What's love got to do with it

word upside-down. The critical approach of Mary Evans is, then, a good
starting point, solid enough to use for some reflection. First of all, it is solid
because it takes ‘love’ in its external composition, where external means
the effective behaviours and representations that nowadays produce its
meanings, or as she says ‘the social implications of love’ (Evans, 2003: 7)
related to an ‘external self’ (p. 17). The second point she makes is that love
is considered in connection to the historical and social figurations of mar-
riage (p. 7): love becomes, thus, the situation where genders perform and
negotiate their social identities vis-a-vis one another. The next step she
takes is to articulate the relationship between love and desire – and the
tendency of the latter to reduce itself to lust – in order to clarify a ‘new
moral order (that) has yet to emerge’ (p. 22).

This last step brings me squarely into an overlapping space of ques-

tioning, between Evans’ enquiry and my own feminist and philosophical
biography: Irigaray’s conception of sexual difference – one of the major
references of my work – puts it in terms of a renewed ethics that will lead,
as she writes, to a new ‘way of love’ (Irigaray, 2004a). Her conception
doesn’t focus, as much as Evans’ work, on the social dimension of love
though, she rather takes it in a sort of ontological approach. For my part,
I prefer naming this approach as cosmopolitical and I urge that we widen
the question introducing the difference among generations. From this lat-
ter standpoint, relationships between genders, women and men, hetero-
sexual relationships, appear to be queer, that is to say they present
themselves as a renewed enigma. How can heterosexuality be queer? The
answer can only become coherent within a genealogical account, with an
intertwining of the Italian contemporary situation and the actuality of the
Italian feminism of sexual difference.

Like many other European countries, we had a big public debate –

although a bit later – on the social and juridical recognition of homosex-
ual relationships. Because of Italian tradition as well as the intensive pres-
ence of the Vatican, the debate did not really concern the recognition of
individual rights, but rather the state of the family, its natural or histori-
cal status, its position in society, as well as the social relevance of sexual
and reproductive behaviours. Debating about queer relationships had,
then, initially a reverse effect: putting in question, while, at the same time,
reasserting, heterosexuality and its social expressions.

As feminist knowledge makes us aware, the debate, affirmative as it

may have been, was showing the loss of historical, social and common-
sensical evidence about relationships among women and men.
Considered in this way, the debate about heterosexual relationships
widens to include the crisis of the welfare state, for which family was a
fundamental source of unpaid reproductive labour, and the current trans-
formations involving the new actresses of this labour, especially women

European Journal of Women’s Studies 17(1)

coming from Southern and Eastern countries to take care of younger and
elder (Ehrenreich and Hochschild, 2004). Consequently, the debate also
concerned the fusing of the borders between domestic and public realms,
between what was of feminine concern and authority – especially decisions
and practices about the beginning and the end of life – and what was a
matter of public and state policies. These new biopolitical issues clearly
have much to do with the women’s exodus from the domestic.

This exodus can be taken as a key to read the transformations in women’s

relations and expectations of love experiences. I now consider the particular
work of Italian feminism on sexual difference politics, in part for what it has
shown and developed about these relationships. Per amore del mondo, for the
love of the world, is the title, drawn from the work of Hannah Arendt, of
the online journal of the philosophical community of Diotima (www.dioti-
mafilosofe.it). ‘Love of the world’ is the figuration of a woman’s freedom,
liberating her energy from its traditional targets: a man to marry and love, his
destiny to assume as hers, his needs as the duties to accomplish for a lifetime.
Loving the world is thus a matter of energy, language and social exchange
that mainly finds its place in homosocial relations among women. I here take
the difference made by Françoise Collin between homosexual and homoso-
cial relations, in order to point out that women’s freedom has found social
expression in a way that involves sexuality, but considered as desire, beyond
sexual choices (Giardini, 2006). Carla Lonzi (1977) has been the first to assert
the political consequences of feminine sexuality, where sexual pleasure,
desire and reproduction do not coincide. This energy thus addressing the
world has been further developed at the crossing of mystics and politics by
Lonzi herself and Luisa Muraro (1995, 2001, 2003). They think about the life
and words of those women who chose the life of the cloister, dedicating
themselves to an almighty lover and master – yes, but in accordance with a
need that brought them far beyond the family routine, as mothers and wives,
that would inevitably have led them to auto-annihilation.

I draw upon these subtle political and philosophical assumptions in

order to interpret some new feminine ways of life and of love. Here are
two recent examples concerning younger women today. The first is the
Italian trend for young women to associate with others in order to create
their own jobs, as well as the perception of being single, not as an isolated
state, but instead as a position in a social network of friendship ties
(Viviani, 2004). The second, and darker, version of this new feminine way
of loving, stands in a non-orthodox reading of feminine eating disorders,
especially anorexia and bulimia: here at stake is feminine desire having
lost the mediation both of a single object of love (petit a, as Lacan puts it)
and of previous socially codified boundaries in which to express itself, so
that it is acted as if the infinity of desire were something that must not, or
can be, swallowed in a gulp (Balzarro, 2006).

Responses to Mary Evans’ Love

Where has love for men come to, then? As Evans puts it: what is the

‘state of health of [heterosexual] “love” at the beginning of the twenty-
first century . . .’ (p. 23). Evans turns to Jane Austen’s novels, as she pursues
her questioning: ‘should we encourage its existence as a necessary,
passionate assertion of our humanity against the calculative normality of
late capitalism?’ (p. 23).

Her concern is to reveal how much the gloss of romantic love is due

more to neocapitalist ideology of consuming than to some intimate
dynamic of affections. Austen is the one who – Evans’ appreciation res-
onates with the interpretation of the Milan Women’s Bookstore Collective –
had the irony and courage to show ‘the economy of sentiments at stake in
social relationships among men and women’ (Libreria delle donne di Milano,
1982: 5) sweeping away false representations of the feminine ego in love, and
thus returning to a virtuous connection of sense and sensibility, that is to
say to a new ethics of love (Irigaray, 2004b).

I will in turn add another invitation: to observe, with the clear gaze that

Austen taught us, the real state of the art of women–men relationships,
and to find and reinvent cultural representations of them. As I am per-
suaded that sexual difference is not a matter of identities, but of positions
that move and redefine one another through history, my theoretical and
political wish consists in thinking experience and in creating well-fitting
images and representations for these times, times of fast and vivid, some-
times violent, renegotiation of our respective and asymmetric positions
(Giardini, 2004a, 2004b). In the concluding chapter, ‘The Future of Love’,
through critical reflections about the ideal of individual autonomy, which
reduces love to individual, instantaneous and controlled attraction, Evans
seems to me to suggest the odd, and very fruitful, ‘cosmopolitical’ couple
Love–(neoliberal)Capitalism and to invite a resignification of the bound-
aries of love, also in their aspect of dependency or of debt, not as a
diminution or loss of freedom, but rather as the very flesh of it. This is a
substantially new formulation – resonating with Braidotti (2006) – of what
ethics is about: responsible awareness about intensive interconnections.

REFERENCES

Balzarro, Paola (2006) L’infinito in un boccone. Roma: Sinnos.
Braidotti, Rosi (2006) Transpositions: On Nomad Ethics. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Ehrenreich, Barbara and Arlie Russell Hochschild, eds (2004) Global Woman:

Nannies, Maids, and Sex Workers in the New Economy. New York: Holt.

Giardini, Federica (2004a) ‘Pour une dynamique des sexes’, Le Passant ordinaire 50:

59–62.

Giardini, Federica (2004b) ‘La bufera infernal, che mai non resta’, DWF 3–4: 53–7.
Giardini, Federica (2006) ‘Genealogie della socialità femminile’, B@bel 2: 165–72.
Irigaray, Luce (2004a) The Way of Love. London: Continuum.

European Journal of Women’s Studies 17(1)

Irigaray, Luce (2004b) An Ethics of Sexual Difference. London: Continuum.
Libreria delle donne di Milano (1982) ‘Jane Austen’, in Catalogo Giallo. Le madri

di tutte noi. Milan: Libreria delle donne di Milano (Milan Women’s
Bookstore Collective).

Lonzi,Carla (1977) ‘Itinerario di riflessioni’, in E’ già politica. Milan: Rivolta

femminile.

Muraro, Luisa (1995) Lingua materna, scienza divina. La filosofia mistica di Margherita

Porete. Naples: Liguori.

Muraro, Luisa (2001) Le amiche di Dio. Scritti di mistica femminile. Naples: Liguori
Muraro, Luisa (2003) Il dio delle donne. Milan: Mondadori.
Viviani, Aglaia (2004) ‘Eroine del nuovo millennio’, Leggendaria 43: 39–43.

Federica Giardini teaches Political Philosophy at the Università Roma Tre. Her lat-

est investigations use the category of difference to recombine the significa-
tions of contemporary issues such as the political realm of relations between
human and non human (cosmopolitics) or relations of obedience and disobe-
dience. She is a member of the philosophical community Diotima; of the
directory board of IAPh (Internationale Assoziation von Philosophinnen,
http://www.iaph-philo.org); of the editorial board of the most ancient Italian
feminist journal, DWF.donnawomanfemme (http://www.dwf.it). She has
authored Relazioni. Differenza sessuale e fenomenologia (“Relations. Sexual dif-
ference and phenomenology”. Roma: Sossella, 2004), and has co-edited Il pen-
siero dell’esperienza (“Thinking experience”, Milano: Baldini Castoldi Dalai,
2008). Address: Dipartimento di Filosofia, Università di Roma Tre, via Ostiense, 234,
00146 Rome, Italy. [email: fgiardini @uniroma3.it]

Intimate Citizenship: A Pragmatic,

Yet Radical, Proposal for a Politics

of Personal Life

Sasha Roseneil

BIRKBECK, UNIVERSITY OF LONDON

In Love: An Unromantic Discussion, Mary Evans offers a powerful demys-
tification of contemporary western romantic love. An exercise in sociohis-
torical analysis and normative theorizing, the book explores the meanings
of (primarily heterosexual) love at the start of the 21st century, and poses
the question: ‘Dare we entertain the idea of a world without love and
could another vocabulary, in which words such as care, commitment and
desire were more often used, actually make us happier?’ (Evans, 2003: 2).
Her conclusion is to propose that ‘we abandon love in its romanticized

Responses to Mary Evans’ Love