73: Romance Was Never Real: From Courtly Love to the Rise of the Fuckboy feat. Sabrina Strings

Ordinary Unhappiness

Abby and Patrick welcome Sabrina Strings, professor and North Hall Chair of Black Studies at UC Santa Barbara, to talk about her new book, The End of Love: Racism, Sexism, and the Death of Romance. The book is both a deep dive into the genealogy of western notions of "romance" - from medieval courtly love to Victorian mother/whore complexes - and a searing critique of contemporary ideologies of love, normative gender roles, practices of dating, and more. Strings takes Abby and Patrick on a journey through how a seemingly abstract "Romantic Ideal" is in fact dependent on histories of racialization, abjection, and a formulation of the bodies of black women as "the commons." Tracing the legacies of these histories to the present, they examine how love, transgressive and otherwise, gets represented in media from Sex and the City and Friends to reality TV shows from Love is Blind to the (undersung) Tool Academy. Must the legacy of Romantic love as a mechanism for perpetuating the social reproduction of inequality and subordination continue to weigh on our relationships today - or are there other possibilities? Plus: a critical theory of the fuckboy!
The End of Love is available here: https://bookshop.org/p/books/the-end-of-love-racism-sexism-and-the-death-of-romance-sabrina-strings/20054512?ean=9780807008621
Other key texts cited:
Tressie MacMillan Cottom, “In the Name of Beauty,” in Thick: And Other Essays: https://bookshop.org/p/books/thick-and-other-essays-tressie-mcmillan-cottom/12898635
Shulamith Firestone, “The Culture of Romance,” in the The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution: https://bookshop.org/p/books/the-dialectic-of-sex-the-case-for-feminist-revolution-shulamith-firestone/21357717
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Formal Chicken - Gnossienne No. 1
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