Research Seminar: Love After Love - Towards a Postromantic Society

This event is part of the School of Media and Communication research seminar series

This talk interrogates the contemporary culture of love from a gendered perspective. Experimenting with narrative and reflexive ethnography, as well as with the analysis of mediated imaginaries, I propose a speculative critique of what I call the post-romantic ethos, a structure of feeling whereby love is constructed as a field to be repaired. This cultural shift reflects a kind of disillusionment with the romantic-plot, due to the acknowledgement of its ideological and oppressive nature. The postromantic fantasy postulates love as a corrupted field which can be restored by means of diagnostic and therapeutic interventions. At stake there is the attempt to build a new normative framework that can guide towards a morally sound experience of romance. The emerging utopia is that of love that does not hurt, it is love devoid of risk and pain and turned into an efficient matching which does not threaten the integrity of the subject.

Carolina Bandinelli is Associate Professor in Media and Creative Industries at the University of Warwick. She is the author of Social Entrepreneurship and Neoliberalism: Making Money While Doing Good (Rowman and Littlefield, 2019) and Fashion as Creative Economy, with McRobbie and Strutt (Polity, 2023). She has published widely on creative labor, entrepreneurship, self-branding, coworking and collaborative economies, and the digital culture of love.