Agenda: gender, sexuality and power

Feminists have long argued that the emotional ties that bind men and women in romantic love is a critical site for the reproduction of unequal relations of power, making the focus of love and feminism uneasy (Holland et al, 1992). It is argued that romantic love subjects women into a realm of fantasy in the service of male sexual prerogatives and power. In critiquing the reduction of love to inequality, Thomas and Cole (2009: 25) ask:

“if … love is as detrimental to women’s interests as these feminists claim, then why have so many women embraced its ideals …?”

In reconfiguring the sexual landscape, however, research has demonstrated that the exercise of power within intimate relations are highly contested domains where gender relations are negotiated, resisted, struggled over as they are reproduced, making the focus on love important to consider (Hirsch and Wardlow, 2006). Thus, the issue seeks to open up the category of love as an analytical problem. The intent here is not simply to show how love is worked upon by men and women, but to demonstrate how love is given meaning; the value attached to it and the gendered experiences in relation to broader social and material circumstances. Like Hirsch (2003), to think of relations only in terms of the exercise of male power is to miss the fact that both men and women, as gendered persons, also express love, invest heavily in it whilst simultaneously involved in daily battles over power. As Hunter (2010) and others (Cole and Thomas, 2009) have argued, the discourses and practices of love are highly charged emotional arenas, shaped not only by cultural contexts but by material structures of power.

In addressing both power and affect, the issue seeks to arrive at a way of rendering love knowable that will make us mindful of its critical value in building a fuller account of gender and sexual relations on the continent, of inequalities, of contestations, and ‘higher than hope’ the possibility of egalitarian gender relations. Thus this issue asks: What constitutes love in Africa? Where do our ideas of love come from? How is gender manifest in the expressions of love and desire? How is power embedded? How is love used as a tool, a strategy to contest and resist gender roles? What are the particular cultural and social forces that shape love and through which love is expressed?

ISBN: 1013-0950
Publisher: Agenda Feminist Media
Edition: No.96: Volume 27.2
Year of Publication: 2013