The Contradictions of Love by Lena Gunnarsson

Author:Lena Gunnarsson [Gunnarsson, Lena]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781138904620
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Published: 2015-03-04T00:00:00+00:00

Part III

The reality of love and power: A feminist-realist depth approach

6 Loving him for who he is

The microsociology of power

Whoever he is, he is not worth all this.

And I will never

unclench my teeth long enough

to tell him so.

Alice Walker (1979/1998: 192–3)

In contemporary western welfare societies power asymmetries based on gender are not legitimate.1 Yet, ideological and judicial norms of gender equality co-exist quite harmoniously with a persisting reality of gender inequality on all levels of society, even in the Nordic countries ruled by strong norms of gender equality. Heterosexual coupledom, based on marriage or marriage-like arrangements, is perhaps the site where this contradiction is most marked. In western societies the forming of heterosexual couples is generally based on individual choice, motivated by the mutual experience of love. Not surprisingly, this historically specific grounding of intimacy in intimacy alone has given rise to optimistic sociological accounts of democratized love. If being together is entirely a matter of the rewards each of the parties experiences from this being together, then, Anthony Giddens (1992) famously argues, the lack of equality and mutuality in love will motivate the less profiting party to end the relationship. Nonetheless, as noted in the introductory chapter, the bulk of empirical research shows that the increasing lack of significant external impetuses for staying in relationships is not a sufficient condition for providing women and men with equal negotiating power within the relationship. The most poignant expression of the poor realization of norms of equal intimacy is the wide occurrence of violence in relations whose raison d’être is supposed to be love and where there are no significant economic obstacles forcing women to stay.

In Chapter 3 I embraced Jónasdóttir’s claim that sociosexuality, defined broadly so as to include women and men’s practices as both desiring-ecstatic and loving-caring beings, is currently organized in a way that ‘forces’ women to voluntarily give their love to men, even when this entails that it is exploited. In this chapter I develop an analytical framework that explains this somewhat paradoxical claim in interactionist or microsociological terms, taking the interactions in heterosexual couple relations as my object of analysis. My focus is the tension inherent in contemporary heterosexual love between, on one hand, norms of equality and freedom of choice and, on the other, persisting inequality. Following Hanne Haavind (1984), I set out from the assumption that, in a context of an ideology of gender equality, the experience of inequality ought to be largely incompatible with the experience of loving and being loved, such that when asymmetries prevail there must be mechanisms that make them appear legitimate if the experience of love is to survive. My focus is not the kind of outright abuse to which most people would object, but the normalized asymmetrical tendencies that I hold to be constitutive of contemporary western heterosexual love. Physical violence and other forms of obvious abuse can be seen as enabled by these more general tendencies, though. Nor will my focus be the unequal structuring of tasks connected to the practice of heterosexual love, such as childcare and housework.

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