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Public Planet Books
The Empire of Love: Toward a Theory of Intimacy, Genealogy, and Carnality
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.
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.
328 pages, Paperback
First published August 9, 2006
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About the author
Elizabeth A. Povinelli
14 books45 followersElizabeth A. Povinelli is Professor of Anthropology and Gender Studies at Columbia University where she has also been the Director of the Institute for Research on Women and Gender and the Co-Director of the Centre for the Study of Law and Culture.
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Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews
January 2, 2023
Povinelli is one of my current author-crushes, despite the fact that about half of what she says is such critical theory gobbledy-gook that I usually have almost no idea what she's trying to say. Her writing is best when she grounds it in the gritty realities of the communities in which she works, with Aboriginal people in northern Australia and radical fairy communities in the United States.
But I like her nuance and refusal to seek redemption: "As much as this book describes various tactics of intimacy and sociality emerging diagonally to liberal discourses of individual freedom and social constraint, this book does not present a redemptive narrative. I do not think these practices are redemptive, [because] the options presented to those persons who choose, or must, live at the end of liberalism's tolerance and capitalism's trickle, are often not great options. To pretend they are is to ignore the actual harms that liberal forms of social tolerance and capital forms of life-and-wealth-extraction produce. Second, to wish for a redemptive narrative, to seek it, is to wish that social experiments fulfill rather than upset given conditions, that they emerge in a form that given conditions recognize as good, and that they comply to a hegemony of love rather than truly challenge its hold over social life" 25 (she repeats something similar on page 85).
And this: "Experiments in sociality such as those engaged in by radical faeries are not, however, always as picturesque as the image of a shaman channeling the spirt world might suggest. They are instead awkward, misfiring, malfunctioning social interactions, blurred moral lines between appropriate cultural borrowings and insensitive appropriations, all of which are sometimes, perhaps too often, deformed by accidental addictions and illnesses. They a re the social strategies conceived to deal with the consequences of the party as well as the party. They are the struggles to build houses without money, to get care without health insurance, to speak a language of dependency when the broader political economy is increasingly oriented to the socially detached conjugal couple."
And here she seems to say what her overall thesis is: The best studies of sexuality are not about sexuality per se, but about how "discourses and practices of gender and sexuality are critical to the maintenance of liberal and illiberal forms of power and domination and are at the governmental heart of capitalism, secularism, civil society, and new and old religiosities" (13). In particular, Povinelli wants to look at the ways in which discourses of individual freedom (autology) and social constraint (genealogy) "animate and enflesh love, sociality, and bodies and operate as strategic maneuvers of power whose purpose -- or result -- is to distribute life, goods, and values across social space" (3-4). So: our conceptions of sexuality and gender are one of the sites in and through which late liberalism is constituted and maintained. Fair enough. Why we need to have so many verbal gymnastics around that claim is an academic mystery I will never understand. [And in 2022, when the far right and Christian nationalists are going after LGBTQ folks hard, this seems more relevant than ever.]
At the same time, I'm always puzzled by the way critical theory seems to make statements-of-fact that are not self-evidently factual: Autological and genealogical discourses "both presuppose a liberal humanist claim that what makes us most human is our capacity to base our most intimate relations, our most robust governmental institutions, and our economic relations on mutual and free recognition of the worth and value of another person, rather than basing these connections , for example, social status or the bare facts of the body" (5). Well, in reality, we do base our intimate decisions in social status all the time: assortative mating is a thing, and it's probably the main reason, for example, that a college education in the US predicts higher incomes: it makes you more likely to marry another college educated person who, by the fact that they finished college in the US, is more likely to have come from a wealthier and higher social status background in the first place. So social status _does_ determine our most intimate relations to a large degree -- people seldom marry outside their class. But while Povinelli certainly knows and understands this, this paragraph completely breezes by that as though it's not a thing. Which is what causes me to get lost while reading, because I just can't see the world the way she's narrating it.
The best parts, as always, are when she most closely engages in ethnographic analysis; in this case, around a sore on her shoulder that she seems to have acquired while in Australia. Such sores are common among her Karrabing colleagues; the agent is unknown -- maybe strep, maybe staph, maybe anthrax -- but the cause is almost certainly pervasive race-based poverty and the precarious physical environments in which her colleagues live, as well as their kin-based decisions to closely share physical space. In trying to get medical care for the sore -- and the potential sepsis it may be causing -- she has to decide how to narrate the sore for the western doctors, who see the sore and her as incompatible in a way that doctors in the local community did not. At the same time, she must decide how much of her other involvement in the radical fairy/queer community to disclose to the doctors, and what of the sore she ought to disclose to potential sexual partners under stranger sociality and a discourse of safe sex. The upshot: different kinds of health and harm are produced by different social situations, and the details here are in fact interesting, if obscured by the hyperventilated academic-ese. The only reason I can imagine that her Karrabing colleagues put up with it is that it is a kind of currency that buys them things they need - status at Columbia and research grants from various funding sources that they can repurpose into things that are actually meaningful to them.
One of the most interesting things for me was her insistence (also mentioned in _Economies of Abandonment_) that most harms caused by late liberalism (and what she means by late liberalism I still do not understand) are slow, cruddy, and pervasive rather than catastrophic, dramatic, and fast. She points out that what the Montreal or Chicago doctors may have most feared -- that she was harboring some new Andromeda strain -- is captured by the notion of "ghoul health," a specter late liberalism raises that its destruction will come from seeds it has sown. (The fact that I wanted to add "which is probably true" is probably one index of the pervasiveness and surface self-evidence of this narrative). On the other hand, "health crises at the seams of global capitalism . . . sores and diarrhea . . . are exceedingly slow, hard to quantify, cumulatively acting health collapse. Sore after sore, bronchial flu after bronchial flu, broken toilet after broken toilet wear down the body's immune system and help account for the quantifiable difference in life expectancy between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal Australians and the less easily quantified difference in quality of life. Diseases of poverty are not usually medical rarities; they demand neither high technology nor new movies to apprehend them. Rather they demand choices about wealth and resource distribution and political sensitivity to a different kind of corporeality" (78) [Slow violence may be a helpful concept here].
She points out that Greg Bordowitz's film about the AIDS crisis, and the rage it narrates about his loss of the "normal stages of a normal life," "signals a certain privilege -- that many people consider life as something that can be counted on, at least for a certain length of time, for long enough to be able to forget about its limited nature. This amnesia does not infect many others. If you are an indigenous person in Australia, you know you are likely to die fifteen to twenty years earlier than your white counterpart; that your household income probably will never rise above the poverty level; that you probably will be sent to prison" (80). So in order to treat the sores effectively, they need to be made "unfamiliar to the subjects most familiar with them" (84). At the same time, the territorial government gets more than would be expected in terms of per capita funding precisely because they manage social programs for so many indigenous people -- the territorial government is a munggul, a person who feeds on other people's kidney fat" (82).
Here is where her thick description gets interesting -- so in this context, of short lives and many funerals, it can be difficult for folks living on less than $10k AUD/year to get to every funeral - and yet not being there can result in feelings of abandonment and aloneness among slighted kin that then manifest in various other geological or biological events. Indigenous people negotiate these situations as best they can. She cites a colleague who received $119K on the death of her husband in a car accident and immediately redistributed it along various kinship lines, thus confirming or reconstituting her relationship with a number of people in the community and "creatively entailing, out of the deformations that composed her life, what might be called a network of trust -- trust that provisions will come, that the severe nature of poverty in a capitalist society will not exile the self from the social" (88)
She cites both Baldwin and personal experience on the difficulties of teaching children to survive in such harsh circumstances, and the attitude of "dig as deep as possible and don't feel sorry for me if it hurts" (90) She describes holding down a niece who had refused treatment for a deep sore on her leg, and how the choice of telling her that next time she will not need to be held down - will choose the treatment herself -- is also a gross choice, and not really a choice at all, and filled with its own pain. As is the choice to leave such communities, which requires that they "still teach themselves and their children to be able to bear the pain of separation. They must learn to depend on stranger sociality in their everyday lives, to look forward to the pleasures and pains of understanding ngamaparrking, and to reflect on their lives in terms of their own individual progress. This, too, takes discipline. It takes a person who can cut herself a different way"(93).
I liked this: "To understand what radical faeries are we should not define the term and then find those who satisfy its criteria. Instead, we need to understand the modes of life across which this social genre is dispersed, contested, and made sensible" (109)
On the ways both faeries and Aborigines are caught between/outside both autology (choice) and genealogy (tradition): "Cast outside genealogy by critical publics and juridical rulings, Faeries fall back, or are pushed, into the disciplines of freedom -- but a severely qualified freedom. Read under the sign of 'homosexual,' radical faeries are barely equal citizens under the law. Understood as religion, they straddle precariously the divide between the autological subject and genealogical society. Radical faeries seem to be free, but they are then refused their freedom and refused a proper 'culture' in any historical or socially governed sense. Indigenous people face the opposite side of this discursive dynamic. They may be seen to have culture in the robustly genealogical sense -- but they're not free . . . media and legal discussions revolve around how far their toes can dip into actual life before they lose whatever social, political, or economic compensations refusing actual life might provide them" (156).
On the ways in which LGBTQ sensibility invites assimilation or radical difference: "the demand that state benefits, property rights, and social recognition be extended to homosexuals is seen as opposed to a demand that the very nature of these institutions be transformed by the multiple forms of desire and association that queer life makes possible" "(160).
"We are witnessing the emergence of a practice of espionage and transfiguration and of an orientation to the reelaboration of the self rather than self-identity. In these social fields, the point may well be to reshape habitudes ahead of recognition, to test something out rather than translate it, not to produce meanings that can be translated, or embodiments that can be recognized." She cites Bey, who wrote about pirate utopias in the 17th century. "Because TAZs are not sites of revolution but sites of insurrection and uprising, they are not oriented toward establishing new forms of permanence. They seek to foster social habitudes 'which do not match the expected curve . . . the question of whether to inhabit the space between fact and norm, and how one actually does this, demands being comfortable with a life of contingency and impermanence, fostering uprisings and insurrections rather than revolutions and new social permanences, and being at peace with the ebbs and tides that this mode of impermanent existence entails." (173).
Argues that liberal, binary categories of intimacy and social constraint aren't really that binary, that each arises from within a social matrix: "where and what sexuality is, where and when a person is a token of a type of social identity, which forms of intimate dependency count as freedom and which count as undue social constraint, which intimacy involves moral judgment rather than mere choice" (30.
"the governance of love, sociality, and the body circulate in liberal settler colonies in such a way that life and death, rights and recognition, goods and resources are unevenly distributed there . . . discourses of individual freedom and social constraint . . . operate as strategic maneuvers of power whose purpose --or result - is to distribute life, goods, and values across social space and . . . contribute to teh hardiness of liberalism as a normative horizon" (4).
74: "My sore is not mine in any sense that really matters . .. it belongs to a cascading set of social harms and attitudes toward these harms that have emerged in the wake of settler colonialism."
76: "Ghoul health refers to the global organization of the biomedical establishment, and its imaginary, around the idea that the big scary bug, the new plague, is the real threat that haunts the contemporary global division, distribution, and circulation of health . . . ghoul health plays on the real fear that the material distribution of life and death arising from the structural impoverishment of post-colonial and settler colonial worlds may have accidentally or purposefully brewed an unstoppable bio-virulence from the bad faith of liberal capital and its multiple geophysical tactics . . . the temporality of ghoul health stands in stark contrast to the state of health crises at the seams of global capitalism. There, sores and diarrhea mark the timing of life and death -- an exceedingly slow, hard to quantity, cumulatively acting health collapse. Sore after sore, bronchial flu after bronchial flu, broken toilet after broken toilet wear down the body's immune system and help account for the quantifiable difference in life expectancy between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal Australians and the less easily quantified difference in quality of life. Diseases of poverty are not usually medical rarities; they demand neither high technology nor new movies to apprehend them. Rather they demand choices about wealth and resource distribution and political sensitivity to a different kind of corporality."
187-188 has something that seems important about how innovations like "we the people" were predicated on romantic love b/t couples, but damned if I can figure out what she's trying to say. "recognizing each other in intimate love" transforms us, which allows "certain forms of state governance and certain forms of capital production" (190-191) though no logical chain of evidence is provided for this (the citations don't actually make the argument).
"the heterosexual family has become more explicitly theorized and politicized as the core institution of the nation-state. In the US, immigration policy is skewed to a narrow reading of the heterosexual family, as is most inheritance legislation, tax codes, health benefits, and family and reproductive law" gay adoption, restrictions on reproductive health technologies also structured heteronormatively (198).
"the temporality of life for many at the edge of liberal capital's promise is the temporality of diarrhea -- slow, debilitating, and blurred. The uneven speed with which people die, the distribution of violence attached to these deaths, or the slowness of their decay, all present different temporalities for how power is invested through local biospaces." (205) key point her is slow, debilitating, blurred -- slow violence, again. (204-205)
Interesting that the consent/protocontract for marriage preceded Hobbesian contracts by 400 years, and "at the same time Gregorian reforms focused on individual consent in the marriage ritual," they dramatically expanded the # of kin and relationships excluded from the possibility of marriage. "The genealogical grid became a pervasive constraint at the very moment that the individual seemed to be freed from its dictates" (213).
224 something about Frantz Fanon and how interracial marriage figured in these conversations about how Europe managed to code as "civilizing" the rape, torture, and exploitation of their colonies to produce the "civilized" cities of Europe, but how these things relate is not specified (225). "to be a friend is to go beyond kinship into a self-reflexive, chosen relation. Friendship opens kinship into a relation between individuals, into a variant of intimate love. We say, she is not simply my sister, she is more: she is my best friend. Yet the exit from kinship as the condition of becoming friend is exactly the work discourses of the intimate event and he genealogical society do . . . indigenous intimacy may be derived from an intensification of kinship rather than its negation. " Close kin could be designated as sister-sister.
Attempts to overcome western binaries of freedom and connection in several movies (232) and Farah novel Links. Foucault insisted on not choosing b/t sex and love, stranger promiscuity or intimate love? what about intimate promiscuity? "Experimenting with new relationships between anonymous sex and intimate friendship would upset the fabric of humanist discourse b/c it cut diagonally across carnality and intimacy (235)
But I like her nuance and refusal to seek redemption: "As much as this book describes various tactics of intimacy and sociality emerging diagonally to liberal discourses of individual freedom and social constraint, this book does not present a redemptive narrative. I do not think these practices are redemptive, [because] the options presented to those persons who choose, or must, live at the end of liberalism's tolerance and capitalism's trickle, are often not great options. To pretend they are is to ignore the actual harms that liberal forms of social tolerance and capital forms of life-and-wealth-extraction produce. Second, to wish for a redemptive narrative, to seek it, is to wish that social experiments fulfill rather than upset given conditions, that they emerge in a form that given conditions recognize as good, and that they comply to a hegemony of love rather than truly challenge its hold over social life" 25 (she repeats something similar on page 85).
And this: "Experiments in sociality such as those engaged in by radical faeries are not, however, always as picturesque as the image of a shaman channeling the spirt world might suggest. They are instead awkward, misfiring, malfunctioning social interactions, blurred moral lines between appropriate cultural borrowings and insensitive appropriations, all of which are sometimes, perhaps too often, deformed by accidental addictions and illnesses. They a re the social strategies conceived to deal with the consequences of the party as well as the party. They are the struggles to build houses without money, to get care without health insurance, to speak a language of dependency when the broader political economy is increasingly oriented to the socially detached conjugal couple."
And here she seems to say what her overall thesis is: The best studies of sexuality are not about sexuality per se, but about how "discourses and practices of gender and sexuality are critical to the maintenance of liberal and illiberal forms of power and domination and are at the governmental heart of capitalism, secularism, civil society, and new and old religiosities" (13). In particular, Povinelli wants to look at the ways in which discourses of individual freedom (autology) and social constraint (genealogy) "animate and enflesh love, sociality, and bodies and operate as strategic maneuvers of power whose purpose -- or result -- is to distribute life, goods, and values across social space" (3-4). So: our conceptions of sexuality and gender are one of the sites in and through which late liberalism is constituted and maintained. Fair enough. Why we need to have so many verbal gymnastics around that claim is an academic mystery I will never understand. [And in 2022, when the far right and Christian nationalists are going after LGBTQ folks hard, this seems more relevant than ever.]
At the same time, I'm always puzzled by the way critical theory seems to make statements-of-fact that are not self-evidently factual: Autological and genealogical discourses "both presuppose a liberal humanist claim that what makes us most human is our capacity to base our most intimate relations, our most robust governmental institutions, and our economic relations on mutual and free recognition of the worth and value of another person, rather than basing these connections , for example, social status or the bare facts of the body" (5). Well, in reality, we do base our intimate decisions in social status all the time: assortative mating is a thing, and it's probably the main reason, for example, that a college education in the US predicts higher incomes: it makes you more likely to marry another college educated person who, by the fact that they finished college in the US, is more likely to have come from a wealthier and higher social status background in the first place. So social status _does_ determine our most intimate relations to a large degree -- people seldom marry outside their class. But while Povinelli certainly knows and understands this, this paragraph completely breezes by that as though it's not a thing. Which is what causes me to get lost while reading, because I just can't see the world the way she's narrating it.
The best parts, as always, are when she most closely engages in ethnographic analysis; in this case, around a sore on her shoulder that she seems to have acquired while in Australia. Such sores are common among her Karrabing colleagues; the agent is unknown -- maybe strep, maybe staph, maybe anthrax -- but the cause is almost certainly pervasive race-based poverty and the precarious physical environments in which her colleagues live, as well as their kin-based decisions to closely share physical space. In trying to get medical care for the sore -- and the potential sepsis it may be causing -- she has to decide how to narrate the sore for the western doctors, who see the sore and her as incompatible in a way that doctors in the local community did not. At the same time, she must decide how much of her other involvement in the radical fairy/queer community to disclose to the doctors, and what of the sore she ought to disclose to potential sexual partners under stranger sociality and a discourse of safe sex. The upshot: different kinds of health and harm are produced by different social situations, and the details here are in fact interesting, if obscured by the hyperventilated academic-ese. The only reason I can imagine that her Karrabing colleagues put up with it is that it is a kind of currency that buys them things they need - status at Columbia and research grants from various funding sources that they can repurpose into things that are actually meaningful to them.
One of the most interesting things for me was her insistence (also mentioned in _Economies of Abandonment_) that most harms caused by late liberalism (and what she means by late liberalism I still do not understand) are slow, cruddy, and pervasive rather than catastrophic, dramatic, and fast. She points out that what the Montreal or Chicago doctors may have most feared -- that she was harboring some new Andromeda strain -- is captured by the notion of "ghoul health," a specter late liberalism raises that its destruction will come from seeds it has sown. (The fact that I wanted to add "which is probably true" is probably one index of the pervasiveness and surface self-evidence of this narrative). On the other hand, "health crises at the seams of global capitalism . . . sores and diarrhea . . . are exceedingly slow, hard to quantify, cumulatively acting health collapse. Sore after sore, bronchial flu after bronchial flu, broken toilet after broken toilet wear down the body's immune system and help account for the quantifiable difference in life expectancy between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal Australians and the less easily quantified difference in quality of life. Diseases of poverty are not usually medical rarities; they demand neither high technology nor new movies to apprehend them. Rather they demand choices about wealth and resource distribution and political sensitivity to a different kind of corporeality" (78) [Slow violence may be a helpful concept here].
She points out that Greg Bordowitz's film about the AIDS crisis, and the rage it narrates about his loss of the "normal stages of a normal life," "signals a certain privilege -- that many people consider life as something that can be counted on, at least for a certain length of time, for long enough to be able to forget about its limited nature. This amnesia does not infect many others. If you are an indigenous person in Australia, you know you are likely to die fifteen to twenty years earlier than your white counterpart; that your household income probably will never rise above the poverty level; that you probably will be sent to prison" (80). So in order to treat the sores effectively, they need to be made "unfamiliar to the subjects most familiar with them" (84). At the same time, the territorial government gets more than would be expected in terms of per capita funding precisely because they manage social programs for so many indigenous people -- the territorial government is a munggul, a person who feeds on other people's kidney fat" (82).
Here is where her thick description gets interesting -- so in this context, of short lives and many funerals, it can be difficult for folks living on less than $10k AUD/year to get to every funeral - and yet not being there can result in feelings of abandonment and aloneness among slighted kin that then manifest in various other geological or biological events. Indigenous people negotiate these situations as best they can. She cites a colleague who received $119K on the death of her husband in a car accident and immediately redistributed it along various kinship lines, thus confirming or reconstituting her relationship with a number of people in the community and "creatively entailing, out of the deformations that composed her life, what might be called a network of trust -- trust that provisions will come, that the severe nature of poverty in a capitalist society will not exile the self from the social" (88)
She cites both Baldwin and personal experience on the difficulties of teaching children to survive in such harsh circumstances, and the attitude of "dig as deep as possible and don't feel sorry for me if it hurts" (90) She describes holding down a niece who had refused treatment for a deep sore on her leg, and how the choice of telling her that next time she will not need to be held down - will choose the treatment herself -- is also a gross choice, and not really a choice at all, and filled with its own pain. As is the choice to leave such communities, which requires that they "still teach themselves and their children to be able to bear the pain of separation. They must learn to depend on stranger sociality in their everyday lives, to look forward to the pleasures and pains of understanding ngamaparrking, and to reflect on their lives in terms of their own individual progress. This, too, takes discipline. It takes a person who can cut herself a different way"(93).
I liked this: "To understand what radical faeries are we should not define the term and then find those who satisfy its criteria. Instead, we need to understand the modes of life across which this social genre is dispersed, contested, and made sensible" (109)
On the ways both faeries and Aborigines are caught between/outside both autology (choice) and genealogy (tradition): "Cast outside genealogy by critical publics and juridical rulings, Faeries fall back, or are pushed, into the disciplines of freedom -- but a severely qualified freedom. Read under the sign of 'homosexual,' radical faeries are barely equal citizens under the law. Understood as religion, they straddle precariously the divide between the autological subject and genealogical society. Radical faeries seem to be free, but they are then refused their freedom and refused a proper 'culture' in any historical or socially governed sense. Indigenous people face the opposite side of this discursive dynamic. They may be seen to have culture in the robustly genealogical sense -- but they're not free . . . media and legal discussions revolve around how far their toes can dip into actual life before they lose whatever social, political, or economic compensations refusing actual life might provide them" (156).
On the ways in which LGBTQ sensibility invites assimilation or radical difference: "the demand that state benefits, property rights, and social recognition be extended to homosexuals is seen as opposed to a demand that the very nature of these institutions be transformed by the multiple forms of desire and association that queer life makes possible" "(160).
"We are witnessing the emergence of a practice of espionage and transfiguration and of an orientation to the reelaboration of the self rather than self-identity. In these social fields, the point may well be to reshape habitudes ahead of recognition, to test something out rather than translate it, not to produce meanings that can be translated, or embodiments that can be recognized." She cites Bey, who wrote about pirate utopias in the 17th century. "Because TAZs are not sites of revolution but sites of insurrection and uprising, they are not oriented toward establishing new forms of permanence. They seek to foster social habitudes 'which do not match the expected curve . . . the question of whether to inhabit the space between fact and norm, and how one actually does this, demands being comfortable with a life of contingency and impermanence, fostering uprisings and insurrections rather than revolutions and new social permanences, and being at peace with the ebbs and tides that this mode of impermanent existence entails." (173).
Argues that liberal, binary categories of intimacy and social constraint aren't really that binary, that each arises from within a social matrix: "where and what sexuality is, where and when a person is a token of a type of social identity, which forms of intimate dependency count as freedom and which count as undue social constraint, which intimacy involves moral judgment rather than mere choice" (30.
"the governance of love, sociality, and the body circulate in liberal settler colonies in such a way that life and death, rights and recognition, goods and resources are unevenly distributed there . . . discourses of individual freedom and social constraint . . . operate as strategic maneuvers of power whose purpose --or result - is to distribute life, goods, and values across social space and . . . contribute to teh hardiness of liberalism as a normative horizon" (4).
74: "My sore is not mine in any sense that really matters . .. it belongs to a cascading set of social harms and attitudes toward these harms that have emerged in the wake of settler colonialism."
76: "Ghoul health refers to the global organization of the biomedical establishment, and its imaginary, around the idea that the big scary bug, the new plague, is the real threat that haunts the contemporary global division, distribution, and circulation of health . . . ghoul health plays on the real fear that the material distribution of life and death arising from the structural impoverishment of post-colonial and settler colonial worlds may have accidentally or purposefully brewed an unstoppable bio-virulence from the bad faith of liberal capital and its multiple geophysical tactics . . . the temporality of ghoul health stands in stark contrast to the state of health crises at the seams of global capitalism. There, sores and diarrhea mark the timing of life and death -- an exceedingly slow, hard to quantity, cumulatively acting health collapse. Sore after sore, bronchial flu after bronchial flu, broken toilet after broken toilet wear down the body's immune system and help account for the quantifiable difference in life expectancy between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal Australians and the less easily quantified difference in quality of life. Diseases of poverty are not usually medical rarities; they demand neither high technology nor new movies to apprehend them. Rather they demand choices about wealth and resource distribution and political sensitivity to a different kind of corporality."
187-188 has something that seems important about how innovations like "we the people" were predicated on romantic love b/t couples, but damned if I can figure out what she's trying to say. "recognizing each other in intimate love" transforms us, which allows "certain forms of state governance and certain forms of capital production" (190-191) though no logical chain of evidence is provided for this (the citations don't actually make the argument).
"the heterosexual family has become more explicitly theorized and politicized as the core institution of the nation-state. In the US, immigration policy is skewed to a narrow reading of the heterosexual family, as is most inheritance legislation, tax codes, health benefits, and family and reproductive law" gay adoption, restrictions on reproductive health technologies also structured heteronormatively (198).
"the temporality of life for many at the edge of liberal capital's promise is the temporality of diarrhea -- slow, debilitating, and blurred. The uneven speed with which people die, the distribution of violence attached to these deaths, or the slowness of their decay, all present different temporalities for how power is invested through local biospaces." (205) key point her is slow, debilitating, blurred -- slow violence, again. (204-205)
Interesting that the consent/protocontract for marriage preceded Hobbesian contracts by 400 years, and "at the same time Gregorian reforms focused on individual consent in the marriage ritual," they dramatically expanded the # of kin and relationships excluded from the possibility of marriage. "The genealogical grid became a pervasive constraint at the very moment that the individual seemed to be freed from its dictates" (213).
224 something about Frantz Fanon and how interracial marriage figured in these conversations about how Europe managed to code as "civilizing" the rape, torture, and exploitation of their colonies to produce the "civilized" cities of Europe, but how these things relate is not specified (225). "to be a friend is to go beyond kinship into a self-reflexive, chosen relation. Friendship opens kinship into a relation between individuals, into a variant of intimate love. We say, she is not simply my sister, she is more: she is my best friend. Yet the exit from kinship as the condition of becoming friend is exactly the work discourses of the intimate event and he genealogical society do . . . indigenous intimacy may be derived from an intensification of kinship rather than its negation. " Close kin could be designated as sister-sister.
Attempts to overcome western binaries of freedom and connection in several movies (232) and Farah novel Links. Foucault insisted on not choosing b/t sex and love, stranger promiscuity or intimate love? what about intimate promiscuity? "Experimenting with new relationships between anonymous sex and intimate friendship would upset the fabric of humanist discourse b/c it cut diagonally across carnality and intimacy (235)
October 18, 2017
"They pull immanent desires and alliances into actual social worlds, creating actual affective and discursive dependencies where before fore there were only potential dependencies. They mobilize kinship, age grades, and gender to sweeten certain same-sex and cross-sex relations through a rough, sexually explicit discursive cursive play (erere, yedametj). Is this sexuality? Only in the most reduced and decontextualized sense. These women are not choosing between homosexuality and heterosexuality, or between discourses of alliance and discourses of sexuality. They are instead constituting social dependencies beyond the conjugal couple; reducing harm through the formation of broader social networks; and enjoying each other's wit."
September 23, 2025
Dense. Rewarding in places, elsewhere discombobulating. Lots of re-reading passages. But worth it for thinking about why love conforms to specific relationship forms and how much of the grammar we use to think about freedom in our lives conforms to the dialectic of genealogy and autology (being beholden to communal tradition and being an independent project). The personal pieces about radical faeries and undiagnosed sores gave color to an otherwise sternly abstract reading experience
September 16, 2020
Doesn't deliver
May 3, 2022
A really powerful meditation on love and intimacy.
February 23, 2025
Introduction, chapter 1 and 3
I learn so much from this book but honestly Povinelli is such a terrible writer lol.
I learn so much from this book but honestly Povinelli is such a terrible writer lol.
January 1, 2014
Beth Povinelli is always thought provoking and immensely erudite. It's a wonderful read and as usual, her take on intimacy and genealogy in this day and age is very illuminating.
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