens, hear on our radios, and read in our magazines is actually part of the process of constructing love: making love what it is. These acts of representation are part of how we collectively create and sustain the contours of romantic love’s social profile” (5). In these stories, love is the clearly imagined end point where people find themselves through discovering the shape of their desires and working out who they are and how to be in the world through their attachment to another. The overall story told time and time again, regular as a heartbeat, yet charting its flutterings, falterings, and failings, is that love is rare, precious, difficult, exquisite, wrenching… but ultimately worth it, because learning to love is also the process of learning what love is.

References Austen, Jane. (1813) 1993. Pride and Prejudice. Norton Critical Editions. 2nd ed. New York: Norton. Baker, Jo. 2013. Longbourn. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. Boone, Joseph. 1987. Tradition Counter Tradition: Love and the Form of Fiction. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Bordwell, David. 1985. Narration in the Fiction Film. New York: Routledge.

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Brontë, Charlotte. (1847) 2006. Jane Eyre. London; New York: Penguin Books. Brooks, Peter. 1984. Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. Demory, Pamela. 2019. Queer/Adaptation: An Introduction. In Queer/ Adaptation: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Pamela Demory, 1–13. Palgrave Studies in Adaptation and Visual Culture. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. DuPlessis, Rachel Blau. 1985. Writing Beyond the Ending: Narrative Strategies of Twentieth-Century Women Writers. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Elsaesser, Thomas. 2005. Cinephilia Or the Uses of Disenchantment. In Cinephilia: Movies, Love and Memory, ed. Marijke de Valck and Malte Hagener, 27–43. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. Fate: The Winx Saga, creator Brian Young, first aired 22 January 2021, on Netflix. https://netflix.com.au. Feury, Patrick. 2000. New Developments in Film Theory. London: Red Globe Press. Halberstam, Judith. 2005. In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives. New York: New York University Press. Halperin, David. 2019. Queer Love. Critical Inquiry 45 (2): 396–419. https:// doi.org/10.1086/700993. Han, Jenny. 2010. The Summer I Turned Pretty. New York: Simon and Shuster. ———. 2018. To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before. New York: Scholastic. Heartbreak High, program creator Hannah Carroll Chapman, first episode date 14 September 2022, on Netflix. https://netflix.com.au. Heartbreak High, program creator Michael Jenkins, aired 27 February 1994–29 November 1999, on Network 10. https://netflix.com.au. hooks, bell. 2000. All About Love: New Visions. New York: Harper Collins. Jenkins, Carrie. 2017. What Love Is: And What it Could Be. New York: Basic Books. Kermode, Frank. (1966) 2000. The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction. New Epilogue. New York: Oxford University Press. Legacies, created by Julie Plec, aired 25 October 2018–16 June 2022, on CW. https://binge.com.au. The Living End, directed by Gregg Araki (1992; Cineplex Odeon Films; Echo Bridge, 2002), DVD. Meade, Richelle. 2008. Vampire Academy. New York: Razorbill. Mulvey, Laura. 2006. Death 24 x a Second: Stillness and the Moving Image. London: Reaktion Books. Nussbaum, Martha. 2001. Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. The Originals, program creator Julie Plec, aired 3 October 2013–1 August 2018, on CW. https://www.stan.com.au. Phelan, James. 2002. Narrative Progression. In Narrative Dynamics: Essays on Time, Plot, Closure, and Frames, ed. Brian Richardson, 211–216. Columbus: Ohio State University Press.

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Rebel Without a Cause, directed by Nicholas Ray (1955; Amazon Prime Video). https://www.primevideo.com. Roof, Judith. 1996. Come As You Are: Sexuality and Narrative. New  York: Columbia University Press. Rosaline, directed by Karen Maine (Disney+, 2022), http://www.disney.com.au. Serle, Rebecca. 2020. When You Were Mine. New York: Simon and Shuster. Shakespeare, William. 1597. Romeo and Juliet. Folger Shakespeare Library. https://shakespeare.folger.edu/shakespeares-­w orks/romeo-­a nd-­j uliet/. Accessed 27 October 2022. ———. 1600. Midsummer Night’s Dream. Folger Shakespeare Library. https:// shakespeare.folger.edu/shakespeares-­w orks/a-­m idsummer-­n ights-­d ream. Accessed 14 October 2022. The Summer I Turned Pretty, created by Jenny Han, first aired 17 June 2022, on Amazon Prime. https://www.primevideo.com. Vampire Academy, executive producer Julie Plec, first aired 15 September 2022, on Stan. https://stan.com.au. Vampire Diaries, created by Julie Plec and Kevin Williamson, aired 10 September 2009–10 March 2017, on CWTV. https://netflix.com.au. Winx Club, created by Iginio Straffi, aired 28 January 2004–17 September 2019, on Nickleodeon. https://netflix.com.au. Woolf, Virginia. (1925) 1979. Mrs. Dalloway. London: Guild Publishing.

CHAPTER 7

Embracing Intimate Civility: Love of Kith and Kin Elizabeth Reid Boyd

Abstract  Intimate civility operates through an individually embraced code of conduct based on mutual respect, empathy, self-awareness, morality, and equality to guide interpersonal dynamics, yet individuals reared in homes devoid of intimate civility can be challenged to identify and promote the interest or wellbeing of their intimate counterparts and may have to seek outside help to learn these skills. The use of empathic imagination for real world relational benefits is common in traditional therapeutic practices, such as encouraging those struggling with self-compassion to imagine the presence of a kind friend or ally to support them at times of hardship. From Aristotle and Plato to Simone Weil and Iris Murdoch, friendship has been crucial in Western philosophies of love. In her chapter “Embracing Intimate Civility: Love of Kith and Kin,” Elizabeth Reid Boyd utilises kith (friendship, or philia) to expand the model of intimate civility as a resource for those for whom kin (family) represents less than loving relationships.

E. Reid Boyd (*) School of Arts and Humanities, Edith Cowan University, Joondalup, WA, Australia e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. Grobbelaar et al. (eds.), Contemporary Love Studies in the Arts and Humanities, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-26055-1_7

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Keywords  Intimate civility • Interpersonal violence • Friendship • Family • Empathy • Moral imagination

Introducing Intimate Civility Civility does not traditionally belong in our most intimate relationships. It has been presumed, even idealised, that intimacy in our personal lives transcends the need for public values to govern relationships: that romantic love is all you need. Civility developed as a public, gendered concept. As researchers, we started to explore the idea of intimate civility in interpersonal violence, and then developed an analysis using social construction and attachment theory simultaneously (Reid Boyd et al. 2019). Intimate civility operates through an individually embraced code of conduct based on mutual respect, empathy, self-awareness, morality, and equality to guide interpersonal dynamics, yet individuals reared in homes devoid of intimate civility can be challenged to identify and promote the interest or wellbeing of their intimate counterparts and may have to seek outside help to learn these skills. The use of empathic imagination for real world relational benefits is common in traditional therapeutic practices, such as encouraging those struggling with self-compassion to imagine the presence of a kind friend or ally to support them at times of hardship. From Aristotle and Plato to Simone Weil and Iris Murdoch, friendship has been crucial in Western philosophies of love. Here I propose utilising kith (friendship, or philia) to expand the model of intimate civility, as a resource for those for whom kin (family) represents less than loving relationships.

Separations of Civility Feminist political theorist Carole Pateman (1994) situated the historical separation between civil society and the private realm as an inheritance of Hegel’s double dilemma: first, a class division between civil society and the state (between the economic man/woman, or private enterprise and public power); and second, a patriarchal division between the private family (and intimate relationships) and civil society/the state. The private location, she argued, is “an association constituted by ties of love, blood … subjection and particularity” rather than the public sphere, “an association of free and equal individuals” (225). Lutze and Cottam (2007) go so far as to define this separation as contributing to what they call false civility:

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False civility refers to the perception that the minimization of violence in the public space of a community represents a true peace or a willingness to live politely together and ignores the lack of civility in the private spaces of the community such as the home and family. Emotional causes and outcomes of violence in the family are ignored (i.e., humiliation, shame, fear, depression, anger, PTSD, isolation). A state of false civility also ignores or minimizes violence that is between individual men and makes invisible violence committed against women and children. Therefore, as long as there is relative peace in the public sphere, in spite of continuing violence within families, civility is perceived as being achieved. (4)

Separations of Friendship Such division also occurred in classical philosophical conceptions of friendship (philia) that developed in separation from the private realm: “problems emerge in Aristotle’s presentation of perfect friendship. It appears that it is only open to men, as women seem confined to an imperfect form of friendship between husband and wife within the family” (Ward 2008, 32). Classical Greek philosophy has been critiqued as elitist, sexist, and racist (Lindsay 1994). Women (might) have been the object of male to female eros, but as they were not traditionally members of civil society, they were not automatically qualified as friends. True friendship based on virtue (equal goodness) might be possible between intimate partners, but for Aristotle, it was a relationship more likely to be based upon utility and pleasure. Plato too identified character or virtue as essential to friendship between equals (Sheffield 2017). Still discussed today in popular media, fora is the idea that men and women cannot be Platonic friends (Lai 2015). Philia, then, has a philosophical inheritance as a bond of the polis, the state. However, friendship, like other forms of love is not so neatly demarcated in public and private, personal and political (Von Heyking 2016). Friendship operating in the civic and political arena can be viewed with suspicion regarding potential nepotism, cronyism, and exploitation (Leontsini 2013). Forms of love can shift and change. Philia can include elements of eros. Platonic ideals can be challenged by romance. The separation of dichotomous forms of love, and their application to different kinds of relationships located in either public or private, in either civil or intimate realms, has had long-lasting effects.

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Defining Intimate Civility Reid Boyd and Abigail Bray first discussed and developed the term intimate civility in 2005 in an unpublished book proposal about contemporary romance and an ethics of love. Romantic love is not a natural state or concept and does not help us to develop safe governance in the world of intimate relationships. Intimate civility is a concept designed to bridge the gap. Approaching love with knowledge, care, and respect will not destroy romance; it is violence, neglect, and abuse that destroys relationships (hooks 2000). Intimate civility does not mean replacing or doing away with romantic love and sexual desire in intimate relationships. Rather, it suggests an embrace of diverse forms of love that are present. Intimate civility is a code of conduct predominantly concerned with civil rights, obligations, and responsibilities within personal relationships based on mutual respect, empathy, self-awareness, morality, and equality. Intimate civility affirms inherent human rights, inclusive of race, sex, nationality, ethnicity, language, and religion within interpersonal relations. Civility includes qualities such as trust, duty, morality, self-restraint, respect, and fairness—a common standard allowing individuals to work, live, and associate together. Intimacy includes feelings of closeness warmth, affection, attachment, privacy, and reciprocity. It encourages caring, loyalty, empathy, honesty, and self-knowledge. Intimate civility should begin with those closest to us, with being civil in our most intimate relationships. A decalogue of intimate civility was developed to include qualities in ten domains: Personal and political; civil rights; politeness; equity; dialecticism; humanness; empathy; respect; holding the other in high regard; and embracing an intergenerational view (Dudek et  al. 2022; Reid Boyd et al. 2019).

Current Research on Intimate Civility A research programme led by psychologists Eyal Gringart and Madalena Grobbelaar has been undertaken to explore the development of intimate civility as a framework for education and clinical understanding, aimed at increasing harmony, diminishing conflict, and promoting constructive relationship beliefs in intimate relationships. Global research suggests that although people of all genders experience intimate partner violence (IPV), women are the most vulnerable to physical violence and conflict in heterosexual relationships (World Health Organisation 2022), though research

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into same-sex relationships and IPV is developing (Australian Institute of Family Studies 2022). Hence, research on intimate civility, largely in the context of IPV focuses on how intimate civility can be applied in interpersonal contexts through exploring people’s thoughts regarding harmony, conflict, and respect for self and other. Within this programme, research in 2019 investigated women’s perspectives on aspects of relationship dynamics they considered to harmonise intimate relationships and reduce conflict, such as safety, equality, and respect in the bedroom. A quantitative exploration was carried out in 2020 of the relationships between variables thought to impact the development of intimate civility in individuals (e.g., attachment and exposure to interparental aggression) and IPV; and the utility of further developing intimate civility as a framework for education and intervention. In 2022, men’s perspectives were investigated regarding what they believe might contribute to harmonising intimate relationships. Additionally, a literary analysis of intimate civility in popular romance texts pre and post the #metoo movement was published (Dudek et al. 2022). Thus far, the overall results across investigations support the principles of intimate civility and the findings of these studies will be published in peer reviewed journals. The development of the intimate civility scale is currently being finalised.

Intimate Civility: Attachment and Construction Attachment theory and social constructionism have been used simultaneously in the development of intimate civility. Attachment theory (Bowlby 1980; Holmes and Slade 2018) suggests we can only develop qualities such as morality and empathy, crucial for intimate relationships, if we have experienced secure, intimate relationships. For many individuals, principles of intimate civility would be learned, primarily in the family of origin, through relationships with significant others and potentially at societal levels through education and therapeutic interventions. Individuals reared in homes devoid of intimate civility may be challenged in identifying and promoting their own wellbeing, or that of their intimate partners (Reid Boyd et  al. 2019). Social constructions, particularly those surrounding gender, are also significant, as the large body of research into interpersonal violence attests (World Health Organisation 2022). This research suggests intimate civility can only be learned or developed within a society that values safety, equality, and fairness, both in public and in private (Reid

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Boyd et al. 2019). However, these explanations do not imply that any act of intimate incivility, such as abuse, domestic and family violence, or perpetration of IPV, can be excused, or victims blamed. There are many factors involved, precisely what ongoing research into intimate civility seeks to explore. The psychological research programme into intimate civility by Gringart and Grobbelaar continues to examine how its values are endorsed, whether they are received or acted upon, and if and why individuals struggle with the relational know-how and relevant emotional regulatory skills. Here, I draw upon philosophical concepts developed by Iris Murdoch and Simone Weil to explore how philia, friendship, may signal opportunities for such relational know-how to be embraced. In her book The Sovereignty of Good, Murdoch (1970) contends that “moral change and moral achievement are slow; we are not free in the sense of being able suddenly to alter ourselves since we cannot suddenly alter what we see and ergo what we desire and are compelled by” (31). Elements from the Decalogue of intimate civility: dialecticism, moral imagination (empathy) and positive regard are considered here in three steps that resonate with Murdoch and Weil’s philosophies of love.

How to Embrace Intimate Civility Think Dialectically Intimate civility is dialectical. The separation of intimacy and civility in Western society and thought is itself a dualism that rests upon other dualisms: public/private, constructed/natural, male/female, rational/emotional, civil/criminal, individual/social, victim/oppressor … We envisage intimate civility—and our relationships—as dynamic, dialectical, discursive, and interactive, above and beyond dualism. (Reid Boyd et al. 2019)

Intimacy and civility have been divided by dualistic thinking. In addition to separations such as public/private, constructed/natural, male/ female, rational/emotional, civil/criminal, individual/social, victim/ oppressor, relevant here too are (permeable) divisions between eros/philia, and between kith/kin. As discussed above, despite historical separations of thought that have held these concepts apart, romantic/intimate partnerships do not necessarily, or even preferably, lack friendliness. Family members can be friends, and friends can be chosen family (Weston 1997).

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A dialectical approach underpins intimate civility because it resources our thinking to reduce such separations (either/or) and to allow for both/ and. It gives room for choice: or at least the idea of it. As Murdoch (1970) asks, “Do we really have to choose between an image of total freedom and an image of total determinism?” (35). For Murdoch, it is what goes on between choices that is of interest (1970, 36). Dialectical behavioural therapy (Linehan 1993) also seeks to promote choice by aiming to reduce dualistic thinking in emotional states (for example, both anger and kindness, fear and courage, might be identified, rather than a singular emotion) and enable individuals to identify behavioural possibilities. Dialectical thinking and dialectical therapeutic approaches offer philosophical understanding and psychological support to develop flexibility in the relational know-how necessary for intimate civility, which might already be present in some contexts and can be applied in others. For individuals who face difficulty, this strengths-based approach (rather than a deficit model) is a way of recognising positive emotions and behaviours that can be brought to bear in situations when, for example, trauma-­ induced attachment responses may be evoked. It allows for the embrace of valuable experiential and relational skills that may be already present in an individual’s repertoire, which can be applied across different interpersonal contexts. Imagine Friendship Intimate civility is empathic. It invites us to create not-yet-said, not-yet-­ imagined relationships. The creative space for intimate civility is not bound by gender, race or sexuality—only by our imaginations. (Reid Boyd et al. 2019)

Moral imagination is a form of empathy that encourages us to be kinder and more loving to ourselves and with each other when we imagine how others might feel (Reid Boyd 2019). It allows for creative acts and responses. The use of empathy and imagination for real world benefits is common in traditional therapeutic practices that encourage those struggling with relational skills, including self-love, to imagine the presence of a kind friend or ally to support them at times of hardship. Such a kind friend may or may not exist. It is in the imagining that a loving or self-loving response can be encouraged, in the warmth of recalling friendship’s embrace. It is not only a matter of imagining a kind friend

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but also calling to mind having been or being a kind friend. Empathy or compassion for another can also be induced with questions such as “is this how I would want to treat a friend?” or “is this how I would want a friend to treat me?” It is the how, rather than the who, that becomes important. So how do we do friendship? What similar forms of relational know-­ how are required that may be applicable in different relationships across kith and kin? In Murdoch’s philosophy, being a good friend can be identified as knowing and understanding others (Mason 2021). However, friendship is more than affection; it is an act of comprehension. Crucial to this concept is the idea of “attention” (33), a concept that Murdoch (1970) drew from the work of theologian/philosopher Simone Weil. For Weil and Murdoch, such attention is love in action. Grow by Looking Intimate civility is a form of highest regard. When we regard another, we truly see them. To hold someone in high regard is to esteem them, to hold them above others, not putting them on a pedestal, or insisting they are superior, but to value them for who they are. To be esteemed for our interior, for our character, rather than what we display or what we own. It connects with the humanistic psychological concept of unconditional positive regard. The highest regard holds each other in arms and in mind. (Reid Boyd et al. 2019)

Intimate civility is a form of regard connected to the humanistic psychological concept of unconditional positive regard (Bozarth 2013). Developed in a therapeutic context, unconditional positive regard is an approach that allows for a therapist’s accepting stance of a client as they are in the present moment. To regard another person is to see/look at, to have consideration for, and to pay attention to. It is purposeful. In line with the work of bell hooks (2000), it is an intentional turn towards. For Iris Murdoch, it is how love grows. Murdoch (1970) explains how she thinks we “grow by looking” (30). She suggests that such a gaze is one that requires moral action and moral effort. It may not come easily. It is more than the romantic meeting of eyes across a crowded room, a friendly glance, or recognition of a family member among strangers, though it might contain these sights. For Murdoch, attention “is the idea of a just and loving gaze, directed upon an individual reality” (Murdoch 1970, 33). By making this moral effort,

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we grow in character. It is the willingness to perceive another, not to overlook faults, but to embrace them as part of the whole human being (Mason 2021) that enables friendship, that enables love.

Divining Humanism: The Look of Love I can only choose within the world I can see. (Murdoch, 1970, 36).

Philosopher and theologian Simone Weil (1951) takes the idea of a look of love even further. For Weil, it is through attention that our humanity is created. It is not present beforehand. She writes, “Creative attention means really giving our attention to what does not exist. Humanity does not exist in the anonymous flesh lying inert by the roadside. The Samaritan who stops and looks gives his attention all the same to this humanity which is absent and the actions which follow prove that it is a question of real attention” (Weil 1951, 105). This idea can be situated in what Julia Kristeva (2014) refers to as new humanism: “This new humanism, interaction with others—all the others—socially marginalised, racially discriminated, politically, sexually, biologically or psychically persecuted others” (64) is only possible if we immerse ourselves in the imaginary, in the experience of ‘the other’. In this definition, Kristeva draws upon the religious writing of sixteenth century mystic Teresa of Avila. In accounts of her life, Teresa described a religious experience of the communication of love through the expression of suffering and compassion in the eyes of Christ that evoked her own compassionate and impassioned commitment to relieving the suffering of others. It is within this new humanism that intimate civility can be placed. In secular terms, such attention might be described as opening our moral eye, our ability to behave imaginatively, to envision and create what does not yet exist (Richards 1996). Murdoch would not have us climb from the human to divine in what C.S. Lewis (1936) called a “ladder of love” (5). Our moral eye, Murdoch (1970) contends, is not mystical, religious, or automatically moral. It is our ordinary eye, paying close attention, or looking with moral imagination and moral effort at ordinary humans, in ordinary human circumstances, in an ordinary world. This act of attention, to see and be seen, might well be experienced as extraordinary, or even miraculous. It can be divined in relationships between intimate partners, in civil interactions, with family members, friends, and strangers, amongst kith and kin. In loving relationships, we divine our humanity.

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References Australian Institute of Family Studies. 2022. Intimate Partner Violence in Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans, Intersex and Queer Communities. https://aifs.gov.au/. Accessed 5 October 2022. Bowlby, John. 1980. Attachment and Loss. Vol. 3. New York: Basic Books. Bozarth, Jerold. 2013. Unconditional Positive Regard. In The Handbook of Person-­ Centred Psychotherapy and Counselling, ed. Mick Cooper, Maureen O’Hara, Peter Schmid, and Art Bohart, 180–192. New  York: Palgrave Macmillan/ Springer Nature. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-­1-­137-­32900-­4_12. Dudek, Debra, Elizabeth Reid Boyd, Madalena Grobbelaar, and Rose Williams. 2022. Tingles and Shivers: First Kisses, Consensuality and Intimate Civility in Eliza Redgold’s Historical Harlequin Romances Pre and Post #Me Too. In New Frontiers in Popular Romance: Essays on the Genre, ed. Susan Fanetti, 47–62. Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland and Company. Holmes, Jeremy, and Arietta Slade. 2018. Attachment in Therapeutic Practice. Los Angeles: Sage. hooks, bell. 2000. All About Love: New Visions. New York: Harper. Kristeva, Julia. 2014. Teresa My Love: An Imagined Life of the Saint of Avila. New York: Columbia University Press. Lai, Chris. 2015. Can a Man and a Woman Really Have a Platonic Relationship? HuffPost. https://www.huffpost.com/entry/can-­a-­man-­and-­a-­woman-­rea_b_ 8100362. Last Modified December 21, 2016. Leontsini, Eleni. 2013. The Motive of Society: Aristotle on Civic Friendship, Justice, and Concord. Res Publica 19: 21–35. https://doi.org/10.1007/ s11158-­012-­9204-­4. Lewis, Clive Staples. 1936. The Allegory of Love: A Study in Medieval Tradition. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Lindsay, Thomas. 1994. Was Aristotle Racist, Sexist and Anti-democratic? The Review of Politics 56: 127–151. https://doi.org/10.1017/S00346705000 49536. Linehan, Marsha. 1993. Cognitive-behavioral treatment of borderline personality disorder. Guilford Publications: New York. Lutze, Faith, and Cottam Martha. 2007. False Civility and Passive Peace: Exploring the Relationship Between Family and Intra-Communal Violence. Paper Presented at the Meetings of the International Society of Political Psychology, Portland, OR. Mason, Kathy. 2021. Iris Murdoch: What the Writer and Philosopher Can Teach Us About Friendship. The Conversation. https://theconversation.com/iris-­ m u r d o c h -­w h a t -­t h e -­w r i t e r-­a n d -­p h i l o s o p h e r-­c a n -­t e a c h -­u s -­a b o u t -­ friendship-­167819. Accessed October 5, 2022. Murdoch, Iris. 1970. The Sovereignty of Good. London and New York: Routledge.

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Pateman, Carole. 1994. The Patriarchal Welfare State. In Defining Women: Social Institutions and Gender Divisions, ed. Linda McDowell and Rosemary Pringle, 223–245. London: Polity Press. Reid Boyd, Elizabeth. 2019. How Creativity Can Help Us Cultivate Moral Imagination. The Conversation. http://theconversation.com/how-­creativity-­ can-­help-­us-­cultivate-­moral-­imagination-­101968. Accessed February 11, 2019. Reid Boyd, Elizabeth, Madalena Grobbelaar, Eyal Gringart, Alise Bender, and Rose Williams. 2019. Introducing “Intimate Civility”: Towards a New Concept for 21st-Century Relationships. M/C Journal 22: 1. https://doi. org/10.5204/mcj.1491. Richards, Mary. 1996. Opening Our Moral Eye: Essays, Talks Poems Embracing Creativity Community. Lindisfarne, UK: Lindisfarne Books. Sheffield, Frisbee. 2017. Plato on Love and Friendship. In The Cambridge Companion to Ancient Ethics, ed. Christopher Bobonich, 86–102. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Von Heyking, John. 2016. The Form of Politics: Aristotle and Plato on Friendship. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press. Ward, Ann. 2008. Mothering and the Sacrifice of Self: Women and Friendship in Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics. Thirdspace: A Journal of Feminist Theory and Culture 7: 32–57. Weil, Simone. 1951. Waiting on God: The Essence of Her Thought. London: Collins. Weston, Kath. 1997. Families We Choose: Lesbians, Gays, Kinship. Revised edition. Columbia University Press. World Health Organisation. 2022. Violence Info. Intimate Partner Violence. https://apps.who.int/violence-­info/intimate-­partner-­violence/. Accessed October 5 2022.

CHAPTER 8

The Tyranny of Love: Love and Psychology Madalena Grobbelaar and Eyal Gringart

Abstract  In “The Tyranny of Love,” Grobbelaar and Gringart explore the role of love in psychology. Since time immemorial, philosophy, religion, art, literature, history, and psychology have contributed to the idealisation of love. Our culture has become saturated with the idealisation of love, whose features are deemed to be close to perfection—natural, spontaneous, effortless, unconditional, and benevolent. Grobbelaar and Gringart ask, how do we account for love in contexts that negate its fundamental construction, for instance in violent intimate relationships? As a socio-cultural ideal, love limits human emotional and relational expression, deeming all else inferior. To truly love is to break free of love’s tyranny and embrace the full spectrum of relationality and emotionality. With social and clinical psychology in mind, they make a case that love is a

M. Grobbelaar (*) Edith Cowan University, Joondalup, WA, Australia e-mail: [email protected] E. Gringart School of Arts and Humanities, Edith Cowan University, Joondalup, WA, Australia e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. Grobbelaar et al. (eds.), Contemporary Love Studies in the Arts and Humanities, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-26055-1_8

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powerful social construction, ubiquitous in all societies, contextually bound, and differentiated across time periods. Although idealised and experienced as a force of nature, love is pliant and fallible, as we all are. Keywords  Attachment • God • Psychology • Absolute love • Idealised love • Harmful love

Introduction What is love? This simple question saw innumerable debates about the nature of genuine love and has many answers (Soble 1998). Characteristics of love echoed throughout history in religion, art, literature, and music have found their way into prevailing ideals and narratives centred on our desire to love and be loved. While love is often regarded as simply an emotion, biological and neuropsychological research into love demonstrates that when we engage with one another, we initiate physiological and psychological processes that are bi-directional in several ways: this bi-directionality is dependent on how the interaction makes us feel; impacts our emotional and mental states; and, in turn, determines how we engage in future acts (Carter and Porges 2013, 12). Fredickson’s foray into the science of love holds that central to the neurobiological process of love is the brain, the vagus nerve, and levels of oxytocin. As she proposes, “love comes from the ways, small and large, that we share positive states”—something she calls “positivity resonance.” It is the way we connect with others’ positive emotions, an evolutionary feature of our social nature, and integral to loving and compassionate relationships (2013, cited in Siegel 2017, 311). The significance of love to psychology remains the focus of much scholarly work as research indicates that individuals regard satisfying love relationships as paramount to their conceptualisations and feelings of personal happiness. Despite “its centrality in the lives of many people, psychoanalysis, with its traditional emphasis on psychosexuality and rationalism, has generally undervalued the importance of love and romance” (Mitchell 1997, 23). Similarly, Levine (2005) muses on the fact that notwithstanding its importance, the field of psychiatry in particular has had a curiously disinterested approach towards the relevance of love to the work of clinicians. As psychologists, we know, both through research and therapeutic work, that relationships act as barometers for individuals’ sense of self and ‘other’, in other words, who we are and how we are regarded by others,

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where the most essential others are significant, intimate ones. Our sense of being loved and loving others can have essential societal, interpersonal, and individual consequences. The literature abounds with studies reporting positive relationships between physical strength, stouter immune systems, lower levels of illness, and individuals who report feeling loved and supported in their relationships (Carroll 2013, 158). Consequently, it behoves us not to underestimate love’s centrality in one’s psychological bedrock, generally composed of early dyadic interpersonal interactions and influenced by larger societal idealisations of the meaning and significance of love. But is there a harmful side to love?

Love as Suffering Love is a concept related to both deep attachment and the greatest interpersonal loss. The more we hold love and loving as positive, important, meaningful, and significant, the greater the potential sense of loss in case it is jeopardised. Love is thus a double-edged sword and one that does not always lead to positive outcomes. In other words, there is a potential conflict between love and freedom. In Judeo-Christian religious traditions that have so powerfully shaped Western traditions of thought, love is presented as powerful currency. The initial instance of the word love in the Bible—in Genesis 22:2, the ‘Binding of Isaac’, the command for Abraham to kill his son—illustrates that while love reflects the strongest attachment possible between humans, one with unquestionable faith would forsake it and suffer the ultimate personal loss at God’s will. This seeming contradiction highlights two interesting aspects related to love: Firstly, loving does not limit behaviours and expressions towards loved ones to the positive and endearing. Secondly, people accept, at least in relation to God, the most extreme forms of abuse as congruent with Godly love. This concept seems to hold similarly in many interpersonal abusive relationships and suggests that, at least for some, there is no contradiction between loving, suffering abuse, and/or inflicting it.

Tragic Love Reflections on human love similarly neither escape idealisations born of time and narrative, nor assuage its many contradictions. A fundamental feature of love, reproduced time and time again, is that of reciprocity. In

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fact, to lose a loved one to death becomes the ultimate trial of love’s genuineness (Soble 1998). The philosopher Kierkegaard claimed that once a beloved dies, one’s need for what they may provide ceases, yet love continues, illuminating its genuineness beyond instrumental use. The absence of reciprocity gives rise to ideas of unrequited love, a love that persists in countless romantic and courtly tales. The tale of Tristan and Isolde, Wagner’s opera inspired by Gottfried von Strassburg’s story, portrays this feature of unrequited love: it is only through transcending death that love achieves perfection. The Greek myth of Orpheus’ love for Eurydice, his adored wife, commemorated throughout Western literature, similarly depicts a man who believes his love will conquer all, even death. Other features of a love that transcends life include the notions of constancy and exclusivity. No other beloved can substitute the one who has been lost. The nature of transcendence, although grand, is also elusive and associated with divine realms. For example, “Plato’s version of love treats the beloved as a mere steppingstone on the path to a love of the abstract, eternal forms” (New Philosopher 2022, 14). During the late twelfth century, Capellanus’ taxonomy of love divided it into two variations: a pure love, celebrated for its durable, cerebral, and modest quality; and common or mixed love, known for its fleshy delights, quick and transient nature, the source of good experiences but also a source of danger (Regan 2011). Love’s ideals have predominantly been narrated as experiences of opposites, with unattainable qualities being desired yet seldom fulfilled, while the common elements, which include sexual desire, are accessible to many and easier to gratify. Again, love conflicts with freedom, its expectations miring us in an equivocal experience.

Loving Humans Human to human love is typically associated with positive feelings, deep endearment, fondness, emotional commitment, and tenderness. The type and style of interpersonal dynamics seem to define the type of love that is relevant, for example, parent-child; partners in long-term relationships; infatuated individuals; grandparents-grandchildren; relatives; and friends. A parent’s love for their child is envisaged as nurturing, caring, and supporting yet educative and sometimes punitive. In long-term relationships, typically, there is a strong sense of attachment, commitment, deep friendship, acceptance of differences, and mutual support, as well as the growth of other attributes such as trust, acceptance, loyalty, and a readiness to

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make sacrifices for the beloved. This type of love is often called companionate love. Infatuated individuals, commonly experience romantic or passionate love, where love is marked by tenderness, anxiety, passion, desire, possessiveness, and cravings for each other’s company. Passionate love’s distinguishing features include a rapid onset, a brief lifespan, an idealisation of (or preoccupation with) the beloved, exclusivity, intense and labile emotions, sexual attraction, and physiological arousal (Regan 2011, 183). Infatuated love does not harbour expectations of educating or punishing. In this type of love, infatuated individuals see hardly any faults in one another. Regardless of the dynamic and type of relationship, human to human love is associated with positive valence, care, and wishing well for the other. This dynamic may be challenging in instances wherein one in a dyadic love feels compromised by the other in some way, as had the other truly loved them such hurt should not have been experienced. Similarly, the other in this hypothetical dyad may question their own love as the other feels compromised. Additionally, when a person loves another, they presuppose they need to forgive the other’s faults. At the same time, however, forgiveness is challenged by the injured belief that the other would not behave in ways that may require forgiveness. This behaviour raises questions about personal freedom and acceptance in the context of loving relationships. In other words, how loving is love? Regarding the love we are expected to have for others, the Judeo-­ Christian worldview that embraces the principle of “love thy neighbour as thyself” (Leviticus 19:18; Matthew 22:37–39) can be a most problematic principle that leaves much uncertain. Of the repertoire of love, which kind of love should this one be? What is meant by neighbour? Who is the “thy” that one is expected to love? Do I love me? What about the socio-cultural principle of not putting myself first, not being egotistical, and caring more for others? Possessiveness, which appears to go hand in hand with human to human loving assumes a quid pro quo equation, as if stating, “if I extend my love to you, you are in my debt”; furthermore, “I love you therefore you are mine.” For some people, this possessiveness may provide a sense of security, which is not supported by the fact that more than 40% of marriages in OECD countries end in divorce (OECD 2022). The myth of love as a bill of ownership is busted by observation, yet the notion is alive and well. Freedom, by definition, is challenged by possessiveness. Three main questions arise: firstly, why do people associate love with possession; secondly,

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do people feel insecure in loving to the extent that they need to protect themselves from the potential loss by ownership; and thirdly, do people readily accept a trade-off between love and freedom. In considering the questions related to possessive ownership, examples are abundant within violent intimate partnered relationships, a concept that Jenkins refers to as domestic love (2009). Here, all differences between intimates are eradicated as sameness is valued; domestic love necessitates that one’s partner adopts compatible thoughts, feelings, and desires. Diversity of thoughts and desires, wishes, or interests, goals, and aspirations is experienced as a threat of loss, abandonment, and rejection, as evidence of failure or inadequacy in loving, of the potential demise of a love that feeds us fully. A prototype of love such as this one induces an insecure and jealous spouse to coerce and correct the behaviour of the other as evidence of love. Dependency needs, which arise in the context of infant development and the interactions with early parental attachment relationships, are experienced in adult intimate relationships as part of loving dynamics; when these needs remain unsatisfied, and individuals continue emotionally unregulated, violence, coercion, obsessional stalking, and homicide may occur. Love may thus contradict the freedom to love. Again, the double-edged sword–love and freedom do not reside harmoniously side-by-side. “Love for king and country” also often brings love to contradict itself. In the name of such love, we may behave in hateful, exploitative, harmful, and traumatising ways. In the name of love for those dear to us we often exploit others. We go to war to better the conditions and livelihood of those we love, which sees us reflect the opposite towards others. Thus, love brings its painful side along with it, which challenges the benevolent, nurturing, caring, and well-intended nature that is typically related to the concept.

Modern Love: Overburdened Presumptions Ideas about love have often reflected the ideals of the times; through the Enlightenment era, humans were considered reasonable and love rational; in contrast, in the Romanticism era, love dominated as an uncontrollable passion, where humans lost all reason (Beall and Sternberg 1995). Through most of Western history, parents arranged the marriages of their children because it was considered an economic union. Had the pair learnt to love one another or were actually in love with one another was an

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advantage, not a necessity or condition. Perel (2007), in distinguishing between marriage and passion in the late nineteenth century, posits that “the central place of sex in marriage, and the heightened expectations surrounding it, took decades more to arrive” (8). While love has remained idealised in so many forms, only in the last two centuries has romantic love become the most sought-after loving connection in Western culture, presuming that love precedes, indeed must precede marriage or a committed relationship (Carroll 2013). Although the dismantling of traditional institutions such as the church, the community, and the extended family has left individuals with more choices and fewer restrictions, it has also resulted in individuals feeling more alone. While in the past individuals sought order, meaning, continuity, social support, and a sense of belonging from these traditional institutions, they now look to their partner for these needs. Although ideals of contemporary love may not present as the tragic fantasised and unattainable figures of literature, lore, and art, modern individuals consequently consider their partners to be fortifications against the vagaries of life—that love must provide compassion, companionship, and emotional nourishment, and moreover, love cures existential anxiety and one’s sense of being alone (Perel 2007). Insecurity and uncertainty about our existence remains, yet modern life, with its increased longevity including in coupledom, has done away with the traditional resources that had contributed to our emotional sustenance and we often become solely reliant on our partners–intimacy in adult relationships is overburdened with expectations. Indeed, Fromm’s prescient opinion that the new freedom found in modern love’s construction has greatly intensified the significance of the object of love as against the significance of the function of love is witnessed in our modern love ideals (1957). Intimate adult relationships mirror the oscillating periods of early childhood, where the child seeks novelty for growth, and stability for nurturance, safety and comfort; in intimate love, we too seek predictable and secure connections yet expect romantic love, with its powerful undercurrent of eroticism and desire, to be a transcendental experience that surpasses the ordinary (this latter expectation prevalent in current dialogues about love, in storytelling, media, music and the arts). Within psychological and intrapsychic models of human bonding, loving and procreating, two functionally separate systems are central, yet may often operate in antagonistic ways through attachment (caregiving; loving system) and sexuality (libido; desire system). Creating and raising offspring successfully

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requires an appealing novelty stimulus (desire) and an enduring capacity (attachment). Attachment needs pull for certainty, security, safety, and nesting, while desire seeks distance, adventure, unpredictability, and rush (Eagle 2007; Mitchell 2002; Perel 2007). Infants’ first blueprint for the development of attachment and sexual models are primary caregivers; learning to be human in all its forms is predominantly learnt subliminally, unconsciously, and through imperceptible social interchanges. Thus, while we learn to love in ways that have been explicitly modelled by primary attachment figures, we also internalise ways implicitly and unconsciously. Integrating often antagonistic needs for caregiving and desire is complicated, initially alluded to by Freud, who considered the idea that boys had to reconcile their feelings about their mothers as sexual objects and as the object responsible for their preservation as almost an impossibility. Moreover, learning to love in early family of origin relationships fraught with dysfunction, disorder and/or violence, compromises our capacity to learn to hold an ‘other’ in mind in a benevolent way. Regardless, our modern culture is saturated with presumptions and idealisations that we both love and desire our partners fully, continuously, and unconditionally, and this idealisation is the core and measure of what love should be. While we are living in the era of pleasure (Perel), this split between love and desire (in idealisation) is increasingly prevalent today, both in individuals seeking counselling, and apparent in media coverage of divorce, sexless relationships, greater use of pornography, loneliness, and broken relationships. The same other we need for loving and safety, as well as to transcend the ordinary, has the power to destabilise us. Love’s magical potency, with all the attending idealisations and expectations, seduces us and grabs us, yet the more attached we become, the more scared, the more we have to lose. Here again, is that double-edged sword. Hence, to conquer our fears of unpredictability, we close the distance, make it predictable, create habits, and degrade romance and love (Mitchell 2002). Attempting to control the unpredictability of passion and love, and the individuality of an other, we tame this uncertainty out of existence and end up with boredom (Perel 2007), and if it is not boredom, then controlling the beloved due to fear of loss ensues. Either way, we look towards someone else to fulfil our expectations rather than change or challenge them.

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A Reconsideration of Love From all that was said thus far we can see that love, the complex and elusive abstraction of an all-encompassing good and its tyranny over humanness, requires reconsideration; that various aspects of it may be quite challenging for humans to fulfil; and that the concept may have been loaded with so much that it is difficult to understand, let alone grow, nurture, and harbour. We propose a new approach to love: The freedom to love humanely, not perfectly, yet more healthily. We offer a love that is not of rigid opposites, such as good and bad, selfless or selfish, conditional or unconditional, but rather love conceptualised along the continuum of both potentials, of a multitude of potentials. These potentials reside in each of us, making us capable of ultimate feats of benevolent as well as destructive actions. Feelings that contribute to love states are transient experiences that ebb and flow, and as such, may be accepted as part of us, like other feelings. They can be inconsistent, impetuous, arrogant, impulsive, and much more, but to idealise that they should not be so, leads us down the inevitability of splitting our love into either/or. While we know that sadness, joy, fear, anger, and other feeling states come and go, why does the tyranny of an idealised state of love remain static? We jettison the best with the worst. Let love be defined by the way we humans are manifesting it. This shift may mean much subjectivity, yet it would grant freedom of heart and spirit for us to own our loving rather than attempting to live up to an ideal that would likely see us fail and deject ourselves for never reaching the imaginary heights love has been promised to reach. Let us ease our fears concerning the characteristics of human nature, free love from the bounds of our fantasies and free ourselves to genuine humane expression.

References Beall, Anne E., and Robert J. Sternberg. 1995. The Social Construction of Love. The Journal of Social and Personal Relationships 12: 417–438. Carroll, Janelle L. 2013. Sexuality Now: Embracing Diversity. 4th ed. Bell: Wadsworth. Carter, Carol S., and Stephen W.  Porges. 2013. The Biochemistry of Love: An Oxytocin Hypothesis. EMBO Reports 14 (1): 12–16. Eagle, Morris. 2007. Attachment and Sexuality. In Attachment and Sexuality, ed. Diana Diamond, Sidney J. Blatt, and Joseph D. Lichtenberg, 27–50. New York: The Analytic Press.

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Fromm, Erich. 1957. The Art of Loving. London: Allen & Unwin. Jenkins, Alan. 2009. Becoming Ethical: A Parallel, Political Journey with Men Who Have Abused. Dorset: Russell House Publishing Ltd. Levine, Stephen B. 2005. What Is Love Anyway? Journal of Sex & Marital Therapy 3: 143–151. Mitchell, Stephen A. 1997. Psychoanalysis and the Degradation of Romance. Psychoanalytic Dialogues 7: 23–41. ———. 2002. Can Love Last? The Fate of Romance Over Time. New  York: W.W. Norton & Co. New Philosopher. 2022. Seeking Love. 35:1. Poet Press, Australia. OECD Family Database. 2022. https://www.oecd.org/els/family/database. htm. Accessed 1 November 2022. Perel, Esther. 2007. Mating in Captivity: Sex, Lies and Domestic Bliss. London: Hodder & Stoughton. Regan, Pamela C. 2011. Close Relationships. New York: Routledge. Siegel, Daniel J. 2017. Mind: A Journey to the Heart of Being Human. New York: W.W. Norton. Soble, Alan. 1998. Philosophy of Sex and Love. Saint Paul: Paragon House.

CHAPTER 9

Consensuality: Love and Sex Post #Metoo Rose Williams

Abstract  This chapter summarises some key ideas in the fields of social psychology, somatic inquiry and psychotherapy, social contract and sexual consent, the role of imagination in inter-personal ethics, and the impacts and potential of aesthetics, imagination, and representation in culture for generating new social paradigms. By knitting together these themes from a creative arts psychotherapy perspective, this chapter theorises a psychology of consent as an essential component of love studies by considering the components, core conditions, and resources that generate mutuality across difference from a psychological perspective. These ideas represent a feeling towards something rather than a knowing, an expression of a desire for ethical mutuality rather than a grasp of it. The objective of this chapter is to show how these ideas, and their place in this edited collection, might inspire a multi-professional muddling together towards social hopefulness, and specifically a hopefulness about our capabilities to creatively engender the state of being defined here as consensuality, collectively and intimately, and to thrive in it.

R. Williams (*) Murdoch University, Perth, WA, Australia e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. Grobbelaar et al. (eds.), Contemporary Love Studies in the Arts and Humanities, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-26055-1_9

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Keywords  Consensuality • Sexual ethics • Intimacy • Psychotherapy • Expressive therapies • Relational ethics

Some Notes on Positionality and Theorising This chapter explores the potential of consensuality (Meltzer 1975) to explore gender ethics and consent in the post #Metoo age. It is written from the perspective of my professional practice as a creative arts psychotherapist with an intimate interest in somatic inquiry, representation, creativity, imagination, embodiment experience, and the sensorium for their intra-psychic, inter-personal, and social potentials. Some of these ideas are explored in past papers by this author and others in Reid Boyd et  al. (2019) on intimate civility and Dudek et al. (2022) on consensuality positioning consent within the context of sexual ethics. In Reid Boyd et al. (2019) we proposed intimate civility as a field of relational ethics across difference and in Dudek et al. (2022) consensuality as a set of psychological capacities exercised under conditions that enable intimate partners to feel together towards inter-subjective consent. This chapter places these ideas together in the emerging field of interdisciplinary love studies in the arts and humanities as a partnership between ethics and inter-personal psychology to explore the role of imagination, embodiment, and sense experience in developing skills for consensuality between people across difference and to consider the role of representation and aesthetic practice in this process. After acknowledging these starting points, this paper opens out into wide ranging ideas—intimate civility, consensuality and development of the self, somatic learning and social emotional competence, relational ethics, expressive therapies literature on imaginative and creative resources— to set out a thought-field where consensuality can be explored from many dimensions as part of love studies. It is hoped that by linking the individual and the social contract into a self-other psychology that is rich enough, it will enable consensuality to be considered as a relational philosophy that frames inter-personal capabilities that can be experienced, taught, and learnt. In doing so, it is hoped to contribute to new social paradigms about positive consensual living and relating that are emerging from the work of #Metoo activists.

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Consensuality and Somatic Inquiry: Theorising a Psychology of Consent “Consensuality” is a term coined by the psychoanalyst Donald Melzer (Meltzer 1975) to describe the imaginative play of a child. Melzer observed that a child’s imaginative and creative absorption, combined with the sensory stimulation of and concentration in the play, allowed the child to hold their senses together in consensuality within the world of their experience. Melzer speculated in his later work on skin/touch (Segal 2009) that this combination of sensory and imaginative focus and attention within the play, experienced within/through the body of the player (specifically the skin through touch), was providing the child with the opportunity to experience themselves as simultaneously contained within themselves whilst also playing in and with the world. The concept of consensuality describes the child’s observed state of mutuality of world and self. Melzer argued that the psychic materials being shaped and formed within this process were the building blocks of an embodied sense of self and of world in this moment, this experiencing consensus providing the platform for forming a stable personality as it relates to self-other knowing. He went on to describe the function of touch and the sensory organ of the skin as defining sensory features of the coming-to-know taking place within the child in this consensual experience. At the same time as Melzer’s work on the role of play, imagination, somatic embodiment, sensorium, and the impact of interoceptive experiences of sensory engagement with the world on psychic development (the period 1966–1973), Gendlin’s “felt sense” was emerging in the schools of phenomenological philosophy and social science (Gendlin 1966, 1973). Weiser-Cornell and McGavin (2020) discuss Gendlin’s felt sense as a formulation of ideas about how one might apprehend pre-conceptual information from the bedrock of human experience through the process of somatic, sensate, embodied collection of as yet unprocessed information. They write, “Images, emotions, moods, even many thoughts are experienced in and from the body, where the ‘body’ is not separate from the mind. In this experienced body we can touch directly what is preconceptual—not already divided into formed concepts” (Wieser-Cornell and McGavin, 32.). Gendlin’s felt sense emerging within the experienced body represents an emerging knowing that comes from a combination of somatic awareness of being a body of/in the world, interoceptive experience of this bodily engagement, and pre-conceptual psychic life.

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Correspondingly, the developing fields of somatic inquiry (interoceptive knowing produced from a combination of sensory and embodied engagement in the outside world of experience) and the methodology of somatic play (interoceptive and embodied engagement in the in-between real/not real state of play) emerge in dance movement education and expressive therapies literature consolidating ideas about philosophies of knowing that are simultaneously somatic, embodied, experiential, and relational (Eddy 2002; Hamel 2021; Mullan 2012; Payne et al. 2019; Tantia 2020). Martin and Dalzen’s (2021) work on the Wheel of Consent takes these ideas about the somatosensory field that lies between people and describes a framework for considering mutuality and choice making in relationships developing from a combination of interoceptive knowledge, self and other awareness, and inter-personal interaction through the body. These methodologies speak to an emerging state of being and of knowing that comes from the lived sensate body. Within the expressive therapies traditions, Eberhart and Atkins (2014) describe states of presence and being as capabilities within the therapist that move beyond skills and practices and speak instead to conditions of attention and intention that infuse the therapeutic relationship and emanate from “attitudes, values and ways of being” of the therapist (28). Levine and Kopytin (2022) affirm that the quality of attention and states of presence cultivated in the being of the therapist set the tone required for the client to risk self-expression within the expressive therapies setting and to achieve a sense of being safely contained by the therapist-client relationship in order to do so. These conditions are best able to lead to consensuality of exploration to emerge between the client-therapist dyad and to progress the construction of shared meaning and shared reality in the therapy that can be simultaneously beneficial for the client and the growth of the therapeutic relationship. Not forgetting that there are client-related factors that affect this core-condition situation (psychological mindedness, open orientation towards help, etc.), we can begin to see the link between a condition within the dyad of the therapist and client to be present to the emerging situation, whatever it is, and a desire to develop consensuality in the intimate space of the therapy. Looking outside the domain of professional therapy and somatic theory, I ask if we can apply these ideas that the attitudes and intentions of the participants, the lived exploration in the relationship between people, once cultivated or set in motion, can set or displace the optimal conditions for consensuality and mutuality to arise

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between them. In other words, how might this concept apply in other relationships, especially those of love and desire?

States of Play, Imagination, and Creativity The creative therapies profession has a specific orientation towards somatic experience, imagination, and creativity as combined cornerstones for psychological wellbeing, emphasising that by exercising these human qualities life enhancing potentials follow (Knill et  al. 2005). These qualities are considered the vital resources within the client, therapist, and the therapy that allow for the development of curative, psychological growth, and satisfying inter-personal relating. Levine (2019) denotes images (a creative artefact of any kind, can also be in the imagination) as working at two levels: firstly, as a work itself—so it has been worked on to come into being or is made; and secondly, as “energeia, a specific charge which is transmitted to us and moves us to action or reflection” (64). Levine (1992) observes the creative process or creativity as a quality that is a naturally occurring precondition from which images emerge, a vital and developing human phenomena. He writes, “there are forms of creativity that develop throughout the lifespan, so that the creativity of the adult and the older person is specifically different from that of the child or of the youth” and that “mature creativity is capable of integrating the opposing forces within the person in order to bring him or her to a sense of wholeness and fulfilment” (77). Within the expressive therapies traditions, creativity and imagination are often treated as akin, linked, or therapeutically adjacent human qualities and psychic processes. McNiff (2004) describes imagination as another intelligence, “a condition in which all of a person’s or a community’s resources simultaneously generate stimuli and insights without necessarily following a logical or linear sequence of actions” (223) and as a “middle realm” where the interplay between inner and outer worlds takes place (225). This middle realm or liminal space concept combines theoretical principles from Donald Winnicott (1974) with the imaginative state. Winnicott regards the operation of play as a capability within us all for suspension between real and not-real experience that can provide a transitional or middle realm from which imagination and creativity emerge. This play space can be cultivated within the therapist-client relationship from which emerges new experiences and psychic capabilities for the client. Knill et al. (2005) describes the need for the play space cultivated in

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the creative arts therapies setting to be a “disciplined play space” in which ritualised practices stimulate imagination and elicit the developmental capability inherent in us all across the life course to enter into the state of play (90). This process requires the client to access their inherent psychological capability for “incantation and magic” (Knill et al. 2005, 89) and imaginative “doing as if” so accessible to them as children in the process of play and to re-ignite it at any life stage within the disciplined play space of the creative therapy session (88). Imagination, creativity, and play taken together with the concepts of developing relational conditions through cultivation of states of presence, being, and intention contribute to the project of consensuality within interdisciplinary love studies. However, how can these concepts be translated into skills for relating and why are they specifically helpful when theorising ethics, relationships, and consent?

Moral Injury and Repair: A Case for Imaginative Ethics and Ethical Imagination Recovery from the injuries sustained when relationships become non-­ consensual is a complex field. Experienced as micro-aggressions in everyday life through to the emergence of violence in all its forms, many survivors of inter-personal violence and micro-aggressive cultures argue that the existential, moral, and ethical dimensions of their injuries endure after many other types of injury fade or resolve (Clarke et al. 2021; Herman 1997; Sue 2010). The joint concepts of moral injury and moral repair (Litz et al. 2009; Shay 2014), emerging from literature about war veterans’ experiences in armed conflict, relates to violations of deeply held moral beliefs (injury) and the reparative experience of events which affirm deeply held moral beliefs (repair). Moral injuries occur when the individual has felt a sense of transgression of a moral belief taking place. These injuries represent psychological harms that accumulate from experiences in which an individual’s internalised moral compass and normative expectations about their lives—their own actions and their personal moral capability and that of others, the moral norms they apply to the world around them—are significantly or repeatedly transgressed. Moral repair takes place when an individual can experience affirmation of deeply held moral beliefs even when also suffering from other types of traumatic injury. The

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moral injury literature affirms that violence in all its forms requires a transgression of safe and socially contracted moral and relational norms. Harmful transgressions and how these are perceived and experienced by participants in a relationship are significantly variable (Lilienfeld 2017). The variability highlights the existence of conflicts between people about what safe relationships are, shifts degrees of personal agency to assert rules of engagement about what feels safe to do, and foregrounds the social contracts assumed between the individuals who develop that specific relationship. How safe each of us need to feel in order to consider a relationship safe enough to function, either intimately or publicly, is predicated on these negotiated elements. Conversely, what is considered to be transgressive by some is not always harmful if consensual agreement has taken place and if negotiation and understanding about the contract of the relationship is truly mutually negotiated and agreed by its participants. That is to say, psychological and emotional safety is both highly individual and also stratified through complex social, cultural, and moral/ ethical encoding operations taking place in societies at large and at the site of the relating individuals. The contemporary field of trauma therapy recognises the mutuality of recovery and sociality, considering social and community activation as an essential counterpart to a return of heath for individuals in trauma recovery work (Briere and Scott 2014; Herman 1997; Rothschild 2021; Van Der Kolk 2014). Survivor movements communicate that regaining a sense of safety does not occur simply when personal symptoms might relent. Regaining psychological safety in some form takes place in the world of relating to other people, in the social dynamics of advocating for safer experiences in the social world as a whole, and not just in the individual universe of intra-psychic experience of the survivors themselves. The neuroscience turn in trauma therapy asks us to understand psychological safety as something that requires a beyond-­ social, beyond-psychological, and beyond-socio/cultural position, too, inviting a bio-sensitive idea of embodiment rather than just a somatic one (King 2016, 2022; Ogden and Fisher 2015). For example, neuroceptivity relates to the science of neural processing in which human beings’ neural processes are working at embodied, organic, pre-conscious, and pre-­ conceptual levels to scan for safety (Porges 2017). The neural system sends interoceptive cues to our bodies to increase physical guardedness or to allow for relaxation and the physical sense-perception of safety. This information gathering and cuing is not generally processed psychologically or inter-personally but is inter-dependant on our bodies relating to and in the

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world. In somatic based therapy, these neuroceptive processes can be brought more into mind where useful to do so when re-constructing felt-­ safety or psychological safety during the process of healing from trauma (Levine 2008; Ogden and Fisher 2015).

The Art of the Interaction: Aesthetics, Fiction, Representation, and The Imaginary For trauma clinicians in the expressive therapies, we know well that these moral and ethical injuries are played out in the imagination of the sufferer (Levine 2009; Malchiodi 2020), including the parts of us that know through images and sense perceptions what it is we are being or experiencing and how this perception shapes our psyche and developing self-states. Within the sensorium more specifically, the effects of violence long resonate including in responses such as flinching for fear of being attacked when someone walks past or having flashbacks in the form of sensory registrations including responses to particular smells, words, tone of voice, lighting, and spatial awareness. Creativity, imagination, and the sensorium are logically an important starting point for restoration of psychological safety for survivors of harm and a doorway to exploration of other domains of injury they may have incurred. Arguably, these resources can also be used for engendering deeper understanding of the dynamics of harms and repairs taking place within the social domain. Bos and Huss (2022), Levine and Levine (2011), and McNiff (1998, 2004, 2015) write specifically on aesthetic imaginative practice at the community or collective level as uniquely restorative, particularly at the site of supra-individual harms (such as war, political conflict, stigma, and workplaces). The emphasis in expressive therapy of the art-making process is because images (sounds/actions/made objects/any creative output) are seen as carrying the capability for holding and expressing aesthesis or the “ahh” or outbreath associated with an arrival of felt experience associated with being affected by the work made. In the world of creative therapies, the interest in collective representation to address shared realities is not in the first instance a call for more political art or a connection to the politics of art making with a political or activist message. Rather, it is a process-oriented interest in what making collectively and collectively representing can achieve when expressing shared realities in aesthetic forms takes on a socially restorative function. If we consider that aesthetic representation is uniquely capable of affecting its audiences

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(maker and audiences) in relation to the shared harms and concerns depicted or explored—at the scale of the individual up to that of the supra-­ national—then we can also consider its potential function as a reparative social paradigm in itself. For example, the Metoo hashtag could be considered the gallery for representation and viewing shared realities about sexual harassment and gender ethics and acting as a reparative social process of its own.

Ending Here? This chapter summarises some key ideas in the fields of social psychology, somatic inquiry and psychotherapy, social contract and sexual consent, the role of imagination in inter-personal ethics, and the impacts and potential of aesthetics, imagination, and representation in culture for generating new social paradigms. By knitting together these themes from a creative arts psychotherapy perspective, I hope to contribute to theorising a psychology of consent as an essential component of love studies by considering the components, core conditions, and resources that generate mutuality across difference from a psychological perspective. These ideas represent a feeling towards something rather than a knowing, an expression of a desire for ethical mutuality rather than a grasp of it. I hope these ideas, and their place in this edited collection, continues to inspire a multi-­professional muddling together towards social hopefulness, and specifically a hopefulness about our capabilities to creatively engender the state of being defined here as consensuality, collectively and intimately, and to thrive in it.

References Bos, Eltje, and Ephrat Huss, eds. 2022. Using Art for Social Transformation: International Perspective for Social Workers, Community Workers and Art Therapists. London: Routledge. Briere, John N., and Catherine Scott. 2014. Principles of Trauma Therapy: A Guide to Symptoms, Evaluation, and Treatment. 2nd ed. Sage Publications. Clarke, Jackie, and The Aunties. 2021. Her Say: Survivors of Domestic Abuse Tell Their Stories. Auckland: Random House. Dudek, Debra, Elizabeth Reid Boyd, Madalena Grobbelaar, and Rose Williams. 2022. Tingles and Shivers: First Kisses and Intimate Civility in Eliza Redgold’s Historical Harlequin Romances Pre-and Post #MeToo. In New Frontiers in Popular Romance: Essays on the Genre in the 21st Century, ed. Susan Fanetti, 49–61. Jefferson: McFarland.

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Eberhart, Herbert, and Atkins Sally. 2014. Presence and Process in Expressive Arts Work: At the Edge of Wonder. London: Jessica Kingsley Publishers. Eddy, Martha. 2002. Dance and Somatic Inquiry in Studios and Community Dance Programs. Journal of Dance Education 2 (4): 119–127. https://doi. org/10.1080/15290824.2002.10387220. Gendlin, Eugene. 1966. The Discovery of Felt Meaning. In Language and Meaning: Papers from the ASCD Conference The Curriculum Research Institute (Nov. 21–14, 1964 & March 20–23, 1965), ed. James B. MacDonald and Robert R.  Leeper, 45–62. Washington, DC: Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development. ———. 1973. Experiential Psychotherapy. In Current Psychotherapies, ed. Raymond Corsini, 317–352. Itasca: Peacock. Hamel, Joanne. 2021. Somatic art Therapy: Alleviating Pain and Trauma Through Art. New York: Taylor & Francis Group. Herman, Judith Lewis. 1997. Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence – From Domestic Abuse to Political Terror. New York: Basic Books. King, J. L. 2016. Art Therapy, Trauma and Neuroscience: Theoretical and Practical Perspectives (J. L. King, Ed.). Routledge. King, Juliet. 2022. Art Therapy, Trauma and Neuroscience: Theoretical and Practical Perspectives. New York: Routledge. Knill, Paolo J., Ellen G.  Levine, and Stephen K.  Levine. 2005. Principles and Practice of Expressive Arts Therapy: Towards a Therapeutic Aesthetics. Philadelphia: Jessica Kingsley. Levine, Stephen K. 1992. Poiesis: The Language of Psychology and the Speech of the Soul. London: Jessica Kingsley Publishers. Levine, Peter A. 2008. Healing Trauma: The Pioneering Program for Restoring the Wisdom of Your Body. New York: St Martin’s Press. Levine, Stephen K. 2009. Trauma, Tragedy, Therapy: The Arts and Human Suffering. London: Jessica Kingsley Ltd. ———. 2019. Philosophy of Expressive Arts Therapy: Poiesis and the Therapeutic Imagination. London: Jessica Kingsley Publishers. Levine, Stephen K., and Alexander Kopytin, eds. 2022. Ecopoiesis: A New Perspective for the Expressive and Creative Arts Therapies in the Twenty First Century. London: Jessica Kingsley Publishers. Levine, Ellen G., and Stephen K. Levine, eds. 2011. Art in Action, Expressive Arts Therapy and Social Change. London: Jessica Kingsley Publishers. Lilienfeld, Scott O. 2017. Microaggressions: Strong Claims, Inadequate Evidence. Perspectives on Psychological Science 12 (1): 138–169. Litz, Brett T., Nathan Stein, Eileen Delaney, Leslie Lebowitz, William P. Nash, Caroline Silva, and Shira Maguen. 2009. Moral Injury and Moral Repair in War Veterans: A Preliminary Model and Intervention Strategy. Clinical Psychology Review 29 (8): 695–706.

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Malchiodi, Cathy A. 2020. Trauma and Expressive Arts Therapy: Brain, Body, and Imagination in the Healing Process. New York: Guildford Publications. Martin, Betty, and Robyn Dalzen. 2021. The Art of Receiving and Giving: The Wheel of Consent. Eugene: Luminaire Press. McNiff, Shaun. 1998. Art Based Research. London: Jessica Kingsley Publishers. ———. 2004. Art Heals: How Creativity Cures the Soul. Boulder, CO: Shambhala. ———. 2015. Imagination in Action: Secrets for Unleashing Creative Expression. Boulder, CO: Shambhala. Meltzer, Donald. 1975. Explorations in Autism: A Psychoanalytic Study. New York: Clunie Press. Mullan, Kelly. 2012. The Art and Science of Somatics: Theory, History and Scientific Foundations. MALS Final Projects, 1995–2019. Ogden, Pat, and Janina Fisher. 2015. Sensorimotor Psychotherapy: Interventions for Trauma and Attachment (Norton Series on Interpersonal Neurobiology). Manhattan: WW Norton & Company. Payne, Helen, Sabine Koch, and Jennifer Tantia, eds. 2019. The Routledge International Handbook of Embodied Perspectives in Psychotherapy: Approaches from Dance Movement and Body Psychotherapies. London: Routledge. Porges, Stephen W. 2017. The Pocket Guide to the Polyvagal Theory: The Transformative Power of Feeling Safe. Manhattan: WW Norton & Co. Reid Boyd, Elizabeth, Madalena Grobbelaar, Eyal Gringart, Alise Bender, and Rose Williams. 2019. Introducing ‘Intimate Civility’: Towards a New Concept for 21st-Century Relationships. M/C Journal 22: 1. http://journal.media-­ culture.org.au/index.php/mcjournal/article/view/1491. Rothschild, Babette. 2021. Revolutionizing Trauma Treatment: Stabilisation, Safety and Nervous System Balance. Manhattan: WW Norton & Co. Segal, Naomi. 2009. Consensuality: Didier Anzieu, Gender and the Sense of Touch. Leiden: Brill. Shay, Jonathan. 2014. Moral Injury. Psychoanalytic Psychology 31 (2): 182–191. https://doi.or/10.1037/a0036090. Sue, Derald Wing. 2010. Microaggressions in Everyday Life: Race, Gender, and Sexual Orientation. Hoboken: John Wiley & Sons. Tantia, Jennifer Fran, ed. 2020. The Art and Science of Embodied Research Design: Concepts, Methods and Cases. London: Routledge. https://doi. org/10.4324/9780429429941. Van Der Kolk, Bessel. 2014. The Body Keeps the Score: Mind, Brain and Body in the Transformation of Trauma. London: Penguin Publishing Group. Weiser-Cornell, A., and McGavin, B. 2020. The concept of “felt sense” in embodied knowing and action. In The Art and Science of Embodied Research Design, ed. J. Tantia. Routledge. Winnicott, Donald. 1974. Playing and Reality. Harmondsworth: Penguin.

CHAPTER 10

Love of Process: Intimacy and Attention Within Painting, Life, and Art Paul Uhlmann and Gregory Pryor

Abstract  In this chapter, the authors address love of process within art and life to reveal a shifting, complex network of dynamic, volatile relations that are simultaneously visible and invisible. Love is explored here as an artistic process above/beyond self/other. This chapter draws from phenomenology as a theoretical framework—where knowledge is gained through embodied action. As practicing artists, the authors develop concepts and relations through a series of inter-related fragments; each artist draws on their own lived experience and engagement with process. In the first half of this chapter, Uhlmann recounts his solitary meditative walks into the night by the Indian Ocean and compares these walks with the act of painting in the studio; he introduces phenomenology as an attitude of embodiment which offers an opportunity to perceive the world anew and to transcend the self. In part two, Pryor develops an expansive investigation into the concept of dyadic relations, identifying a

P. Uhlmann (*) • G. Pryor Edith Cowan University, Mt Lawley, WA, Australia e-mail: [email protected]; [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. Grobbelaar et al. (eds.), Contemporary Love Studies in the Arts and Humanities, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-26055-1_10

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surprising correspondence between painterly and love dyads, where intimate relationships emerge between two forces. Keywords  Attention • Phenomenology • Painting • Creative process • Dyadic relations • Painterly Dyads

Introduction In this chapter the authors address love of process within art and life to reveal a shifting, complex network of dynamic, volatile relations that are simultaneously visible and invisible. Love is explored here as an artistic process above/beyond self/other. Close attention and intimacy with another or through a slow creative process such as painting becomes a political act in a period of great distraction where our attention has, as writer Johann Hari observes, been intentionally “stolen” by the increasing dominance of the internet (Hari 2022). This chapter draws from phenomenology as a theoretical framework—where knowledge is gained through embodied action. Phenomenologists including Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Gaston Bachelard, and Paul Crowther provide the scaffolding to develop inter-relations between art and life. As practicing artists, the authors develop concepts and relations through a series of inter-related fragments; each will draw on their own lived experience and engagement with process. In the first half of this chapter, Uhlmann recounts his solitary meditative walks into the night by the Indian Ocean and compares these walks with the act of painting in the studio; he introduces phenomenology as an attitude of embodiment which offers an opportunity to perceive the world anew and to transcend the self. In part two, Pryor develops an expansive investigation into the concept of dyadic relations, identifying a surprising correspondence between painterly and love dyads, where intimate relationships emerge between two forces.

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Part One: Phenomenology as Process in Love and Art Walking Blind True philosophy consists in relearning to look at the world. (Merleau-Ponty 2005, xxiii)

Having grown up in the Eastern States of Australia, relocating alone to Western Australia in the mid-1990s was initially an overwhelming and disorientating experience. With an aim of grounding myself, I began a series of twilight walks, driving to just beyond the city lights and descending on foot to the white sand dunes to the ocean. The transition of light was a wondrous spectacle, merging sulphurous greens, intense indigos, vibrant ultramarines, crimsons, and yellows. As the final rays vanished from the arching horizon, I would set out southwards along the sea’s edge. On my right, the turbulent ocean boiled with an unceasing rage, whilst on my left the wildness of the sand dunes was palpable. Night would envelop my surroundings and an infinite number of stars unencumbered by streetlights whirled overhead; during such moments, something odd occurred—my hands vanished, then my feet, and finally my body. My ego too dissolved—so that there was no division between self and world. After many hours, I reluctantly returned to my studio to find my body trembling with vibrations. My creative challenge became not a matter of aiming to paint what I saw but rather to endeavour to capture the sensations of the body (Deleuze 2005) enfolded with the environment. The philosopher of phenomenology Maurice Merleau-Ponty offers insights to engage reflexively with and to understand such experiences. Phenomenology may be understood as a philosophy and methodology to comprehend the world, but it is also an elusive term that avoids definition. For Merleau-Ponty, phenomenology involves a study of “essences” of perception or of consciousness (Merleau-Ponty 2005, vii). The philosopher Edmund Husserl famously stated that this mode of attention was to enable a return to the “things themselves” (as cited in Smith n.d.), to strive to have encounters with phenomena without prior assumptions and prejudice—to see the world anew. Phenomenologists such as Merleau-Ponty and Husserl bracket their attention to focus on phenomena and in so doing create divisions between subject and object.

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Since Rene Descartes, we have become habituated to a mind-body split—our body is internally divided from our thinking and from the world we are immersed in. Extensions of this thinking created the modern malaise of alienation which is still with us as identified by the German Romantics in the early part of the nineteenth century: from ourselves, each other, and from nature (Beiser 2003, 31). Cartesian dualism has enabled humanity to see resources as objects which can be refashioned to our common benefit, often without a holistic understanding of the ethics involved and our wider impact. For writers such as Clive Hamilton, Cartesian thinking about the world has directly contributed to climate change (2010, 134–139). The environmentalist, David Suzuki in collaboration with Amanda McConnell and Adrienne Mason, write that this divided world situates each of us within the limits of our bodies (2008, 277); we see our individuality as vastly separate from the environment and are trapped within our bodies, within our skin. Phenomenology as a process of attentive engagement with our world offers opportunities to escape these habits of mind. During my night walks, my body is the subject, and the environment through which I walk is the object. As I walk actively into this meditation, the cloak of self-consciousness gradually slips away so that object and subject merge and become one to reveal a univocal understanding of existence. The body is not separate from the world; rather the world is “flesh” as the body is flesh “—the body has emerged from the earth and is of the earth (Merleau-Ponty 1968, 136–142) and interconnected with all life forms (Suzuki et al. 2008). Merleau-Ponty (1968) articulates this dynamic as a kind of folding or doubling with the world:” “It is because there are these 2 doublings-up that are possible: the insertion of the world between the two leaves of my body, the insertion of my body between the 2 leaves of each thing and the world” (264). Painting and the Material Imagination For the painter, to fuse and translate complex life world experiences with materials becomes an intimate act of complex relations and, like love, is not easily communicated to others. As the philosopher Vilém Flusser explains, if one were to stand at the shoulder of the artist and observe all the movements in the process of making an artwork, it would not be possible to discern what has occurred. One sees movements and gestures but not the internal dynamic (Vilém Flusser 2014). An aim of the

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phenomenologist Gaston Bachelard was to develop a language to chart the creative process, to reveal and to make visible this intimate act. He outlined two main forms of creative engagement: the formal imagination and the material imagination. He argues that matter itself has a “life” which is pervaded with images (Bachelard 1987, 11–13). With the formal imagination, one is able to fashion and give shape to the structure of form in a more conscious manner. The material imagination recognises that there are images which already exist within the world that may be found within the veins of a leaf, ice crystals on a window-pane, patterns within water, the flux and pulse of the sky, within the molecules of the stuff of atoms. Bachelard insists that this “problem confronts the poet as well as the sculptor” for poetic images too, have their matter (1987, 12). Many of my paintings are imbedded within a dense void (Figs. 10.1 and 10.2). Ephemeral forms such as birds, clouds, and smoke occupy the field. However, the void is not nothing—it is not an absence. Rather, these voids are filled with pure potential, pure potency of form. To construct these fields, I often chose to mix the pigment lamp black together with other pigments suspended in a medium of layered oils. When dry, natural, Fig. 10.1  Paul Uhlmann, everything is movement 2022, oil on canvas 55 × 35 cm. (Photography: Christophe Canato)

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Fig. 10.2  Paul Uhlmann, life is movement 2022 oil on canvas, 55 × 35 cm. (Photography: Christophe Canato)

or artificial light moves through this surface, it illuminates the darkness and gives the work the appearance of a pulse. Lamp black is a lightfast permanent and opaque pigment, traditionally made by collecting soot from a beeswax candle, tallow, resin, or oil lamp. The fine film of carbon is collected to produce art products used in inks and painting (Coles and Lander 2021, 21). Carbon has been employed within the language of painting since the emergence of consciousness and is found in rock art works around the world; the earliest examples within Australia are dated at 26,000 BCE in the Nawarla Gabarnmang rock shelter in Jawoyn Country, south-western Arnhem land (Visual arts Cork prehistoric Nawarla Gabarnamng n.d.). Carbon, the “King of the Elements” within the Periodic Table is essential to life and is found in all living things. Naturally abundant in the universe and found within the sun and many stars, it is the second most abundant element in the human body after oxygen (Royal Society of Chemistry 2013). The Jewish chemist and poet Primo Levi, who was transformed by his experiences within Auschwitz, wrote a literary dream about the life of

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carbon as a mental act of resistance to the horrors he lived through. This short story traces a single molecule of carbon as it drifts through the eons. Displaced from a limestone cliff where it has dwelt undisturbed for hundreds of millions of years, it is then fused through a kiln into an object and later placed within a chimney and released into the air. Breathed in by a falcon, exhaled, it drifts for years through clouds, over deserts, forests, and limitless expanses of ice. Through great difficulty, it is taken into the leaf of a plant and recycled into the atmosphere, but not before travelling through the body of an individual via the catalyst of wine in which it is momentarily co-composed (Levi 1986, 224–233). This story underscores the passage of one carbon atom and its journey and gives shape to Bachelard’s material imagination, to make one wonder about potential new relations that become possible when it is fused into a painting, combining the formal and material imagination with already, pre-existing images within molecules and fashioned by a very particular form of love. This love of close attention enfolds experiences of the lived body with events known and unknown, controlled and not controlled. New relations and forms of love, or opposition, are created when the public engages with the surface and gazes into the depth of the works.

Part Two: Dyadic Relations—A Correspondence Between Love and Paint One of the joys of being a painter is that you get to play the role of matchmaker (Fig. 10.3). Like a parent equipped with profiles of their unmarried children at the large Xiangqin or matchmaking markets in China (Wang 2022, 547–548), a painter enters the painting field with a diverse range of chromatic, gestural, and material profiles at their disposal (Crowther 2017, 68) and initiates a process of coupling that will hopefully produce offspring in the form of a fully realised work. Couplings of all persuasions are explored and ultimately proliferate in the process of making a painting, as two brush marks come together to make meaning (Fig. 10.4). James Elkins (2000, 9) applied the language and concepts of alchemy as a way to talk about painting and to foreground an emphasis that materiality has in both pursuits. Both disciplines focus on the transformation of something mute (paint, earth) into something precious. One can equally align the process of painting to the transformations that can occur in love relationships, not so much in terms of materiality

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Fig. 10.3  Gregory Pryor. They followed a star to meet under the trees. 2019, oil on wood panel, 60 × 39.6 cm. (Photography: Eva Fernandez)

but in the complex, emotional, psychological, metaphysical, or philosophical characteristics of painting (Crowther 2017, 64) that align well with the various stages and scope found in loving relationships (Karandashev 2019, 31–39). Painterly dyads can occur quickly and unexpectedly, or even by accident, (Crowther 2017, 50) as so often happens in love dyads. Speaking of the embodied sensation found in the paintings of Francis Bacon, Deleuze (2005) could equally be talking about the frisson experienced by couples in love: “Here we are no longer in the domain of simple vibration, but that of resonance. There are thus two Figures coupled together” (46). John Currin (2010) has spoken about the excitement and exhilaration of “making things up” as a painter, how it is imbued with a “loving touch” and the surprise when it somehow makes sense or becomes something identifiable (21). At other times, a more formal process is initiated, when the individual characteristics of each “partner” brush mark are identified, analysed, and considered before any “commitment” occurs. This process is

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Fig. 10.4  Gregory Pryor. This is the place of skin and bones (detail). 2019 oil on wood panel, 60 × 39.6 cm. (Photography: The artist)

explored through a more considered and informed choice of colour, tone, speed, gesture, shape, transparency, scale, or texture of any given mark. Likewise, in the Xiangqin markets and in the proliferation of online profiles and dating apps, a more formal process ensues, where the age, looks, education, ethnicity, personality, blood type, and economic status may be assessed before a match is considered (Gui 2017, 1932; Wang 2022, 547–548). Dyadic relations are omnipresent in formal painterly analysis, whether it be the dyad of the figure/ground relationship (Crowther 2017, 68), the nexus between form and content, the endless chromatic binaries that whirr around the colour wheel, or the philosophic negotiations between light and dark, which emerged as one of the signature branding elements of the renaissance. The foundation stone of all these dyads, however, occurs when a single mark is deposited on the painting surface, looks around, and finds that it has company (Crowther 2017, 51; Elkins 2000, 51–53).

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Just as initiating a relationship can set off a rapid exchange and process of transformation (Bredow et al. 2008, 54), two previously “unattached” paint marks can find themselves in the same place at the same time and begin making mischief together. The possibilities here are endless. Some painterly dyads are instantly ignited into a fierce expression of something new only to find it short-lived, quickly dissipating and burning out. Other dyads emerge into a captivating slow-burn, where the promise of the first encounter evolves into something more substantial and ongoing (Crowther 2017, 51). This dyadic transformation in paint is dependent on the characteristics of each part. The two components may be similar, but rarely identical, given the manual subtleties of brushwork. At the other end of the scale, the two marks could form an odd or outright volatile coupling of extreme contrasts of colour, tone, shape, texture, scale, transparency, or gesture. The challenge here for the painter as matchmaker is to help painterly dyads of contrasting elements imagine a future together despite their combustible alliance. To borrow a term from studies in relationship initiation, an integrating topic needs to arise (Bredow et al. 2008, 54). This integration of painterly dyads is often aided by providing a visual context in the greater work from which they can extract clues of commonality. Information gleaned from such analysis can then lead to the marks being adjusted or “updated” with a common element, such as colour, shape, or directionality. The pursuit of common interests is also a prominent feature of love dyads (Ortigue et al. 2010, 1002). If these two contrasting components are positioned in a transitional passage of the painting, however, the painterly dyad needs to fulfil a more complex task (Crowther 2017, 70). In this instance, they can retain their formal differences, but work together to facilitate the transition for the artist and eventual viewers of the work (Crowther 2017, 53, 67). This language and the related concepts of affiliation also feature in love studies through an analysis of the “unity metaphor” in love relationships, (Karandashev 2019, 137; Ortigue et al. 2010, 1002) and in phenomenological concepts of unity drawn from disclosure or disguise (Crowther 2017, 73). It took a long time for western painting to acknowledge and appreciate the painterly dyad. The classical mimetic tradition for the most part sublimated the individual expressive mark in favour of subtle blending that rendered it invisible in an effort to replicate nature (Crowther 2017, 58; Munro 2022, 242–243). Unlike the highly complex and diverse calligraphic vocabulary that evolved in Chinese painting, the painterly dyad

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was supressed in the pursuit of painting as illusionistic deception. Like some marriages that appear to be too perfectly orchestrated to be true, eventually cracks appeared in the nineteenth century when many painters stopped varnishing their paintings and allowed demonstrable brushwork to remain as witness to their expression (Ferguson et al. 2004, 17). The movement away from academic painting and conventions of aesthetic “finish” allowed the painterly dyad to emerge like a shy debutante. Identifying this shift in the work of Paul Cézanne, Merleau-Ponty’s aptly titled paper Cézanne’s Doubt provides a close analysis of the painter’s struggle and uncertainty when striving for a painterly process (which Cézanne called sensation) that corresponded to a more visceral experience of being in and perceiving the world of nature (Merleau-Ponty 1992, 14–19). Deleuze (2005, 61–63) further sharpens this analysis of Cézanne and articulates a continuum of renewal that was set in motion in his work. Rather than “trapping” perceived form inside an outline that is then filled with paint, the strokes of paint are allowed to amass in open patches and correspondences, all contributing to and “renewing” the work as a whole. Cézanne’s work was lampooned at the time for being base, amateurish, and unfinished (Ferguson et al. 2004, 18), but Merleau-Ponty saw something authentic and alive in the nervous patches of paint, which helped inform his phenomenological writings on perception. With the arrival of photography hijacking reality, artists increasingly pursued this more speculative and searching range of techniques. By the late modern era, the concept of an “unfinished” or authentic work had not only been accepted but keenly sought after (Crowther 2017, 59), and it evolved into a plethora of creative practices beyond painting that blurred the line between art and life (Kaprow and Kelley 2020, 10–12). In a testament to how seemingly cursory and incomplete painterly dyads eventually became relational, a famous east/west love dyad was ignited in the Indica gallery in London in 1966. In her exhibition titled Unfinished Paintings and Objects, the Japanese artist Yoko Ono invited the English musician John Lennon to climb a ladder and hold a magnifying glass in front of a canvas attached to the ceiling, eventually locating the tiny word yes on the otherwise blank canvas (Concannon 2014, 103). Despite this emergence of an increasingly complex array of creative practices, many of which employ sophisticated technology, teams of specialist technicians, or focus on strategies of social engagement, contemporary painters continue to engage with the endless potential and possibilities of painterly dyads (Crowther 2017, 2). Painters have now become expert

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in method, continually adding paint on the surface of a canvas, sometimes in a directed manner but at other times, knowing that if you allow paint to work it will inform itself, be alive, and breathe (Crowther 2017, 5). Quoting painters Phillip Guston and Laura Owens, Russell Ferguson identifies a protean quality in contemporary practice (Ferguson et  al. 2004, 20). Painters often talk about this transformation, when a work begins to talk back to you, or an “internal logic” arises from the work itself (Cooke 2009). Even if obvious gestural marks are carefully blended into each other and they disappear, painters are cognisant of the contribution they play in the memory of the work (Crowther 2017, 59). We can read the signs of passionate intimacy in a dishevelled bed, or even in the stupor and bearing of lovers who have just emerged from such an intense experience, but a remade bed, domestic order, and a well-dressed couple still carry the memory of such an experience that remains embedded in outward appearance. Volatile painterly dyads that have been blended into a uniform patch of a painting that hide obvious brushwork distinctions, or the speculative searching quality they can emit, also retain the memory of their foreplay and union (Celmins, 2003; Cooke 2009; Elkins 2000, 2, 5).

Conclusion These two examples from practicing artists underscore the importance of close attention as a form of love within creative process. Phenomenology provides us with a univocal view of the universe within which this attention is experienced. Through an exploration of dyadic relations in both love and paint, surprising new insights are identified for both maker and viewer of the resulting creative outcomes.

References Bachelard, Gaston. 1987. On Poetic Imagination and Reverie: Selections from Gaston Bachelard. Rev. ed. Dallas, Tex: Spring Publications. Beiser, Frederick C. 2003. The Romantic Imperative: The Concept of Early German Romanticism. Cambridge, Mass: London: Harvard University Press. Bredow, Carrie A., Rodney M. Cate, and Ted L. Huston. 2008. Have We Met Before? A Conceptual Model of First Romantic Encounters. In Handbook of Relationship Initiation, ed. Susan Sprecher, Amy Wenzel, and John H. Harvey, 3–28. New York: Psychology Press.

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Celmins, Vija. 2003. Vija Celmins in “time.” Art 21. https://art21.org/watch/ art-­in-­the-­twenty-­first-­century/s2/vija-­celmins-­in-­time-­segment/. Accessed 25 October 2022. Coles, David, and Adrian Lander. 2021. Chromatopia: An Illustrated History of Colour. New York; New York: Thames & Hudson Inc. Concannon, Kevin. 2014. Yoko Ono’s Dreams. Performance Research 19 (2): 103–108. https://doi.org/10.1080/13528165.2014.928525. Cooke, Nigel. 2009. Nigel Cooke: New Accursed Art Club. Tate Gallery. https:// www.tate.org.uk/art/artists/nigel-­cooke-­6788/nigel-­cooke-­new-­accursed-­ art-­club. Accessed 25 October 2022. Crowther, Paul. 2017. What Drawing and Painting Really Mean: The Phenomenology of Image and Gesture. 1st ed. Routledge. https://doi-­org. ezproxy.ecu.edu.au/10.4324/9781315311852. Currin, John, Gagosian Gallery, Kara Vander Weg, and Gagosian Gallery. 2010. John Currin. New York, NY: Gagosian Gallery. Deleuze, Gilles. 2005. Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation. London: Continuum. Elkins, James. 2000. What Painting Is. New York, NY: Routledge. Ferguson, Russell, and UCLA Hammer Museum of Art and Cultural Center, and Hammer Museum. 2004. The Undiscovered Country. Los Angeles, CA: Hammer Museum, University of California, Los Angeles. Flusser, Vilém. 2014. Gestures. Minneapolis University of Minnesota. Gui, Tianhan. 2017. “Devalued” Daughters Versus “Appreciated” Sons: Gender Inequality in China’s Parent-Organized Matchmaking Markets. Journal of Family Issues 38 (13): 1923–1948. https://doi.org/10.1177/0192513X 16680012. Hamilton, Clive. 2010. Requiem for a Species: Why We Resist the Truth about Climate Change. London; Washington, DC: Earthscan. Hari, Johann. 2022. Your Attention Didn’t Collapse. It Was Stolen. The Guardian, January 2. https://www.theguardian.com/science/2022/jan/02/attention-­ span-­focus-­screens-­apps-­smartphones-­social-­media. Kaprow, Allan, and Jeff Kelley. 2020. Essays on the Blurring of Art and Life. Berkeley: University of California Press. https://doi-­org.ezproxy.ecu.edu. au/10.1525/9780520930841. Karandashev, Victor. 2019. Cross-Cultural Perspectives on the Experience and Expression of Love. Cham, Switzerland: Springer Nature. https://doi-org. ezproxy.ecu.edu.au/10.1007/978-3-030-15020-4. Levi, Primo. 1986. The Periodic Table. London: Abacus. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 1968. The Visible and the Invisible: Followed by Working Notes, Eds. Claude Lefort and Trans. Alphonso Lingis. Evanston: Northwestern University Press. ———. 1992. Sense and Non-sense, Trans. H.  L. Dreyfus and P.  A. Dreyfus. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press.

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———. 2005. Phenomenology of Perception. London: Routledge. Munro, Sarah. 2022. Tracing the Minor Gesture in Painting: A Shift from Reflection to Diffraction. Journal of Visual Art Practice 21 (3): 241–57. https://doi.org/10.1080/14702029.2022.2103984. Nawarla Gabarnmang Charcoal Drawing: Oldest Art in Australia. n.d.. www. visual-­Arts-­Cork.com. http://www.visual-­arts-­cork.com/prehistoric/nawarla-­ gabarnmang.htm. Ortigue, Stephanie, Nisa Patel, Francesco Bianchi-Demicheli, and Scott T. Grafton. 2010. Implicit Priming of Embodied Cognition on Human Motor Intention Understanding in Dyads in Love. Journal of Social and Personal Relationships 27, 7: 1001. https://doi.org/10.1177/0265407510378861. Royal Society of Chemistry. 2013. “Carbon  - Element Information, Properties and Uses | Periodic Table.” Rsc.org. Royal Society of Chemistry. 2013. https://www.rsc.org/periodic-table/element/6/carbon. Smith, Joel. n.d. Phenomenology. In Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. https:// iep.utm.edu/phenom/. Accessed 27 November 2022. Suzuki, David, Amanda McConnell, and Adrienne Mason. 2008. The Sacred Balance. Allen & Unwin. Wang, Pan. 2022. The Cultural Economy of Xiangqin: An Analysis of the “Intimate Business” on Chinese Television. Date-Renting Sites and Mobile Phones. Continuum 36 (4): 546–561. https://doi.org/10.1080/10304312.2022. 2045253.

CHAPTER 11

Conclusion: The Fire of Love Pearl Proud

Abstract  In “The Fire of Love,” Pearl Proud reflects upon how gender and race studies are areas of heated theoretical and political debate in the social sciences, particularly in the wake of equal rights movements such as Black Lives Matters and #Metoo. Proud argues that recent consciousness for black women has been in the counting of the cost of struggle, including challenging the very framing of lives and identity as having struggle and hardship at their core and acknowledging oppression fatigue, of educating others, of sharing lived experience to aid the awareness of others. She invites a reframing of this view of long-suffering selves and of being the embodiment of struggle, and a co-creating of a different narrative by which black women define themselves. She argues that self-love is, and will be, vital because self-love is a political act and a dimension of female self-­ empowerment. The essay ends with a reflection upon the significance of the Zulu concept of Ubuntu, a “seeing” of the other, an extending of a humanity and generosity of spirit to the other that has love at its core.

P. Proud (*) Community Arts Network (CAN) and ConnectGroups, Perth, WA, Australia © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. Grobbelaar et al. (eds.), Contemporary Love Studies in the Arts and Humanities, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-26055-1_11

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Keywords  Self-love • Ubuntu • Transformational leadership • Self-care • Racism • Black women

The Fire Within I have traversed from one continent to another, with a fire in my heart, at times blazing, sometimes a flickering flame, but forever burning. I am a Black woman of Zulu heritage, living for over three decades now in Boorloo, Noongar country (Perth), Western Australia. I am a Healer, a Clinician, and an Inclusion Consultant. I am a bearer of my ancestral torch with a mandate to heal. I have lived with the blessing of my ancestors for over thirty decades now. I come from a long line of matriarchs: strong, sure-footed, self-directed, formidable, and above all emancipated. The freedom of our spirits was never sought; it is a birth right, an ancestral anointing, and very much a privilege, in a world at odds with such gifting. I am a pioneer, forging connections, ancient and modern, endeavouring to ensure that healers of tomorrow shall walk a path already lit.

The Dawning of New Era: A Time for Love The dawning of a new socio-political era is upon us. As if awakening from a kind of slumber, eyes adjusting to a new dawning, ears noting different and newer voices, and the collective conscience gaining a quicker pulse, we are in a new era. The world has suddenly become smaller, the news cycle is faster, and the internet has turned us, irrespective of which corner of the globe we inhabit, into instant neighbours. Political movements and words like BLM (Black Lives Matter) and #Metoo denote concepts like diversity and inclusion, equity and justice, truth-telling, and privilege, all reference points benchmarking our morality. The rhetorical and political debates in the gender and race studies within social sciences are heated and they are demanding a new lens. The moral imperative of recent events like the deaths of Breonna Taylor, George Floyd, and Cassius Turvey, global marches for women’s equity, rights, and safety, demand an awakening from a moral slumber. We can no longer unsee the seen, or unknow the known. Our time to be in it together is here; the pandemic and its aftermath will ensure it. Some of the coined phrases in this space may be new, but the narrative has a long history and many of the issues in this space across the world are

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not new for Black folk. Much has been written about race, and topics like Critical Race Theory remains intensely contested between progressives and conservatives, particularly in North America (Gray 2021; Zurcher 2021). The construct of race has been pervasive and brutal for black and brown peoples all around the world, especially those with a history of colonisation, including Australia where truth-telling around white settlement is lacking and Aboriginal and Torres Islander First Nations peoples continue to experience traumas. This is not in the past. This is now. Racism continues to hurt. Black women have the double jeopardy of gender and race, and as such, live in parallel firing lines. Feminism and gender diversity spaces offer limited shelter for black and brown women as the discourses of each are too narrow to allow for the intersectionality described by Crenshaw (1991) and to reflect their lived experience. I coined the phrase “the bronze ceiling” because bronze is tougher than glass, so the phrase captures the limitations with which black and brown women contend. The melting of the bronze ceiling is not only fired with righteous anger and rage but also with ambition, with ritual and illumination. The bodies of black and brown women have long been viewed through a particularly problematic bifocal lens: rendered paradoxically visible, due to the melanin hue and a sense of the exotic; and simultaneously invisible, stripped of beauty and value. Black and brown female bodies have been used as canvases for painting or projecting images of both the desirable and despised, with roles in the foreground and background depending on the gaze. This sentiment has and continues to be echoed by authors and scholars worldwide. For instance, bell hooks (2014) called for the old and negative narratives regarding black bodies to be replaced by ones that challenge and unsettle, disrupt and subvert, and in her prescient book Enfleshing Freedom M. Shawn Copeland (2009) posited that black female bodies become sites of divine revelation. Nevertheless, this elevation constitutes an oppressive identity quandary because, who does not want to be associated with the divine?

Love to Reclaim Joy Recent consciousness for black women has been in the counting of the cost of struggle, including challenging the very framing of lives and our identity as having struggle and hardship at their core and acknowledging oppression fatigue, of educating others, of sharing our lived experience to

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aid the awareness of others. The invitation is that we reframe this view of long-suffering selves and of being the embodiment of struggle, instead co-creating a different narrative to define ourselves and to subscribe to. Love can aid in the reclaiming of joy (Nichol and Yee 2017). The need for abandoned laughter and celebrating our bodies and our gifts is urgent and there is a growing movement around the world, an active project. We are choosing to come out of the metaphoric trenches, to dial down the fire from raging to a gentle flame and to allow self-care, self-love, self-­ compassion, and self-nurturing to reign (Miller and Grise-Owens 2021). Self-love is, and will be, vital. Self-love is a political act and a dimension of female self-empowerment. Caring for self is not self-indulgence; it is self-preservation and an act of political warfare (Lorde 2017). Mahali (2017) suggests the mobilising of self-care collectives as a continuation of the struggle outlined. She charts the long road of struggle that has culminated in these collectives, crafting unapologetic spaces centred on the lives and lived experiences of black women, encouraging radical self-love and care as a community-building exercise as part of the contemporary revolutionary imagination, announcing in the title of her article that “Without community, there is no liberation”. Burnout expert Kelley Bonner (2022), on her Black Girl Burnout podcast, urges black women to guard against burnout. She implores us to seek rest actively, to see rest as an act of resistance and the renewal rest gives as an act of self-love. She suggests black women of all ages across continents say aye, we are ready for it, and we are going to do the thing. Likewise, ‘Black Gurl’ Ashmi Path (2022) invites black women to “Take a day for yourself. Journal and reflect in the sun. Take a walk, without rushing. Make something, just for fun. Daydream and doodle your dreams. Take a bath and nourish yourself. Meditate a bit longer. Put your soul first on the to-do list.” This valuable sharing of ‘how to’ is the intel we need to reclaim joy as a collective. A poignant representation of this movement captured in the Sis Poem by Positivewomen (2022): Sis is drinking her water. Sis is eating healthy. Sis is in the gym. Sis is taking care of her skin. Sis is reading her books. Sis is doing the work + healing herself. Sis is practicing self-love + self-care. Sis is closer to God. Sis is walking in her purpose. Sis is me. I am Sis.

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Hence, whilst hooks (2003) argued that black male cool was an alchemy for withstanding the heat of hardship and staying centred, a modern, feminine equally alchemising response is the claiming of “Black Girl Magic” (Positivewomen). This strategy captures the spirit of the “reclaiming joy” movement, inspiring black Sistas the world over to light the fire in the heart of the other and restore the spirit of the other. The practice of self-­ love and the expression of gratitude are fundamental components of this joy project, as is laugher and celebration of bodies and minds, which are a thing of beauty. The connection to a black history that is not marred by modern atrocities—and is a reverence of our physical, cultural, lingual, and artistic gifts—is an essential element for the continuation of our journey.

Ubuntu: I am Because We Are The Zulu approach to life, Ubuntu, is a “seeing” of the other, an extending of a humanity and generosity of spirit to the other, and it has love at its core. It is a light passed from one to another that fills the heart and keeps the spirit alive. It is a reminder that love is a birth right and part of a cultural and spiritual heritage, passed down from our ancestors to us. It gives us a sense of belonging and value. It reminds us that love is divine, that it is a tonic and a salve. It is an antidote to pain and a flame that burnishes, ameliorates, soothes, heals, and transforms. Love as a spiritual practice, is a communing with, an embodiment of the flame of love. It is an invitation to all of us to jump into spirit. Ubuntu, generally translated as “I am because we are,” is a sentiment so salient to the call for social inclusivity and the transformation of society; it is the primary theme of The Global Agenda for Social Work and Social Development Framework for 2020–2030 (IFSW 2020). Hence, whilst not a novel revelation, it seems the notion of love and allyship as being transformative for communities is also awakening from its slumber in this new era. We can infuse our communities with love. We can bask in the collective warmth of embodied love. The garnering of a unified strength allows for a melding of new consciousness with the wisdom of old, a fortification of love for the self, love for our brothers and sisters, a love for community. I am fortunate to have been bestowed the gift of Sistahood. I experience love as a Sista act. I belong to a Circle of Sistas. We are travelling the journey of life together. We affirm one another, we remind one another of the essentials, we bear witness for one another, we share our burdens with

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one another, we soothe pain for one another, we shine our collective moral compasses together, we guard against life’s ills and compassion fatigue for one another, we express our values together, we learn from our diversities including race, together, we celebrate our woman-ness together, we marvel at the beauty of life together, and at times we are giddy with the joy of life, together. Above all, we stoke our fires for one another, and we choose love together. I was born with a fire within, tasked with using it as a healing energy. It can be gentle as to provide warmth to hearts but can be so fierce as to scorch and burn to a cinder. Injustice, unfairness, and disrespect turn my fire fierce. I have the fire of love in my heart, and a joy sprinkled with Black Girl Magic, and my eye is on that ceiling the colour of bronze. What could be more Black Girl Magic than that?

References Bonner, Kelley. 2022. Daily Practices to Heal with Kelley Bonner. Black Girl Burnout (podcast). https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/black-­girl-­burn-­ out/id1598362678. Accessed 29 November 2022. Copeland, M.  Shawn. 2009. Enfleshing Freedom: Body, Race, and Being. Minneapolis: Fortress Press. Crenshaw, Kimberle. 1991. Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence against Women of Color. Stanford Law Review 43 (6): 1241–1299. https://doi.org/10.2307/1229039. Gray. 2021. What is Critical Race Theory and What is Not? The Conversation. https:// theconversation.com/critical-­race-­theory-­what-­it-­is-­and-­what-­it-­isnt-­162752. hooks, bell. 2003. We Real Cool: Black Men and Masculinity. New York: Routledge. ———. 2014. Black Looks. London: Routledge. International Federation of Social Workers (IFSW). 2020. Global Agenda for Social Work and Development Framework Co-building Inclusive Social Transformation. IFSW. https://www.ifsw.org/2020-­to-­2030-­global-­agenda-­ for-­social-­work-­and-­social-­development-­framework-­co-­building-­inclusive-­ social-­transformation/. Accessed 29 November 2022. Lorde, Audre. 2017. A Burst of Light: Essay. In A Burst of Light and Other Essays. Garden City, NY: Dover. Mahali, Alunde. 2017. “Without Community, There is No Liberation:” On #BlackGirlMagic and the Rise of Black Woman-Centred Collectives in South Africa. Agenda 31 (1): 28–41. https://doi.org/10.1080/1013095 0.2017.1351093. Miller, Justin Jay, and Erline Grise-Owens. 2021. World Social Work Day 2021: Ubuntu and Self Care. The New Social Worker. https://socialworker.com/

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feature-­articles/self-­care/world-­social-­work-­day-­ubuntu-­self-­care/. Accessed 29 November 2022. Nichol, Donna J., and Jennifer A. Yee. 2017. “Reclaiming Our Time”: Women of Color Faculty and Radical Self-Care in the Academy. Feminist Teacher 27 (2–3): 133–156. https://doi.org/10.5406/femteacher.26.2.2-­3.0133. Path, Ashmi. 2022. Give Yourself Permission, @ASHMIPATH, Instagram, 13 October 2022. https://www.instagram.com/ashmi.path/related_ profiles/?hl=en. Accessed 29 November 2022. Positivewomen. 2022. Sis Poem. Instagram. 4 September 2022. https://twitter. com/bychiamaka/status/1132344455359619073. Accessed 29 November 2022. Zurcher. 2021. Critical Race Theory: The Concept Dividing the US. BBC. https:// www.bbc.com/news/world-­us-­canada-­57908808. Accessed 29 November 2022.

Index

NUMBERS AND SYMBOLS #Metoo, 98–105 A Activism, 2–11 Adaptation, 64, 69, 70 Aesthetics, 98, 104–105 Agape, 3, 28, 30–31, 33–35 Art, 110–120 Artificial heart, 53, 57 Asylum, 28–29, 31, 33, 35 Attachment, 21, 34, 52, 71, 76, 78–81, 89, 90, 92–94 Attention, 110–120 Austen, Jane, 64, 65 B Black women, 124–126 Borders, 28–30, 32, 34, 40–48 Bronze, 125, 128

C Care, 52–60 Conflict, 16–23 Consensuality, 98–105 Consent, 98–102, 105 Coupling, 115, 118 Creative process, 110, 113 Creativity, 17, 98, 101–102, 104 D Dalai Lama, 3 Death, 33, 44, 66–70, 90, 124 Dialectical, 80, 81 Displacement, 28 Domestic love, 92 Dyadic relations, 110, 116–120 E Ecosocial, 2–11 Empathy, 23, 28, 31, 34, 35, 76, 78–82

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. Grobbelaar et al. (eds.), Contemporary Love Studies in the Arts and Humanities, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-26055-1

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INDEX

Eros, 22, 30, 64, 65, 68, 70, 77, 80 Ethics, 2, 4, 6, 18, 78, 98, 102–105 Expressive therapies, 98, 100, 101, 104 F Family, 40, 42, 43, 45, 47, 66, 68, 69, 76, 77, 79, 80, 82, 83 Fire, 124–128 Friendship, 2, 18, 19, 30, 47, 70, 76, 77, 80–83, 90 G God, 89 Greek myth, 90 H Harmful love, 89, 92 Health humanities, 52–60 Heart, 52–60 Heart failure, 57 hooks, bell, 2, 3, 16, 68, 78, 82, 125, 127 Hope, 6–11 Hospitality, 28–35 Humane, 95 Humanism, 83 I Idealised love, 88–95 Imagination, 98, 99, 101–105, 112–115, 126 Inclusive, 28, 30, 34 Indifference, 28–35 Interconnectedness, 8, 11 Interpersonal violence, 76, 79

Intimacy, 98, 100 Intimate civility, 76–83 J Joy, 125–128 Judeo-Christian, 89, 91 Justice, 2–11, 17–19, 21, 55, 124 K Kierkegaard, 90 Kin, 76–83 King Lear, 53, 55, 59 Kith, 76–83 L Left ventricular assist device (LVAD), 57–60 Literary, 64–71 Literature, 3, 7, 59, 88–90, 93 Loss, 89, 92, 94 Love Ethic, 2–11 M Marriage, 40–48 Media, 64–71 Migration, 28, 29, 31, 40–48 Moral imagination, 80, 81, 83 Murdoch, Iris, 76, 80–83 N New era, 124–125, 127 Non-violence, 3, 7–9, 11 Nussbaum, Martha, 30, 34, 35, 69

 INDEX 

O Object love, 93 P Painterly dyads, 116, 118–120 Painting, 110–120 Peace, 16–23 Phenomenology, 110–115, 120 Philia, 3, 30, 70, 76, 77, 80 Policy, 28–32, 34, 35 Popular romance, 40–48 Psychology, 88–95, 98–101, 105 Psychotherapy, 105 Q Queer love, 67 R Racism, 125 Reciprocity, 31, 69, 78, 89, 90 Refugee, 28–35 Relational ethics, 98 Respect, 76, 78, 79 Romance, 64, 66–71, 77–79, 88, 94 Romeo and Juliet, 68–70

133

S Self-care, 57, 59, 60, 126 Self-love, 126, 127 Sensory, 99, 100, 104 Sex, 98–105 Sexual ethics, 98 Shakespeare, William, 53–57, 59, 60, 64, 68, 69 Social capital, 16, 18 Social construction, 76, 79 Structural change, 7, 9 T Teenagers, 68, 70 Thanatos, 68 Tragic, 89–90, 93 Transformation, 16, 21, 22, 64–66, 69 Tyranny, 88–95 U Ubuntu, 127–128 Y Yogic Peace Education, 16, 20–21, 23