Love study researchers may see activism after school shooting as an act of love.
Rita Watson MPH
With Love and Gratitude
With Valentine’s Day behind us, we are filled with mixed emotions. Some people in relationships are thrilled because their love in thriving. Others are sad because the romance in their lives languished, ended, and now they are heartbroken. If we look at “Critical Love Studies,” (April 2017, Journal of Popular Romance Studies), we see in perspective the many forms of love. This Valentine’s Day 2018 we witnessed neighborly and community love filled with pain that has left many people across this country heartbroken. The loss of children in Florida helps us to embrace a broader view of love as we hold the families, friends, and neighbors of victims in our hearts.
According to the editors:
Critical Love Studies, therefore, “refrains from offering a single definition of love. As shorthand, we stick with phenomenological descriptors such as parental love, sibling love, romantic (or intimate) love, neighborly love or the more abstract loves for one’s community, a sports team or country.”
Although this was initially to be a way of looking at Valentine’s Day in a romantic context, it was difficult to write about ways of showing love, gratitude, and kindness without discussing the pain of love lost. Michael Gratzke, Ph.D., is Professor of German and Comparative Literature at the University of Hull. He notes “each occurrence of love should be judged against the backdrop of the socio-historic circumstances in which a set of love acts is performed.” And he says:
“Firstly, that we cannot grasp the full potentiality of love (it is always yet to come); secondly that love is performative (it needs to come into being in individual occurrences of love); thirdly that changes to the ways in which people experience and represent love happen through countless iterations of ‘love acts.’” He likens love acts to speech act theory and argues that they occur in the contexts of normative frameworks which make them intelligible.” Read More