Love rallies: Love and materialist feminism

Abstract

In the 20th century, a number of authors engaged with the creation of a new conceptual framework to interpret love from a political perspective. They interpreted it as a political feeling and questioned the practice of relegating it to the private and intimate dimensions. In this article, light is shed on a foundational moment in the definition of this conceptual framework, looking first at Alexandra Kollontai’s reflections and then introducing Shulamith Firestone’s take on love, as the expression of a first theoretical turn. This initial subversión had a great impact on the forms in which the subsequent feminist generations theorised a political economy of love in the context of women’s struggles to become political subjects themselves and fight for their own emancipation.

Through an analysis of Kollontai’s Largo all’Eros alato! and Shulamith Firestone’s The Dialectic of Sex, both linked to materialist traditions, we identify the role that, according to the authors, love – as a political feeling – plays in women’s struggle for freedom. These first intuitions have been particularly fruitful in framing feminist contemporary approaches to “romantic love” (Illouz, Esteban, Herrera). In Kollontai’s and Firestone’s texts, love is presented as an emotional and psychic pivot upon which patriarchal domination is founded and consolidated in bourgeois-capitalist societies. Nevertheless, Kollontai argues that love also has to be understood as a psycho-social feeling with a great potential to promote emancipatory relationships for women. These two perspectives also reveal the complex role that love plays in contemporary feminist reflection and the profound transformation that emerged, between the 1920s and the 1960s, in the forms in which women were represented as a specific group in a class society (Kollontai) or as a class per se under patriarchy (Firestone).