Empire of Love

Povinelli Elizabeth A. Povinelli

Description

In The Empire of Love anthropologist Elizabeth A. Povinelli reflects on a set of ethical and normative claims about the governance of love, sociality, and the body that circulates in liberal settler colonies such as the United States and Australia. She boldly theorizes intimate relations as pivotal sites where liberal logics and aspirations absorbed through settler imperialism are manifest, where discourses of self-sovereignty, social constraint, and value converge.For more than twenty years, Povinelli has traveled to the social worlds of indigenous men and women living at Belyuen, a small community in the Northern Territory of Australia. More recently she has moved across communities of alternative progressive queer movements in the United States, particularly those who identify as radical faeries. In this book she traces how liberal binary concepts of individual freedom and social constraint influence understandings of intimacy in these two worlds. At the same time, she describes alternative models of social relations within each group in order to highlight modes of intimacy that transcend a reductive choice between freedom and constraint.Shifting focus away from identities toward the social matrices out of which identities and divisions emerge, Povinelli offers a framework for thinking through such issues as what counts as sexuality and which forms of intimate social relations result in the distribution of rights, recognition, and resources, and which do not. In The Empire of Love Povinelli calls for, and begins to formulate, a politics of "thick life," a way of representing social life nuanced enough to meet the density and variation of actual social worlds.

Sujets

• Sociologie, société et politique
• Cultural studies
• Human sexual activity

Informations

• Publié par: Duke University Press
• Date de parution: 30 août 2006
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780822388487
• Langue: English

Extrait

Public Planet Books A series edited by Dilip Gaonkar, Jane Kramer, Benjamin Lee, and Michael Warner

Public Planet Books is a series designed by writers in and outside the academy—writers working on what could be called narratives of public culture—to explore questions that urgently concern us all. It is an attempt to open the scholarly discourses on contemporary public culture, both local and international, and to illuminate that discourse with the kinds of narrative that will challenge sophisticated readers, make them think, and especially make them question. It is, most importantly, an experiment in strategies of discourse, com- bining reportage and critical reflection on unfolding issues and events—one, we hope, that will provide a running narra- tive of our societies at this moment. Public Planet Books is part of the Public Works publication project of the Center for Transcultural Studies, which also includes the journalPublic Cultureand the Public Worlds book series.

The Empire of Love

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The Empire of Love

Toward a Theory of Intimacy, Genealogy, and Carnality

Elizabeth A. Povinelli

D U K E U N I V E R S I T Y P R E S S

Durham and London 

©  Duke University Press

All rights reserved

Printed in the United States of

America on acid-free paper 

Typeset in Bodoni by Tseng

Information Systems, Inc.

Library of Congress Cataloging-

in-Publication Data appear on

the last printed page of this

book.

For Stacey Marie D’Erasmo

Contents

1

2

3

Acknowledgments

xi

Empires of Love: An Introduction

Rotten Worlds

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

Spiritual Freedom, Cultural Copyright



The Intimate Event and Genealogical Society

Notes



Bibliography

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