The interdisciplinary research project “Contentious Emotions?” at the Collaborative Research
Center Affective Societies: Dynamics of Social Coexistence in Mobile Worlds at Freie Universität
Berlin invites scholars to submit paper proposals for a two-day workshop on love as a
contested emotion in queer*feminist art and activism taking place in Berlin on 6th and 7th
March 2025. The workshop language will be English.

“Love is more than a cultural idea”, sociologist Eva Illouz [2013 (2011)] wrote, “it is a social
foundation for the self.” For queer*feminist selves, love can pose a specific challenge: while
some celebrate it as a liberating, unifying, and solidarity-building force, others condemn it for
being an emotional trap that underpins dependency and exploitation within romantic
relationships and nuclear families. These challenges to queer*feminist love can also change
over time reflecting new developments in the culture of emotions in general such as
“emotionalization” or “reflexive emotionality” (Patunly et al. 2019). According to these
current diagnoses, emotions are becoming more valorised, individualized and reflexive,
modifying the ways emotions are experienced, expressed and negotiated. Thus, as Jónasdóttir
and Ferguson (2014) have pointed out ten years ago, love does not only remain a “question
for feminism in the twenty-first century”, but becomes recontextualised as the emotional
culture around it shifts.

Today, we are observing how love receives renewed attention as a cultural, particularly
contested resource within queer*feminist movements. Political groups experiment and
negotiate new care practices and an increased number of books conceptualises love as a
nuanced political and literary subject. bell hooks' book “all about love” (2000), which has
gained popularity with a new generation of readers, explains for example how people can love
better, whereas the narrator of Constance Debré’s novel Love Me Tender (2020) blatantly asks
her readership “When do we break up with love?” Not least, the queer*feminist debates
surrounding the #MeToo movement, which have reanimated differences in the way activists
envision appropriate responses to sexual abuse “through individual empowerment, or
through collective liberation” (Donegan 2018), have also shed light on diverging
understandings of the social foundations of the emotional self – a conflict that is reflected on
in Laura Leupi’s The Alphabet of Sexualised Violence (2024).
In this two-day workshop we wish to ask how recent tendencies to perceive and depict
emotions in ways that have been described as “emotionalization” or “reflexive emotionality”
(Patunly et al. 2019) also alter semantics and negotiations of love in queer*feminist literature,
art, and activism. We will examine how queer*feminist actors criticise, valorise, and depict
love as a “cultural resource” and “strategy of action” (Swidler 2001), as a “power” or
“motivator” (García-Andrade, Gunnarsson, Jónasdóttir 2018) or as work done in the name of
“emotional reproduction” (Gotby 2023). How does love become embedded in controversies
and contestations, but also efforts of community-building, empowerment and meaningful
relationship making? How do such moments of fissure and fusion relate to a late-modern
perceptions and experiences of emotional complexity and individuality and what are their
conditions? What languages and emotion repertoires are employed to talk about love and
which literary and artistic positions take part in these negotiations?
We would like to be particularly attentive towards forms and norms of feeling at the overlap
of activism and art/literature, as well as intergenerational and intersectional perspectives on
love since we assume these fields to be pivotal for the development of new emotion
repertoires.

We welcome contributions on, but not limited to, the following topics (we encourage
engagements with these general ideas in very specific contexts):

– Different cultural perceptions and strategies of love as a matter of dispute within
queer*feminist movements or between different queer*feminist actors
– Negotiations on the role that love plays in queer*feminist practices concerning
activism, (care) work, housing, sexual and reproductive self-determination
– The representation of love as a controversial emotion in historical and contemporary
queer*feminist artistic or literary positions and practices
– Queer*feminist love and “emotionalization”
– Queer*feminist love and new forms of exclusion, inequalities and dilemmas

If you are interested in joining us, you are welcome to submit an abstract (approximately 500
words) along with a short bio (no more than 100 words) to the workshop organisers Aletta
Diefenbach (she/her) (aletta.diefenbach@fu-berlin.de) and Gesa Jessen (she/her)
(gesa.jessen@fu-berlin.de) by October 31, 2024. Invited participants will be notified by
November 30, 2024 and will be asked to prepare a presentation of approximately 20 minutes.
We further intend to publish an anthology on the workshop’s topic.

We are very much looking forward to your contributions and our discussions!