Precisely because we live in a time where the idea of individual responsibility reigns supreme, the vocation of sociology remains vital. In the same way that at the end of the nineteenth century it was radical to claim that poverty was the result not of dubious morality or weak character, but of systematic economic exploitation, it is now urgent to claim not that the failures of our private lives are the result of weak psyches, but rather that the vagaries and miseries of our emotional life are shaped by institutional arrangements. The pur - pose of this book is thus to vastly shift the angle of analysis of what is wrong in contemporary relationships. What is wrong are not dysfunctional childhoods or insuf ficiently self-aware psyches, but the set of social and cultural tensions and contradictions that have come to structure modern selves and identities. Feminist writers and thinkers have long contested both the popular belief in love as the source of all happiness and the psychological individualist understanding of the miseries of love. Contrary to popular mythology, feminists argue, romantic love is not the source of transcendence, happiness, and self-realization. Rather, it is one of the main causes of the divide between men and women, as well as one of the cultural practices through which women are made to accept (and love) their submission to men. For, when in love, men and women continue to perform the deep divisions that characterize their respective identities... --Eva Illouz, Why Love Hurts A Sociological Explanation
Posted on: Tue, 06 Jan 2015 22:29:11 +0000
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