Queering Love and Globalization

A recent New York Times article tells us that in reformist, modernizing China billionaire men are seeking virgin brides through a growing cottage industry in personal ads. One young woman's response to this phenomenon is to ask, "Isn't the purpose of saving our virginity to get a good price?" However, based on the broader public reaction, it appears that love outweighs the prospect of marrying into wealth for many Chinese youth, raising the question of how intimate lives and expanding economies are negotiated in an era of globalization.¹ This contest of commodified desire and enduring sentiment is being played out in many settings and with mixed results. Here, I consider some highly innovative work that has challenged us to examine love and intimacy in multiple sites in a time of market expansion on a global scale.

In fall 2005 I offered a new graduate seminar at the University of Florida titled Sex, Love, and Globalization. I wanted to design a course that would make use of the rich ethnographies now available that commingle analyses of globalization and affective relationships.² Most important, I wanted to develop a reading list that would feature feminist contributions to what is sometimes referred to as the anthropology of love. I imagined that I would present a mix of studies on both heterosexual and same-sex relations and put them into conversation through seminar discussion. In the end, I included more heteronormative case studies because I found that some of them offered exemplary analysis not only of the connections between love and emotion but also of shifting political economies under conditions of globalization.³ In class, the students and I found it productive to consider whether these ethnographies had been sufficiently inclusive of diverse sexualities and also to ask what gender and sexuality studies might find particularly salient in the works we were reading. In short, we attempted both a feminist and a queer reading of the texts.

In what follows, I want to suggest that scholars in queer studies may benefit from reading widely in the new literature on love and globalization, including that on heteronormative subject matter. Likewise, this recent body of scholarship stands to benefit from a feminist and queer critique.⁴ In some cases these works are particularly successful in opening new lines of inquiry into areas of heterosexual practice free of normative expectations of marital and familial love. Yet, often enough, the authors stop short of reimagining their field of analysis to include those outside the boundaries of conventional heterosexuality and love relations. There are certainly many other works that might have been selected for discussion here, and I mention some of them below. However, I find it both useful and stimulating to consider these recent works, even (or especially) if they may not be the standard fare of queer studies.

Toward an Anthropology of Love and Affect

Earlier work in psychological anthropology (or the culture and personality school) examined affective relations in family and society, but for my purposes I begin with a landmark study that appeared in 1990. A collection coedited by Catherine Lutz and Lila Abu-Lughod, Language and the Politics of Emotion, sought to break away from the psychological approach to internal states to consider emotion as socially constructed. Their volume begins by observing that "emotions are one of those taken-for-granted objects of both...