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I just read this article  about "love in capitalist times", which resonates with many of the things that have been on mind since some time now ( although I do not identify with everything that is said here) . T he article is in Polish, so I translated an excerpt for those of you who do not speak Polish (big mistake, big mistake folks :p): “Concerning the ‘games’ and ‘intrigues’ that women are said to play in romantic relationships – the world forces them to do so. That’s also why jokes and memes about [a so-called] ‘female logic’ or rather women’s lack thereof, about how difficult it is to understand women, and how absurd is their ‘thinking something, doing something else’ principle, are misplaced. It’s not a question of [a female] nature, but of socialization. It’s a bit as if you trained a dog and then made fun of him for obeying. It’s true – it is difficult to really learn to know and understand someone who has been taught that telling the truth about their needs and de

Spoiler alert: don’t read if you intend to read/watch “The Girl on the Train” I just saw the film adaptation of the British bestseller “The Girl on the Train” and it made me see more clearly the utterly political aspect of the ‘crazy ex-girlfriend’ trope. The film shows an alcoholic woman who is gaslighted by her (former) husband into thinking that she is prone to angry and violent outbursts during her drinking blackouts. The manipulation not only makes her doubt her sanity, but leads her to think she killed another woman. Although I do not really care for the thriller and crime story aspect of the film, I found it interesting because it resonates with the white western misogynist and racist ideal of emotional restraint that hurts so many people (the ‘crazy ex-girlfriend’ trope, the ‘angry black woman’ trope, etc.). Emotions are political folks, and let’s pause for a second to thank second-wave feminists for pointing it out so clearly to us, despite all the shortcomings of t

I was just reading feminist psychiatrist Jean Baker Miller who wrote that "women, by their very existence, confront and challenge men because they have been made the embodiment of the dominant culture's unsolved problems" (Baker Miller 1988: 58). Baker Miller was talking about emotions and the issues Western culture had with them, but this statement is now true for women wearing the hijab (or the burkini) in France and beyond. Those women are reified and denied individuality  in a very gendered racist manner. French authorities fight the presence of veiled women in public because it challenges the implicit racial segregation of space (no, veiled women do not exist in the sole parallel world of the banlieue, they inhabit the country as a whole, beaches, school trips, and all), and forces white people to face the fact that their (post)colonial domination over the rest of the world (home and abroad) is fading. The post's title comes from this article .

"[W]hen we speak of housework we are not speaking of a job as other jobs, but we are speaking of the most pervasive manipulation, the most subtle and mystified violence that capitalism has ever perpetrated against any section of the working class. True, under capitalism every worker is manipulated and exploited and his/her relation to capital is totally mystified. The wage gives the impression of a fair deal: you work and you get paid, hence you and your boss are equal; while in reality the wage, rather than paying for the work you do, hides all the unpaid work that goes into profit. But the wage at least recognizes that you are a worker, and you can bargain and struggle around and against the terms and the quantity of that wage, the terms and the quantity of that work. [...]  But in the case of housework the situation is qualitatively different. The difference lies in the fact that not only has housework been imposed on women, but it has been transformed into a natural attrib

I do not agree with the way Illouz talks of the 'seduction' love exercizes on women in the last excerpt hereunder. I think it is the legacy of most of pre-modern history, through which Western women were not left much choice as to the sphere of life they wanted to express themselves in. It is not that they were particularly 'seduced' by love, it is just that they were relegated to it. Love was socially constructed as a 'female' domain, in which they had to thrive and to invest, lest they be branded ugly, masculine or spinsters (the hidden and common theme of these three patriarchal scarecrows being of course heternormativity, with its correlates of lesbo- and transphobia). And the same goes for the domestic sphere and care. Although it seems that Illouz falls here into what she denounces throughout the book (the making of social phenomena into individual struggles and responsibilities), I still find her observations enlightening.  "Precisely because we

"A contemporary Catherine [the heroine of Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights ] or Emma [the heroine of Flaubert's Madame Bovary ] would have spent a great deal of time reflecting and talking about their pain and likely found its causes in their own (or their lovers') deficient childhood. They would have derived a sense of glory not from the experience of grief, but precisely from having overcome it, through an arsenal of self-help therapeutic techniques. [T]he search for love [in high modern times] is an agonizingly difficult experience from which few modern men and women have been spared. [...] Despite the widespread and almost collective character of these experiences, our culture insists they are the result of faulty or insufficiently mature psyches. [...] The Freudian culture in which we are steeped has made the forceful claim that sexual attraction is best explained by our past experiences, and that the love preference is formed in early life in the relationship be

" The Ragged Trousers Philanthropists suggest how much worse it is to be a man of principle trapped in the same system, to know with dreadful clarity what is oppressing and wasting you, but to be powerless to do anything about it, except proselytise and wriggle and rant." Andy Miller (2014), The Year of Reading Dangerously: How Fifty Great Books (and Two Not-So-Great Ones) Saved my Life , London, Fourth Estate: 59.

"I would suggest, though, that there is a sense in which all materialisms are ‘new’ materialisms, and this is because there very notion of materiality must have a gestural or oppositional component. One might say that any intellectual movement must be somewhat uncharitable to its previous generation in order to establish a difference, and one might also say that intellectual movements as such come in dialectical response to each other; after years of insisting on the importance of social and linguistic construction, one would turn back to materiality, and then perhaps be critical of a too-immediate emphasis on matter. That may be so, but there is something about the problem of feminist materiality that is far more insistent than the standard philosophical squabbles that toggle back and forth between idealism and realism , or historicism and absolutism (or any other series of conflicts and oppositions). If one looks over the debates regarding matter, materialism and materiality o