Imagining “We” in the Age of “I”: Romance and Social Bonding in Contemporary Culture

Description

In the early twenty-first century shifts in gender and sexuality, work and mobility patterns and especially technology have provoked interest in perceived threats to social bonding on a global scale. This edited collection explores the fracturing of couple culture but also its persistence. Looking at a variety of media sites―including film, television, popular print fiction, new media and new technologies―this volume’s diverse range of contributors examine how mediated scenes of intimacy proliferate, while real-life experiences are cast in a newly uncertain light. The collection thus challenges a latent but growing tendency towards perceptions of romantic decline, in a variety of cultural contexts and with attention to the impact of COVID-19. This is an accessible and timely collection suitable for scholars in gender studies, media, cultural studies and communication studies. Cover Half Title Endorsement Title Page Copyright Page Table of Contents Figures Contributors Acknowledgments Introduction: Romance and Social Bonding in Contemporary Culture – Before and After Covid-19 Affective Currents in Contemporary Romantic Discourse Romantic Despair in the Age of “I” Romance in the Time of Coronavirus Innovation as Compensation Notes References 1 Abject Desires in the Age of Anger: Incels, Femcels and the Gender Politics of Unfuckability Sympathy for the Incel? The Gender of Humiliation: Love and Suffering in Late Modernity Femcels and the Gender Politics of Unfuckability No Woman Left Behind: the Illegibility of Feminine Disadvantage Notes References 2 Love Technologies: Televisual Matchmaking and algorithmic Attraction Love Matches and Computers No Accounting for Attraction Television Sparks No End in Sight Notes References 3 Negotiating Romantic Relationships in the Cell Phone Age: The Jamaican Context Notes References 4 Facing the Fig Tree: Contemporary Intimacy Culture in master of None The End of the Good Life? Happily Ever After Or Happy for Now? Making Decisions The Law of the Market and the Individual Growing Up Is There Room for “we” in the Age of “I”? Notes References 5 Open (to) Marriage: Saving Sanctioned Coupling Through Consensual Nonmonogamy Narratives Beyond Swingers and Orgies: Screening Open Marriage From Free Love to the Sharing Generation: Queering Open Marriage Getting (some) Strange: The Freebie Serially Insecure Keeping Things Open: Easy You Can Go Home Again: Wanderlust Serial(ized) Monogamy Still Notes References 6 Aliens, Mermaids and Cartoons: Neoliberal Gender Politics in twenty-First-Century South Korean Dramas The Fantasy Element: From Men to Supermen Beyond Patriarchy: a Deeper Resistance to Neoliberalism Back to the Past: Nostalgia for An Imagined Pre-Modern Korea Conclusion: Generic Hybridity for Disillusioned Youth Notes References 7 Romantic, Transnational and Messy: Intimate Spaces/Cosmopolitan Spaces in already Tomorrow in Hong Kong 1997 and Beyond An Expatriate’s Guide to the City Tales of Ordinary Hybridity Trouble in Paradise Note References 8 Mixed Feelings: (Inter)raced Romance and the Post-Millennial Romantic Comedy The Post-Millennial Romantic Comedy From What Happened to The Incredible Nostalgia, Temporality and the Great (White) Someone To All the Romcoms I’ve Loved Before Notes References 9 The Bittersweet Queer Romance: Affect and Temporality in Weekend and Paris 05:59: Théo & Hugo Note References 10 Plaisirs D’amour: Love and Popular Fiction in contemporary France France, Gender and Love Love in the World of Guillaume Musso Harlequin and the French “New Romance” Gavalda and “Courtly Love” Conclusion Notes References 11 His Baby Daddy Is An Alien?!: Mpreg Fantasies and Queer Reproductive Intimacies in Contemporary M/M Science fiction Romance Origins, Readership and Representation Within M/m Romance Aliens and Mpreg: Gender, Sexuality and Cross-Species Reproduction in Sf M/m Romance Notes References 12 Bibliographic Traces: The Material Book and the Quest for intimacy in Spike Jonze’s Her Notes References Index