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29 de abril de 2014

Romantic Love from a Queer perspective. Coral Herrera








ROMANTIC LOVE FROM A QUEER PERSPECTIVE

INTRODUCTION: ¿WHAT IS LOVE?
-          How do we build our loving culture?

o   The social construction of romantic love: laws, institutions, gender roles, patriarchal hierarchies, tags, inequality, discrimination.
o   Cultural construction of romantic love: myths, traditions, stereotypes, beliefs.
o   Our loving model in our Patriarchal Romanticism.

-          The romantic postmodern utopia. Individualism and collective goals.

1 PATRIARCAL ROMANTICISM MYTHS 
o   Media Naranja Myth
o   Love forever myth
o   Wedding for love Myth
o   Omnipotence  of Love Myth
o   Heterosexuality Myth
o   Monogamy Myth

Gender Myths: Femininity and Masculinity Myths.
o   Good girls/bad girls
o   “Don Juan”, “Prince Charming” and “Alpha Macho” myths.

2 ANALYSIS OF LOVE IN OUR CULTURE
- Multidisciplinary analysis of two movies (Pretty Woman and Dirty Dancing) and a Coca Cola advertising campaign
- Royal Weddings Analysis

3 QUEER LOVE
- Models of diverse gender identities and relationships.
- Different love is possible. Proposals to make a better world.  Proposals to build good and beautiful relations between us.




INTRODUCTION: ¿WHAT IS LOVE?

Love is not only a human feeling. Animals enjoy loving relations between them and with humans. We have survived as species thanks to love, because we have been able to feel empathy and solidarity, and to care for our children and elderly, help our sick fellows, or any people that we find suffering.

We have a lot of ways to build loving or romantic relationships, and love has been changing as economy, politics and society have changed. Our grandmothers loved in a different way we love now in this 21 century.  Love changes with history, and the laws, the beliefs, the models, the heroes and heroines, and it changes at the same time as societies change.

 Love is a very complex phenomenon: It’s a mix between hormones, enzymes, amphetamines that transform the chemistry and physics of our bodies. When we fall in love, our bodies change, and we live a revolution inside of us. Love makes us usually more handsome, or prettier, because our eyes and hair are brighter, and because our happiness enhances our beauty … it is often contagious. Our behavior changes as well: We get nervous if we are waiting for a phone call, we are a little clumsier and sometimes we say or do things we don´t usually say or do. Love is a personal revolution in our lives, because we generally become very generous and nice when we feel something beautiful … we can make a lot of crazy things like leave our jobs to find a better one, or change our country of residence … we are able to do any kind of mad and strange things in the name of love.

Love is not only a chemical issue: Love is a social and cultural construction and has an hegemonic ideology in it that is not visible to us. We think that love is an universal feeling, but the way we love each other is not the same … we love according to our religions, our socioeconomic class, the education we have received, our age, the country where we were born, the language we speak, the gender we identify with.
Our societies are based on systems that are essentially unequal: The traditional division of gender roles is the principal way to divide us in two opposite human groups, women and men. This discrimination between us has been built to make us think that we are very different and that we must partner with a member of the other group to be completed.