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Love Objects: Emotion, Design and Material Culture
How are love and emotion embodied in material form?
Love Objects explores the emotional potency of things, addressing how objects can function as fetishes, symbols and representations, active participants in and mediators of our relationships, as well as tokens of affection, symbols of virility, triggers of nostalgia, replacements for lost loved ones, and symbols of lost places and times.
Addressing both designed 'things with attitude' and the 'wild things' of material culture, Love Objects explores a wide range of objects, from 19th-century American portraits displaying men's passionate friendships to the devotional and political meanings of religious statues in 1920s Ireland.
Love Objects explores the emotional potency of things, addressing how objects can function as fetishes, symbols and representations, active participants in and mediators of our relationships, as well as tokens of affection, symbols of virility, triggers of nostalgia, replacements for lost loved ones, and symbols of lost places and times.
Addressing both designed 'things with attitude' and the 'wild things' of material culture, Love Objects explores a wide range of objects, from 19th-century American portraits displaying men's passionate friendships to the devotional and political meanings of religious statues in 1920s Ireland.
- GenresMaterial Culture
184 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 2014
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December 14, 2015
It is hard to rate and review a book that is composed of separate essays authored by individuals. I picked up this book for the essay on amateur shoe-making ladies of the 19th century. I wish the illustrations were in color as the lovely cover photo is. The shoe-making essay was wonderful. Shoe-making was a hobby of late 18th- and early 19th-century ladies. I learned quite a bit about it in just the one essay. The ladies' handmade shoes weren't especially durable; mostly dancing slippers made for friends and relatives. It takes years of apprenticing to become a shoe-maker and the ladies' interest in it seemed more faddish than permanent. They took lessons from master shoe-makers, who were socially closer to their status than laborers, as it is a highly skilled trade. Their shoe-making kits were made of luxurious materials. It was enough of a trend that several poems and caricatures about it were published. Overall a very well-written essay.
The rest were hit-or-miss, mostly being those dry academic essays in which everything is analyzed to bits and in the end, no actual meaning is conveyed. An essay about 19th-century photos of male romantic friendships wavered between "they were just friends" and "they were closeted homosexuals" while trotting out the usual tropes about homosexuality being a 20th-century invention. In fact, just like any random set of photos of men, some were gay, most were not. Similar photos exist for female friends, it's just that men were more likely to be out and about unchaperoned and to enter photo studios with friends on a whim. The photos, while charming, don't really signify anything about sexuality, but rather about masculine friendships and how important they were. The author's theory that looking at these photos is an experience similar to "cruising" is so far-fetched as to be hardly worth a note.
Another essay about women-friendly sex shops seems to conclude that clean, nicely decorated sex shops attract more women customers than dodgy stores where pervy guys tend to congregate. This is hardly news. Obviously an attractive well-lit store in a safe neighborhood, staffed by women, is going to be more popular with women than one populated by seedy-looking guys in raincoats.
The idea of the book, the notion of love objects and tokens, is a good one, but most of the essays don't really support that. A vibrator is not really a love object, it's just a sex aid, it's hard to put it in the same category as the lovely handmade red slippers on the cover. The rest of the essays were so dull as to be hardly worth a read, but the book really was redeemed by the lovely essay on amateur shoe-making.
The rest were hit-or-miss, mostly being those dry academic essays in which everything is analyzed to bits and in the end, no actual meaning is conveyed. An essay about 19th-century photos of male romantic friendships wavered between "they were just friends" and "they were closeted homosexuals" while trotting out the usual tropes about homosexuality being a 20th-century invention. In fact, just like any random set of photos of men, some were gay, most were not. Similar photos exist for female friends, it's just that men were more likely to be out and about unchaperoned and to enter photo studios with friends on a whim. The photos, while charming, don't really signify anything about sexuality, but rather about masculine friendships and how important they were. The author's theory that looking at these photos is an experience similar to "cruising" is so far-fetched as to be hardly worth a note.
Another essay about women-friendly sex shops seems to conclude that clean, nicely decorated sex shops attract more women customers than dodgy stores where pervy guys tend to congregate. This is hardly news. Obviously an attractive well-lit store in a safe neighborhood, staffed by women, is going to be more popular with women than one populated by seedy-looking guys in raincoats.
The idea of the book, the notion of love objects and tokens, is a good one, but most of the essays don't really support that. A vibrator is not really a love object, it's just a sex aid, it's hard to put it in the same category as the lovely handmade red slippers on the cover. The rest of the essays were so dull as to be hardly worth a read, but the book really was redeemed by the lovely essay on amateur shoe-making.
Displaying 1 of 1 review