6-7 March 2025, Berlin, Germany
Collaborative Research Center Affective Societies, Freie Universität Berlin
https://www.sfb-affective-societies.de/veranstaltungen/news/Call-for-Papers.html
Enduring love: the political potential of chronicity
Rahil Roodsaz
This paper departs from what sociologists of love have identified as a breakdown of the social bond in late modernity more generally and in intimate love relationships specifically. Eva Illouz, for instance, speaks of “the end of love” or “unloving” as a late modern condition of intimacy. Regardless of whether individuals succeed in entering and maintaining a romantic relationship, questions such as “Is this the right person for me?”, “Am I missing out on something more meaningful?”, “Are we really happy?” or “Why can’t I be happy?” have become an integral part of daily intimate life, cultural scripts and (informal) therapeutic discourses. In contrast to this conception of the “end of love”, in this paper instead, I want to focus on enduring love.
Rather than the conditions of leaving, this paper asks what it means as well as what is takes to stay. Enduring love, as a temporality might seem an unexpected focus from a critical, queer perspective as endurance is usually associated with stagnation and thus the continuation of existing power relations. This tension between endurance and queerness refers to the idea that liberation in the realm of intimacy, sexuality and love necessitates disruption or transgression, rendering other modalities as somehow “stuck in time” or “normative”. Indeed, what we learn from scholars of queer temporality is that queer time is non-developmental, non-reproductive, and non-normative; temporal qualities that exist in tension with other temporalities, such as maintenance, repetition, endurance and repairment.
The maintenance of love, however, often entails the chronicity of invisible and taken for granted practices that seem to be at odds with late-modern or neoliberal demands to upgrade and to improve as described by Illouz and others. Feminist scholars and scholars in critical time studies have extensively argued that time of the clock as a linear, commodified time that can be “bought”, “invested” or “wasted” dominates temporalities of love and care interactions which are traditionally considered feminine tasks. The main argument here is that different temporalities characterizing everyday life clash, while linear (work) time dominates all aspects of life.
Against this backdrop, I ask in this paper, could enduring love represent a radical refusal to upgrade, to dispose, to withdraw, to optimize, or to consume? What would it mean to expand our queer temporal analysis of love beyond disruption and to instead re-orient enduring love from “stagnation” towards “dynamics of chronicity”? How does enduring love then create conditions for newness, including, for instance, tender moments of care, of agreements and refusals, and of the precarity of affecting and being affected by another? In short, what is the political potential of chronicity in relation to love?
Rhythms of Love 