The Contradictions of Love : Towards a feminist-realist ontology of sociosexuality Paperback / softback

by Lena Gunnarsson

Part of the Ontological Explorations Routledge Critical Realism series

Paperback / softback

Out of stock

Description

The Contradictions of Love: Towards a feminist-realist ontology of sociosexuality offers a robust and multifaceted theoretical account of how, in contemporary western societies, women continue to be subordinated to men through sexual love.

The book defends and elaborates Anna G. JÃ³nasdÃ³ttirâ€™s thesis that men tend to exploit women of their â€˜love powerâ€™, by means of an innovative application of critical realism, dialectical critical realism and the philosophy of metaReality.

Gunnarsson also offers a critique of the state of affairs of contemporary feminist theory. The author demonstrates that the meta-theoretical framework of critical realism offers the tools that can counter the poststructuralist hegemony still prevailing in feminist theory.

On a general level, The Contradictions of Love attempts at reconciling theoretical positions which tend to appear in opposition to one another.

In particular, it offers a way of bridging the gap between the notion of love as a locus of exploitation and that of love as a force which can conquer oppression. This book is a unique and timely contribution in the field of feminist theory, in that it offers the first elaborate assessment and development of JÃ³nasdÃ³ttirâ€™s important but relatively sidestepped work, and in that it counters poststructuralist trends from the point of view of a robust critical realist framework that has hitherto been spectacularly absent in feminist theory, although it offers solutions to metatheoretical problems at the forefront of feminist debates; in the field of critical realism broadly defined, in that it elaborates on crucial ontological themes of (dialectical) critical realism and the philosophy of metaReality via a discussion of the issues of love, sexuality, gender and power; and finally, in the field of love studies, in that it offers a sophisticated account of how gender asymmetries prevail in love despite norms of gender equality and reciprocity, and in that it reconciles feminist, conflict-oriented perspectives on love with notions of love as transcending conflict.