Imagining "We" in the Age of "I" Romance and Social Bonding in Contemporary Culture

Winner, MeCCSA Edited Collection of the Year, MeCCSA Outstanding Achievement Awards 2022 In the early twenty-first century shifts in gender and sexuality, work and mobility patterns and especially technology have provoked interest in perceived threats to social bonding on a global scale. This edited collection explores the fracturing of couple culture but also its persistence. Looking at a variety of media sites—including film, television, popular print fiction, new media and new technologies—this volume’s diverse range of contributors examine how mediated scenes of intimacy proliferate, while real-life experiences are cast in a newly uncertain light. The collection thus challenges a latent but growing tendency towards perceptions of romantic decline, in a variety of cultural contexts and with attention to the impact of COVID-19. This is an accessible and timely collection suitable for scholars in gender studies, media, cultural studies and communication studies.

Introduction: Romance and Social Bonding in Contemporary Culture – Before and After COVID-19. Mary Harrod, Suzanne Leonard and Diane Negra Abject Desires in the Age of Anger: Incels, Femcels and the Gender Politics of Unfuckability. Jilly Boyce Kay. Love Technologies: Televisual Matchmaking and Algorithmic Attraction. Misha Kavka. Negotiating Romantic Relationships in the Cell Phone Age: The Jamaican Context. Roxanne Burton and Michael Yee Shui. Facing the Fig Tree: Representations of Contemporary Intimacy Culture in Master of None. Beatriz Oria. Open (to) Marriage: Saving Sanctioned Coupling through Consensual Nonmonogamy Narratives. Maria San Filippo. Aliens, Mermaids and Cartoons: Neoliberal Gender Politics in Twenty-First-Century South Korean Dramas. Ji-yoon An. Romantic, Transnational and Messy: Intimate Spaces/Cosmopolitan Spaces in Already Tomorrow in Hong Kong. Celestino Deleyto. Mixed Feelings: (Inter)Raced Romance and the Post-Millennial Romantic Comedy. Jacqueline Ballantine. The Bittersweet Queer Romance: Affect and Temporality in Weekend and Paris 05:59: Théo & Hugo. Jonathan Cicoski. Plaisirs d’amour: Love and Popular Fiction in Contemporary France. Diana Holmes. His Baby Daddy is an Alien?!: Mpreg Fantasies and Queer Reproductive Intimacies in Contemporary M/M Science Fiction Romance. Andrea Wood. Bibliographic Traces: The Material Book and the Quest for Intimacy in Spike Jonze’s Her. Gillian Silverman.

Mary Harrod is Associate Professor in French Studies at the University of Warwick, UK. She is the author of From France with Love: Gender and Identity in French Romantic Comedy (2015), Heightened Genre and Women’s Filmmaking in Hollywood (2021) and the co-edited collections The Europeanness of European Cinema (2015) and Women Do Genre in Film and Television (2017, winner of the British Association of Film, Television and Screen Studies Best Edited Collection Prize 2019). Suzanne Leonard is Professor of English and Director of the Master’s Degree in Gender and Cultural Studies at Simmons University in Boston, USA. She is the author of Wife, Inc.: The Business of Marriage in the Twenty-First Century (2018) and Fatal Attraction (2009) and co-editor of Fifty Hollywood Directors (2014). Diane Negra is Professor of Film Studies and Screen Culture at University College Dublin, Ireland. A member of the Royal Irish Academy, she is the author, editor or co-editor of 12 books, the most recent of which is Shadow of a Doubt (2021). She is Co-Editor-in-Chief of Television and New Media and Chair of the Irish Fulbright Commission.