Blazer-Sharp, Prattle-Ready, Brainless Steel Samurai Banana

Sociological studies of emotions are relevant for understanding social practices and power struggles. Socially shared imaginaries about a feeling interfere in different spheres of social interactions. From this perspective, this post seeks to reflect theoretically on the utopia of romantic love as a promoter of power and gender inequalities, and thus a source of symbolic violence.

Just like monogamy, the expression of affection and love may seem universal and “natural” to human beings. However, love is a historical-cultural construction, an emotional belief, which as such can be maintained, altered, improved, worsened, dismissed or abolished, and was, therefore, a human invention. Thus, considering love as a human invention, it is indefinitely reconstructed over time and changes through sociocultural contexts, varying according to economic, religious, social nuances, etc.

The construction of romantic love had as its sociocultural context the expansion of colonialism and capitalism in the 18th century, emerging as a discursive mechanism and informal practice for the imposition of monogamy.


Romantic love is not just a form of affection, but rather a complex psychological and social set, with a combination of people's ideas, beliefs, attitudes and expectations dominating their behavior. It is predetermined how relationships should be, how to act, feel and react, but the subject is so conditioned to live it that it becomes common to talk about love as if it would never change.

Thus, romantic love carries with it and reproduces in the social body, impacting from practices to intimate emotions, certain values and discourses closely related to monogamy, such as: a) affective-sexual exclusivity, which, when loving a person, would be impossible to love or feel sexually attracted to anyone else – and, if it occurs, it would not be “true love”; b) the need for a romantic partner to achieve complete happiness – as, without a companion, one would be “incomplete”; c) expectation that another person meets all of the partner’s affective-sexual needs; d) feelings of jealousy and possessiveness – these are widely seen as reasons for gender-based violence, in which a husband feels jealous and attacks his partner;,and e) the eternity of love, with Catholic roots, in which marriage is indissoluble. A loving relationship is only real if it lasts forever, or it wasn't true love.

Monogamy and romantic love sustain power imbalances in social relationships and the perpetration of systems that structure inequality, domination and violence – such as capitalism and colonialism. A political articulation of non-monogamy aims to deconstruct such practices and discourses, emerging as a network of intersectional resistances against such power relations – resisting monogamy, capitalism, colonialism, racism, homophobia, romantic love. They are resistances, in the plural: possible, necessary, unlikely, spontaneous, wild, solitary, planned, drawn out, violent, irreconcilable, ready to compromise, interested or doomed to sacrifice.