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.
Our
societies are based in the model of young, heterosexual couples with children.
The laws and the institutions only accept this way of love, and therefore this
is the way we organize our homes and communities. We usually do the same as our
grandmothers and our mothers: We are born, we grow, we study, we fall in love,
we get married, we find a job, we have babies, we have grandsons and
granddaughters, and we die.
The way in
which we learn to love, or to be a man or a woman is through culture: Songs,
tales, films, novels, TV movies and series, magazines, etc. All these
narratives offer us a map of how to build our identity and feelings. These
myths give us models that we can imitate, the stories that show us the
conflicts we are going to face in our adult lives, and the way we can overcome
them.
For
example, let’s think about Cinderella’s tale: She was a poor girl and she
wanted a change in her life, because she was not happy at home, and she didn’t
like her work cleaning the smokestack. She could have changed her life by
herself. She could have studied, look for another job, share house with her best
friends, and live happily being a self-sufficient woman.
But what
she did was … to wait. She waited and complained about her life. She waited for
another person to rescue her. And what happened was just that: One day, Prince
Charming Showed up at her house, she tried to fit her foot in the magical shoe
brought by the Prince, and she won! So the Prince took her to his beautiful
palace and she live happily for the rest of her days.
She didn´t
have to do anything but wait. She waited as Snow White did, or as Belle did as
well, she had to wait for a hundred years for her Prince Charming.
So what we
learn when we are little girls is just that it is not necessary to make changes
in our lives. All we have to do is to stay at home and wait for our rescuer.
Our loving
culture is based on patriarchal and capitalist ideology. That is why our
society allows the marriage to be between only two persons. In some countries
you can only get married with a person from the opposite sex, and the way we
stay together is in a monogamous system.
We love people as if they were our private property, that is why we say
things like: “my husband”, “my lover”, “my wife”, “my fiancée”.
We have a
strict model of love. It is the couple formed by two adults of the same age
that want to build a traditional family. All the people that love in ways other
than the previously mentioned suffer a lot because they are not free to love,
and they have to hide their feelings and their sexual orientation. In some
countries you can be killed if you love a person of your same gender, so there
is a lot of people that have to renounce to their love story if they want to be
accepted in their community.
Although
love should be a fundamental human right, in our planet we have strict rules about
who we should love, how to love, when, why and how much should we love. There
are a lot of ways to love and to build relations, but we only accept one model:
Barbie and Ken, Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie … couples idealized by media and
mythologized by our culture.
If you
don´t love in that way, you can be punished by your community (they will look
at you as if you were sick o crazy, or as if you have become a deviant monster).
You can also be punished by the laws of your country if you live in places were
non-traditional types of loving are aberrations, sins, or crimes.
ROMANTIC POSMODERN UTOPIA
Love is the
new collective religion. The postmodern act of faith believes that romantic
love is our great goal in life. Almost all of us think that love make us happier:
We don’t love love by itself, but because of all the promises it brings us,
such as happiness, harmony, stability, security, protection, abundance,
plenitude, self-realization, etc.
This is one
of our problems: We don’t love the love in itself, because love is a means to
obtain all these other things. We are not generous loving someone because we expect
a lot of things from love: we want for love to be as easy, as eternal, as
perfect, as it was created. That is why
we suffer so much trying to live the dream of love.
Love is an
utopia because we don´t enjoy it by itself, we idealize love because we think
we will be rescued. We dream with the idea that we are not going to be alone
any more, that we are going to be happy, we are not going to have problems, and
everything is going to be okay.
Love is a
postmodern utopia because it is sold as a paradise full of promises, because it
make us feel very alive. It is a magical experience, so we live it as if it
were a spiritual transcendence that allow us to contact with eternity, with THE
life and with THE death.
Love is also the only personal revolution we
do in our lives. We can leave everything and change our lives in the name of
love, we feel that the doors are opened, that we can do everything, that it is
possible to enjoy life.
Love is comprised
by a very strong group of myths. We believe in these myths as we believe in
Santa Claus, the aliens, the ghosts, or the elves. We think we are free to
love, but the real thing is that our society obligates us to find a person of
the opposite sex, and get married to have babies that will grow and will do the
same: look for a mate, get married, and have babies, for ever and ever, amen.
Love is
like anesthesia… that is very useful to keep us under control, each one of use
dreaming with our custom-made paradise. We desire the goals society wants for
us, they only have to sell us these goals with a lot of pink magic and
beautiful myths.
Love is a
globalized dream, an entertainment, and it is very useful to avoid reality, to
get lost in beautiful worlds, to escape from real world with blue princes or
pink princesses …
Love is
useful in order to be accepted in our society. If you love the right person,
you will have a big fiesta and everybody will be happy because you are “normal”
and you are “right”. If you don´t love under these parameters, if you love a
married person, a prisoner, someone too young or too old, someone of your same
sex… if you love two people, if you stay single … if you don´t obey patriarchal
morality or you break with traditions, you will be punished by the
institutions, the laws and the leaders of our society.
Love is the
last bastion of patriarchy because when we form a couple, we assume all the
myths, stereotypes, rituals and the traditional division of gender roles. And
we assumed them without thinking in all the patriarchal ideology that is inside
the tales, the films, the songs …
Love is an
utopia that makes us very unhappy because we feel that we have failed if we
haven´t find our true love. Most people are very frustrated when they can´t find
real princes, or if their relationships are not as happy as they would want.
Most of relationships make us suffer a lot: It is not easy to build equal
relationships, because women and men hung onto their gender roles and privileges
and we don´t have a lot of alternatives.
On the
other hand, there is a lot of people that have found love but they can´t live
it because it’s forbidden.
Everybody
suffers because of love, but we prefer to be in love with love, and we don’t
love people as they are, but as we would like for them to be. We inherit
traditional loving structures instead of building new ones, we hang on myths
and romantic dreams, but having a look at the divorce statistic, it is clear
that love is not forever. That is why we should try to change the reasons why
we suffer so much. One of the main causes of romantic suffering is because the
relationships based on domination and submission, on inequality, on sexism rule.
I propose that we connect with real people with love, but not through myths.
This loving
utopia is very individualistic because it is based on the idea that everyone
has to solve their own problems and that social transformation is not possible.
So everybody has to think only about individual solutions, not in social
solutions.
I think,
however, that love is a very wonderful solution for all of our problems: Xenophobia,
racism, sexism, homophobia, discrimination…
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 Male” myths.
Myths are
human constructions used to explain world around. Frequently, Plato and Aristotle
used myths to explain their theories, because when there wasn´t a scientific
method, myths were the only way humans had to talk about real and fantastic
worlds.
Myths are narratives that are used as models,
as ways to explain and face the problems, as examples to overcome fears. They
give us heroes and heroines, and ways to solve conflicts. Myths give us
emotional maps, behavioral models, and ways to get what we need or we want.
The most
important Myth in our loving culture is “… and they lived happily for ever and
ever”.
But consider
this: Nobody tells us about what happened to Cinderella, Snow White or Bella
after they married. As this is the most important day of their lives, there is
no more to tell about the lives of these princesses. We don´t know if they were
had real happy lives in their palaces because the tale always ends with the
wedding. They don’t want us to think about marriage and the problems that
people may encounter in the real world, so it’s better for us to imagine that
these princes with their princesses lived very happily together, without
problems forever.
All of our
cultural and media productions are based in this myth of patriarchal
romanticism: Women are happy when they find their perfect man, and when they
fall in love and they go to live in a very big palace with all her needs and
wishes fulfilled. She might be alone, but the myth is there to assure that she
is very happy and that this she is living a very beautiful and romantic life.
This myth has
a lot of consequences for us and especially for women. The happy endings from
Hollywood have contributed a lot to expand all over the world the idea that the
wedding day is the happiest days of our lives. Thank to this happy ending, women
dedicate so much time and energy to be beautiful to find her Prince Charming. This
is a quite enslaving type of deal, because we usually adopt gender roles to
find our romantic love, we give up our freedom, we make ourselves into
idealized little girls and by doing so we lose our power. It is a dangerous
deal because we think that when we are in love we must forget ourselves and
only think in the other person´s welfare.
SOCIAL CONSTRUCTION OF FEMININTY
We are
educated to be loved. Before we are born, everybody labels us in a way that
defines us based on gender, ethnicity, language, religion, social class, etc.
If we are
girls, we are going to learn that men have the power and that we need men to be
safe and secure. We usually grow thinking that we are inferior to men, because
they can climb trees or cross rivers, and we are not able to do it because we
are weak and faint. We admire men because they are the great writers, presidents,
scientists, sportsmen, or businessmen, we study at school what men do in history,
and we don´t have a lot of positive models of women that have done great
discoveries or achievements.
Our self-esteem
is negatively affected because we think that we need to be loved by a man in
order to be complete. Our adults teach us that women are vulnerable “by nature”,
so for us it’s very difficult to trust ourselves. We can´t be adults and are not able to make
decisions because we are always like little girls, babies, and
sweethearts.
That is how
we fall into victimization: We think that we mustn´t use or show our power, we learn it´s better
to seem unable to do things independently. We have learned from other women
that only if we are pretty we will get what we need or what we want. If you are very pretty, you can be chosen by
a prince or a rich man. And that is why we idealize love: Because we think love
will rescue us, and because we think men are stronger than us …
CULTURAL CONSTRUCTION OF FEMININITY
In our
culture, women are divided in two groups: The good girl or the bad girl.
Good girls
are usually blonde, happy at home or at a palace. Good girls are obedient, submissive,
always happy, and don’t have their own dreams beyond marriage. They are self-sacrificing,
generous, live in abnegation, and care for their husbands, sons and daughters.
Good women
don’t think about their careers or their own personal goals. Good women are
happy cleaning, cooking, looking after the grandmother or the grandfather, or caring
for sick members in the family. Good women live to love, live to dedicate their
time and energies to the house and to the members of the family. Good women
know that they belong to their husbands, and they are happy being housewives,
although nobody tell women that that is very hard work because women must work without
perceiving a salary and without paid holidays. Women’s work is essential to
keep things running in our society, but it is the worst paid and the worst valued
job in the world.
Good women
don’t live to enjoy life, but to make others enjoy their lives, to make life
easier for others but never for themselves.
BAD WOMEN
Bad women
are the models that society created to show women what happens to girls when
they are not obedient. Our culture is full of representations about this idea that
bad women are free and brave to make decisions for themselves. This kind of
woman is always painted as a monster: siren, harpy, hyena, evil, snake, witch,
vamp, etc.
Since the
beginnings of patriarchy, men have been condition to dislike free-thinking and
acting women. That is why in their narratives, bad women always find death, or
are punished in different ways: nobody talk them in her community, or become indigent,
or they get sick forever, or live alone forever.
“Bad women”
are penalized because they chose to be like the bad example: That is perfect to
teach good girls to try to be good because with these examples, we learn that being
a bad girl has a terrible impact in our lives.
We are told
that we have to avoid bad girls because they are selfish, false, and addicted
to lying. Bad girls are greedy, insatiable, disobedient, perfidious,
manipulators, treacherous and deceitful, unreliable, irrational, wild, and
sometimes crazy.
Their power
is dangerous because it can destroy our patriarchal system Bad women don’t want
to be mothers. In all of our tales, bad women try to destroy men with their
beauty and charms, so they can make love with them, but will never get married.
Men learn in these tales that they have to defend themselves from bad women.
Bad women are only there to be sexually exploited until they find a good woman.
Bad women
are dangerous because if you fall in love with them, your life is going to be a
disaster … patriarchy teaches us that free women will direct and control a
man’s life if he’s not strong enough.
Bad women can
be very attractive, but they do whatever they want with you. Men learn in these
stories that they can only get married to good, blonde, obedient girls. Good
women love strong men and they prefer to be dominated, so they don’t cause problems.
Good girls never ask questions, good girls don’t protest.
Bad women
are idealized in our culture, but they are always sacrificed. They pay a very
high price for their freedom, and for their disobedience to the patriarchal
system. In these tales, bad women have to apologize for their behavior, they
ask for forgiveness to their sins. They must show that they are sorry and that they
can be forgiven only if they promise that they’d become a good girl.
SOCIAL CONSTRUCTION OF MASCULINITY
SOME HEGEMONIC
VIRILITY KEY CONCEPTS FOR MEN:
- Avoid
anything that sounds/looks feminine
-Need to differentiate
from the rest
-Practice emotional
restraint
-Must bear
social pressure to be active and aggressive
-Show
always bravery and courage, and hide fear
-Must be
competitive and successful
-Must mask
their feelings and keep their emotions in check
-Must be
the main breadwinner.
The four assertions
that define hegemonic virility can be subsumed into: “Don´t be a sissy, don´t
be a baby, don´t be gay”.
-You have to
be important and successful
-You must
be a strong man
-You must
send everybody to hell
-You must
respect hierarchies and laws
Men
educated in patriarchal culture don’t give so much importance to love. They
learn that they have to be powerful and that they must hide their feelings.
They don’t learn how to manage their emotions because they never learn the
language of feelings, and they are not allowed to show what they feel, so they can’t
express themselves when they have problems.
Men are
educated to be the kings of their homes, and they always will defend their
freedom and their spaces because they don’t want to be dependent. They need to
feel that they don’t need women and that they are not going to be dominated by
any woman.
That is why
it’s so difficult for men to have equal relations with women: They have to live
pretending not to care about women. And feelings and emotions are supposed to
be our issues, not theirs.
So the boys
educated according to patriarchal values, grow with a lot of fear about women
and feelings: they learn that they must dominate both, be always the winner in
all gender and loving battles.
Men submit to
their gender roles to feel secure, they must always show that they are the
macho, and try to be the best at sports, business, etc. Men suffer quite a bit
trying to obey their gender obligations, because patriarchy is violent.
Masculine identity is built around violence, strength, and domination. They
have to eliminate a part of themselves to be a macho man … and they don’t have the
tools to talk about their feelings, which make them feel disconnected from
themselves.
I think it
is very important to give visibility to the new men that are breaking with
patriarchal stereotypes, myths, and roles from hegemonic virility. The good news
is that there are so many groups of men that are fighting against gender violence,
sexism, and machismo. They are deconstructing their masculinities, and inventing
other models of being a man in this XXI century, and I think that their work is
so good and so needed.
CULTURAL CONSTRUCTION OF MASCULINITY
In my
doctoral thesis I analyzed three different stereotypes of patriarchal
masculinities: Don Juan, Prince Charming, and the Alpha Macho.
Don Juan is
a myth that was born in Spain many centuries ago. Don Juan is a man that builds
his masculinity according to the number of his sexual conquests. He is a
hunter, and his virility is enhanced as he accumulates “trophies”. He very much
enjoys good women like nuns, young virgins, or devoted wives because he want to
laugh at their husbands and parents. Loving a woman was a way to joke for Don
Juan, and to dare another man. Don Juan never stays with the same woman. He
only makes love to her and goes away. He never makes love to the same woman
again.
Don Juan
visits many beds, but he finally surrenders when he meets Doña Inés. She is the
only woman in the world that can help him become a good man, overcome his
promiscuity, to be faithful, to love eternally and unconditionally.
That is why
a lot of us fall in love with promiscuous boys and we pretend to change our
lover as Doña Inés did. A very big mistake …
Prince Charming
is not as Don Juan, because charming princes always get married to you. He is
the solution to poverty, family problems, personal lacks, missery. He liberates
you to be enclosed in his big and luxurious palace, alone but very happy. Princes
Charming are very similar among them, and they have all the virtues together: They
are good people, generous, strong, healthy, sensitive, hard working, nice,
cultivated, rich, handsome, funny, responsible, mature, intelligent, sincere, active,
etc.
Prince
Charming exists in our reality: Guillermo from England, Felipe from Spain,
Philippe de Monaco … they are princes of blue blood that have chosen plebeian
women to get married to. So anyone of us can be, by luck, the queen of an
European country any day …
The last
one is the Alpha Macho in action: That kind of man that never goes to the toilet,
never sleeps, never has a rest, never needs to eat, never needs a shower or a
hug. Alpha Macho men are so strong that they appear to be like robots, machines,
super men with super powers.
Alpha
Machos never feel fear, and don’t mind death or pain. They have a very big
mission, more important than their own lives. They have to save us from aliens,
mafias, terrorists, dragons, orcs, monsters, etc. So they are martyrs, because they
are the Big Rescuers.
An Alpha
Male is a very lonely person, but our role in that kind of movies is to
discover his little heart and show him that he can love us, that he is able to
rely on us, to express his feelings. We usually ask them for protection, and
sometimes we are so clumsy that they have to put their mission and their lives
in danger because of us.
I think it
is because women usually wear high heels that they can’t run to save their own
lives, and we don’t wear appropriate clothing to be in the jungle like the
Alpha Male …
2 ANALYSIS: THREE ROMANTIC STORIES OF LOVE
1)
PRETTY WOMAN: Pretty woman is
Cinderella. She is a sex worker that wants to change her life, but she doesn´t
know how. One day appears in her life Richard Gere, her Blue Prince. He will
show her to be a dame, and she will become a respectable woman to get a place
in his life and his heart. She leaves her work and she won: he comes to rescue
her in a white and long limousine, and he goes to look for her as Romeo went to
look for Juliet. He buys a very big bouquet of roses, and asks her to be his
wife. It’s the perfect romantic dream, but there are not many Richard Geres in
the world.
2) DIRTY DANCING: is based on the tale
of the ugly duckling that becomes a charm swan when he discovers his power and
beauty. In this film, the boy is poor and she is rich. He will teach her to
dance and to rely on herself, he will teach him that love doesn´t know about
socio-economic classes, and that rich people are not bad. He becomes a woman thanks
to him, and he leaves his job as sex worker because he meets with real and truenlove.
3) COCA COLA: There are reasons to
believe.
This spot shows us that one of the reasons to believe in change is love.
You only have to find someone that loves you unconditionally, and your life
would be easier and full of happiness and goods. The world can be at war, but
it doesn´t matter if you have found your lover, because love is going to take
you to a beautiful paradise. You will feel that you are going to be happy if
you forget the wars, the poverty, the violence, the injustices of the world,
and you concentrate on your happy mate.
3 DIFFERNET LOVES
We all have
the right to be loved and to love, and romantic love is political. Love has political,
economical, social, and religious dimensions.
The
personal is political, and we have to realize that we have a problem with this
loving culture based on a patriarchal model, because all of us suffer with love
issues. First, because at school we don´t have emotional education. They talk to
us about sexuality, pregnancies, and sexually transmitted diseases, but nobody talks
us about love, or teaches us how to manage our emotions, or helps us to learn
how to build egalitarian and healthy loving relationships.
We can only
learn about love reading romantic novels or watching films with happy endings in
which love is idealized as the perfect union between people of different sexes
that don´t want to be alone and need to be complemented by a person of the
other sex.
I think it is very important to begin to talk
about feelings and emotions in forums, congresses, conferences, assemblies … we must change our individualistic utopia and
work for a better world where we can build relations not based on benefits.
We need love
without patriarchal myths, roles, or stereotypes. We need a love that can
eliminate social phobias like homophobia, trans-phobia, racism, xenophobia, and
hate speeches against human collectives.
Another
ways of loving are possible, and we have to build a more loving world. I think
that we have to join to work together to build new ways of relations.
These are a
few proposals to work and discuss about it:
-Let’s de-patriarchyze
emotions and feelings
-Love is
not suffering. Love is not pain and frustration. Love is joyfulness and
generate in people positive and beautiful feelings.
- Extend
concept of “love”: It’s better to love anybody than to love only one person. We
are not alone, we must enjoy life with the people that love us and those that we
love: friends, parents, etc.
- Create social
networks of affection and solidarity in our towns, our streets, our colleges.
-Understand
that our loving culture is the best way to transform it.
-Eliminate
social phobias, inequality, and discrimination with love.
-Build
beautiful and equal relationships based on freedom and not on our needs.
-Stop
relationships based upon domination or mutual dependency.
-Avoid
selfishness, fears, and negative emotions when we are in love. Love can be
enjoyed because it is a positive emotion, and it is a great energy that moves
the whole planet.
So let us
think that love can’t be illegal, and that we can improve our affections and
relationships with a larger concept of love, beyond labels and things that
separate and discriminate us.
Other ways
of loving are possible, and we should invent different ways to suffer less, and
enjoy more!
I gave this conference at Women´s Studies Department at Kansas State University on 1 May 2014.