2005 Programme Session 11

Session 11: What Does Love Have to do With It?
Chair: Roshan Nair

“Have You just Fallen Madly in Love?”: Sex, Sexuality and Science in T.C. Boyle’s The Inner Circle
Eve-Sabine Zehelein
American Studies Department, Johann Wolfgang Goethe-University Frankfurt, Frankfurt/Main, Germany

It may well be argued that the sexual revolution began in 1948 with the publication of Alfred C. Kinsey’s Sexual Behavior in the Human Male. Whereas Freud, Ellis, Mead and others had “blazed the trail” by developing the ideological and theoretical basis, it was Kinsey who provided the extensive data to show that the propagated sexual freedom was already a living reality.
This paper analyses T.C. Boyle’s 2004 “Kinsey-novel” The Inner Circle in comparison with anthropologist Helen Fisher’s 2004 bestseller Why We Love.
With Boyle and Fisher as just two poignant examples, I argue that

1. particularly in the broad field of love and sexuality we see the blurring of literary genre boundaries. Both books are genre mixes, and both derive part of their potential from the “literature vs./and science” conflict or debate.
2. the post-postmodernist movement – among other things – re-raises the ancient questions about the nature and significance of sex, love and human relationships on the basis of or assisted by “scientific” analysis and discoveries.

T.C. Boyle uses the format of a historical novel or fictional life narrative and/or biography (obviously based in huge parts on James Jones’ controversial biography Alfred C. Kinsey: A Public/Private Life (1997). His narrative builds up the overarching contrast and conflict between sexual cataloguing and experiment on the one hand (personified by Kinsey), and the attempt to build a loving marriage based on emotional dedication and obligation (personified by John Milk’s wife Iris) on the other.
Whereas “Dr. Sex” propagates that sex is just a hormonal activity, merely a physiological response and has nothing to do with marriage or love, Milk experiences “irritating emotions” such as jealousy and loving adoration for Iris which clash with Kinsey’s model of sexual promiscuity and the notion of being “just a human animal”.
Boyle’s narrator says: “You were a human animal and you were a source of data”. This attitude of reducing man to a copulating lab rat also applies in Helen Fisher’s case. Her book Why We Love oscillates between pop-science and “how to-manual”.
Fisher explains at length that numerous brain scans show that romantic love is “a universal human feeling produced by specific chemicals and networks in the brain” (51), thus clearly taking romance out of romantic love.
She argues that knowledge about the nature of love has made her feel more secure: “I know more about why I feel the various ways I feel. I can anticipate some of the behaviour around me. And I have some tools to deal with myself and others” (219).
Obviously, this credo on the last page of her book is meant to be an uplifting and positively connoted crescendo, yet this reader certainly felt utterly horrified that all emotion has been eradicated from love’s equation.
This book is a clear indicator that in a world of ever growing general anxieties and numinous fears the idea to practice complete control over one’s self and over others, based on scientific knowledge of chemical reactions in the human body, provides a vital source of security and reassurance; the “Entzauberung der Welt” has reached another high peak.
Boyle’s fictional version of the “sex and science”-topic puts romance and love back center and both leave the 21st century reader with the ancient questions: what does marriage actually mean? Are we satisfied with the idea that love is just a chemical reaction? What is love? And what role does sexuality play?

Discourses on Love and Intimacy in the ‘West’: Equalising Intimacy and Racialising Modernity
Christian Klesse
Independent Scholar, Hamburg, Germany

This paper critically explores sociological and historical accounts of the development of loving and intimate relationships in late modern societies in the ‘West’. Many grand narratives on the transformation of intimacy claim that accelerated processes of modernisation and detraditionalisation result in a diversification and democratisation of family forms and relationship patterns. Whereas feminists have convincingly shown that the discourse of a new gender democracy rests on the denial of persisting power relationships, the thesis of an enhanced equality of same-sex relationships has gone largely unchallenged. While queers have been absent from most grand (post)-modernisation narratives, they often get attributed a privileged position in the theories that include them in analysis. In particular, lesbians and gay men are constructed as the pioneers of change and the democratisation of intimacy. The paper shows a variety of problems with this sort of analysis: (A) The thesis that equality would ‘in principle’ be inherent to same-sex relationship practices rests on a reductive analysis of power that obliterates the effects of the social divisions of class, race, generation, and ability on practices of intimacy. (B) The exaggeration of the themes of detraditionalisation, individualisation, choice, and agency tends to play down structural power relationships around the social divisions around race, ethnicity, class, gender, sexuality, and disability. The author further directs attention to the fact that most theories of the ‘modernisation’ of sexuality and intimacy either implicitly or explicitly refer to cultural processes that take place in the ‘West’. The deep-running racialisation of the dichotomy modern/traditional marks a further insensitivity of most of these meta-narratives on the transformation of intimacy towards the power relations that shape post-colonial sexual and intimate cultures.

Celebrating Singlehood: Heteronormativity and Narratives of Post-Couple Culture
Shelley Budgeon
Department of Sociology, University of Birmingham, Birmingham, United Kingdom

Demographics indicate that single person households are the fastest growing household formation, signalling the beginning of what some have termed ‘the singles’ century’. This paper will identify a number of myths surrounding the figure of the single person in contemporary culture. In particular the analysis will look at how the position of being single has increasingly lost its stigma to become a status that is valorised (e.g. appearing in various lifestyle magazines, Sex and the City, and so forth). If the heterosexual couple has historically been positioned at the heart of the social formation, the emergence of a singles culture as a space for the creation of alternative lifestyles may be undermining heteronormativity. This paper will offer an analysis of the narratives that single people (across different sexual identities) construct about couple relationships and their own cultures of intimacy, constituted to a significant extent through friendships. These narratives indicate a refusal to perpetuate the privileged practices that make heterosexuality appear natural and, as a consequence heterosexuality is practised more reflexively. To the extent that heteronorms are being destabilised, significant modes of resistance for those living outside of the normalising force of heteronormative institutions are being created in cultures of intimacy that de-centre the couple. The organisation of heterosexuality, as constituted through gender, will be discussed with regards to the emergence of a particularly celebrated figure: the single woman.

Eroticism and the Postfeminist Melancholic
Diane Negra
Cogut Center for the Humanities, Brown University, USA

In recent years an aggressively postfeminist representational culture has intensified the sexual visibility of midlife women. Grandmothers can now be attributed with “gray glamour,” romantic comedy heroines are played by female stars in their late 30s and early 40s, and a variety of slang terms have emerged in popular speech to designate sexually desirable mothers, feeding a popular culture that encompasses everything from the pop hit “Stacy’s Mom” to the prime-time television phenomenon “Desperate Housewives.” As plastic surgery and other cosmetic technologies adjust the sliding scale of age-based conceptions of femininity, the correspondence between the new sexualities and the depreciating capital of female maturity deserves fuller examination.
A cluster of films in the early years of the new millennium seem to push against the trend toward unproblematic celebration of youthfulness. These films centralize an adult woman whose erotic connection to a much younger man or boy arises from a stalled relation to the past. In Birth a widow who has just become engaged is pursued by a young boy who tells her he is the reincarnation of her husband, in P.S. a college admissions officer becomes romantically involved with an applicant who bears the name and identical physical appearance of her dead former high school boyfriend, and in The Door in the Floor a grieving mother has a sexual relationship with a much younger man who reminds her of the son she has lost. In these films the experience of erotic intimacy by a female protagonist is defined purely as an access route to the past. With their connotations of necrophilia, pedophilia and incest the films disturb the conventions of the romance in striking ways. This paper will examine how the films’ suspicion that the new rhetorics of age may disenfranchise women rather than empower them is articulated through the plot device of the intergenerational romance.



2nd Global Conference Wednesday 30th November - Saturday 3rd December 2005 Vienna, Austria Conference Programme, Abstracts and Papers
Session 11: What Does Love Have to do With It? Chair: Roshan Nair “Have You just Fallen Madly in Love?”: Sex, Sexuality and Science in T.C. Boyle’s The Inner Circle Eve-Sabine Zehelein American Studies Department, Johann Wolfgang Goethe-University Frankfurt, Frankfurt/Main, Germany It may well be argued that the sexual revolution began in 1948 with the publication of Alfred C. Kinsey’s Sexual Behavior in the Human Male. Whereas Freud, Ellis, Mead and others had “blazed the trail” by developing the ideological and theoretical basis, it was Kinsey who provided the extensive data to show that the propagated sexual freedom was already a living reality. This paper analyses T.C. Boyle’s 2004 “Kinsey-novel” The Inner Circle in comparison with anthropologist Helen Fisher’s 2004 bestseller Why We Love. With Boyle and Fisher as just two poignant examples, I argue that 1. particularly in the broad field of love and sexuality we see the blurring of literary genre boundaries. Both books are genre mixes, and both derive part of their potential from the “literature vs./and science” conflict or debate. 2. the post-postmodernist movement – among other things – re-raises the ancient questions about the nature and significance of sex, love and human relationships on the basis of or assisted by “scientific” analysis and discoveries. T.C. Boyle uses the format of a historical novel or fictional life narrative and/or biography (obviously based in huge parts on James Jones’ controversial biography Alfred C. Kinsey: A Public/Private Life (1997). His narrative builds up the overarching contrast and conflict between sexual cataloguing and experiment on the one hand (personified by Kinsey), and the attempt to build a loving marriage based on emotional dedication and obligation (personified by John Milk’s wife Iris) on the other. Whereas “Dr. Sex” propagates that sex is just a hormonal activity, merely a physiological response and has nothing to do with marriage or love, Milk experiences “irritating emotions” such as jealousy and loving adoration for Iris which clash with Kinsey’s model of sexual promiscuity and the notion of being “just a human animal”. Boyle’s narrator says: “You were a human animal and you were a source of data”. This attitude of reducing man to a copulating lab rat also applies in Helen Fisher’s case. Her book Why We Love oscillates between pop-science and “how to-manual”. Fisher explains at length that numerous brain scans show that romantic love is “a universal human feeling produced by specific chemicals and networks in the brain” (51), thus clearly taking romance out of romantic love. She argues that knowledge about the nature of love has made her feel more secure: “I know more about why I feel the various ways I feel. I can anticipate some of the behaviour around me. And I have some tools to deal with myself and others” (219). Obviously, this credo on the last page of her book is meant to be an uplifting and positively connoted crescendo, yet this reader certainly felt utterly horrified that all emotion has been eradicated from love’s equation. This book is a clear indicator that in a world of ever growing general anxieties and numinous fears the idea to practice complete control over one’s self and over others, based on scientific knowledge of chemical reactions in the human body, provides a vital source of security and reassurance; the “Entzauberung der Welt” has reached another high peak. Boyle’s fictional version of the “sex and science”-topic puts romance and love back center and both leave the 21st century reader with the ancient questions: what does marriage actually mean? Are we satisfied with the idea that love is just a chemical reaction? What is love? And what role does sexuality play? Discourses on Love and Intimacy in the ‘West’: Equalising Intimacy and Racialising Modernity Christian Klesse Independent Scholar, Hamburg, Germany This paper critically explores sociological and historical accounts of the development of loving and intimate relationships in late modern societies in the ‘West’. Many grand narratives on the transformation of intimacy claim that accelerated processes of modernisation and detraditionalisation result in a diversification and democratisation of family forms and relationship patterns. Whereas feminists have convincingly shown that the discourse of a new gender democracy rests on the denial of persisting power relationships, the thesis of an enhanced equality of same-sex relationships has gone largely unchallenged. While queers have been absent from most grand (post)-modernisation narratives, they often get attributed a privileged position in the theories that include them in analysis. In particular, lesbians and gay men are constructed as the pioneers of change and the democratisation of intimacy. The paper shows a variety of problems with this sort of analysis: (A) The thesis that equality would ‘in principle’ be inherent to same-sex relationship practices rests on a reductive analysis of power that obliterates the effects of the social divisions of class, race, generation, and ability on practices of intimacy. (B) The exaggeration of the themes of detraditionalisation, individualisation, choice, and agency tends to play down structural power relationships around the social divisions around race, ethnicity, class, gender, sexuality, and disability. The author further directs attention to the fact that most theories of the ‘modernisation’ of sexuality and intimacy either implicitly or explicitly refer to cultural processes that take place in the ‘West’. The deep-running racialisation of the dichotomy modern/traditional marks a further insensitivity of most of these meta-narratives on the transformation of intimacy towards the power relations that shape post-colonial sexual and intimate cultures. Celebrating Singlehood: Heteronormativity and Narratives of Post-Couple Culture Shelley Budgeon Department of Sociology, University of Birmingham, Birmingham, United Kingdom Demographics indicate that single person households are the fastest growing household formation, signalling the beginning of what some have termed ‘the singles’ century’. This paper will identify a number of myths surrounding the figure of the single person in contemporary culture. In particular the analysis will look at how the position of being single has increasingly lost its stigma to become a status that is valorised (e.g. appearing in various lifestyle magazines, Sex and the City, and so forth). If the heterosexual couple has historically been positioned at the heart of the social formation, the emergence of a singles culture as a space for the creation of alternative lifestyles may be undermining heteronormativity. This paper will offer an analysis of the narratives that single people (across different sexual identities) construct about couple relationships and their own cultures of intimacy, constituted to a significant extent through friendships. These narratives indicate a refusal to perpetuate the privileged practices that make heterosexuality appear natural and, as a consequence heterosexuality is practised more reflexively. To the extent that heteronorms are being destabilised, significant modes of resistance for those living outside of the normalising force of heteronormative institutions are being created in cultures of intimacy that de-centre the couple. The organisation of heterosexuality, as constituted through gender, will be discussed with regards to the emergence of a particularly celebrated figure: the single woman. Eroticism and the Postfeminist Melancholic Diane Negra Cogut Center for the Humanities, Brown University, USA In recent years an aggressively postfeminist representational culture has intensified the sexual visibility of midlife women. Grandmothers can now be attributed with “gray glamour,” romantic comedy heroines are played by female stars in their late 30s and early 40s, and a variety of slang terms have emerged in popular speech to designate sexually desirable mothers, feeding a popular culture that encompasses everything from the pop hit “Stacy’s Mom” to the prime-time television phenomenon “Desperate Housewives.” As plastic surgery and other cosmetic technologies adjust the sliding scale of age-based conceptions of femininity, the correspondence between the new sexualities and the depreciating capital of female maturity deserves fuller examination. A cluster of films in the early years of the new millennium seem to push against the trend toward unproblematic celebration of youthfulness. These films centralize an adult woman whose erotic connection to a much younger man or boy arises from a stalled relation to the past. In Birth a widow who has just become engaged is pursued by a young boy who tells her he is the reincarnation of her husband, in P.S. a college admissions officer becomes romantically involved with an applicant who bears the name and identical physical appearance of her dead former high school boyfriend, and in The Door in the Floor a grieving mother has a sexual relationship with a much younger man who reminds her of the son she has lost. In these films the experience of erotic intimacy by a female protagonist is defined purely as an access route to the past. With their connotations of necrophilia, pedophilia and incest the films disturb the conventions of the romance in striking ways. This paper will examine how the films’ suspicion that the new rhetorics of age may disenfranchise women rather than empower them is articulated through the plot device of the intergenerational romance.
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