Desire Love

"There is nothing more alienating than having your pleasures disputed by someone with a theory," writes Lauren Berlant. Yet the ways in which we live sexuality and intimacy have been profoundly shaped by theories - especially psychoanalytic ones, which have helped to place sexuality and desire at the center of the modern story about what a person is and how her history should be read. At the same time, other modes of explanation have been offered by popular and mass culture. In these domains, sexual desire is not deemed the core story of life; it is mixed up with romance, a particular version of the story of love. In this small theoretical novella-cum-dictionary entry, Lauren Berlant engages love and desire in separate entries. In the first entry, Desire mainly describes the feeling one person has for something else: it is organized by psychoanalytic accounts of attachment, and tells briefly the history of their importance in critical theory and practice. The second entry, on Love, begins with an excursion into fantasy, moving away from the parent-child structure so central to psychoanalysis and looking instead at the centrality of context, environment, and history. The entry on Love describes some workings of romance across personal life and commodity culture, the place where subjects start to think about fantasy on behalf of their actual lives. Whether viewed psychoanalytically, institutionally, or ideologically, love is deemed always an outcome of fantasy. Without fantasy, there would be no love. Desire/Love takes us on a tour of all of the things that sentence might mean.

An engaging and accessible introduction to the subject, this text explores love and sex as defining features of our identity. Through thirty-nine classic and contemporary articles, as well as original contributions written by emerging voices in the field, Desire, Love, and Identity covers awide range of topics, such as sexual objectification, the ethics of sex work, love and sex online, friendship, polyamory, and BDSM.

Is love “blind” when it comes to gender? For women, it just might be. This unsettling and original book offers a radical new understanding of the context-dependent nature of female sexuality. Lisa M. Diamond argues that for some women, love and desire are not rigidly heterosexual or homosexual but fluid, changing as women move through the stages of life, various social groups, and, most important, different love relationships.This perspective clashes with traditional views of sexual orientation as a stable and fixed trait. But that view is based on research conducted almost entirely on men. Diamond is the first to study a large group of women over time. She has tracked one hundred women for more than ten years as they have emerged from adolescence into adulthood. She summarizes their experiences and reviews research ranging from the psychology of love to the biology of sex differences. Sexual Fluidity offers moving first-person accounts of women falling in and out of love with men or women at different times in their lives. For some, gender becomes irrelevant: “I fall in love with the person, not the gender,” say some respondents.Sexual Fluidity offers a new understanding of women’s sexuality—and of the central importance of love.

This wonderfully small, thick book--like a box of photos--is divided up into the following categories: bonds (between partners and family members), icons (say, Jane Fonda as Barbarella), observations of glimpsed love or lust, come-ons to further naughtiness, tokens (mostly flowers juxtaposed with women), libidos (lusty acts), reveries (erotica), and obsessions (the sexual unusual). The international array of photographers includes Man Ray, Robert Mapplethorpe, Nan Goldin, Helmut Newton, Sally Mann, Immogen Cunningham, Brassai, and Julia Margaret Cameron. After a lengthy introduction on the history of photography and desire, there's nothing but photos there-on-in. You might just get aroused, or fascinated as to how others are aroused, or intrigued as to how far people go to arouse others. Ewing is director of the Musee de l'Elysee in Lausanne, Switzerland. Annotation copyrighted by Book News Inc., Portland, OR

"Once the initial intense excitement of a new relationship fades, we tend to think there are only two options: chase the impossible dream of recapturing that early magic or settle for a less than fulfilling love life. In Quantum Love, sex and relationship expert Laura Berman, Ph.D., the New York Times best-selling author of eight books including For Women Only, Real Sex for Real Women, and The Passion Prescription, offers a thrilling alternative--a higher level of love beckoning us to move forward, not backward. Using the essential truth we've learned from the study of quantum physics--the fact that at our molecular core, each of us is simply a vessel of energy--she explains how we can use what's happening in our inner world to create a level of passion, connection, and bliss in our relationships that we never imagined possible."--Provided by publisher.

This is a story about Gianni, a man whose mission was to lead a simple lifestyle of finding love and getting married and starting a family. He wanted to live out this dream he had since he was in his late teens, and he endured many obstacles over the years to get to where he felt he needed to reach his goal. This story takes place over many years of his life and covers his many different trials and tribulations while growing up from a shy kid to a confident adult. It also covers the reasons he goes through his struggles of finding love and how he tried to lead the simple life and the examples of what he did to maintain the simple lifestyle. Sometimes it was a completely innocent encounter, but nothing was simple for Gianni because no matter where he went, trouble would begin for him. Many times, his friends would be surprised or shocked by these encounters with women even though they would see it happen in front of their own eyes, but the person who was most often surprised was Gianni himself. Because he had many different encounters and circumstances with women that were beyond his control, the dream that he had envisioned was altered and led him to live a completely opposite lifestyle that he was seeking. Not only did he have many different encounters with women in his life, but these encounters would also happen to him anywhere he would be. And it did not matter what his age was, whether he was a teenager or when he was already in his forties. Once he started into the opposite lifestyle, could he turn back in time to reverse course and accomplish his original mission?

In a comprehensive, ground-breaking study of the Christian teaching about sexuality, Eric Fuchs surveys the 'taboos of Judaeo-Christian morality.' He looks at the ethics of sexuality as they are presented in the Bible, and by early theologians, medieval scholastics, reformers and counter-reformers, and present-day thinkers. Through it all he is concerned to answer the question: "By what mysterious alchemy did the liberating Gospel of Christ who unconditionally accepted wounded humanity become transformed into moral requirements that were so guilt forming'" Fuch's exhaustive study leads him to develop his own theological interpretation of sexuality: its liberating aspects in the fulfilment of human life, the completion of personality, end the expression of humanity's highest ideals.

He knows how to score …on the field and in the bedroom. But Alex Dare isn’t prepared for the injury that sidelines him into early retirement. Still, if it means working closely with the one woman who ever meant more to him than a one night stand, he’s all on board. But there is no amount of wealth or charm that could persuade social worker, Madison Evans, back into Alex's bed. Good thing Alex loves a challenge. But soon seducing Madison becomes more than just a goal, it just might define his future.