Genealogies of Emotions, Intimacies, and Desire

Genealogies of Emotions, Intimacies and Desire is a lucid and comprehensive overview of recent attempts to write the history of these aspects of human existence that are often thought to be eternal. The theories Brooks is concerned with all agree that love and intimacy are different in different times and places, but they disagree about how and why. Brooks explains these theories and explores their differences. A useful text for postgraduate courses and for anyone seeking to understand these influential theories, Genealogies of Emotions, Intimacies and Desire is the first study to bring these related theories together to be considered side by side. David R. Shumway, Professor of English, and Literary and Cultural Studies, Carnegie Mellon University. Author of Modern Love: Romance, Intimacy, and the Marriage Crisis (2003) and Rock Star: The Making of Cultural Icons from Elvis to Springsteen (2014). This is a thought-provoking and enjoyable publication and Ann Brooks makes a valuable contribution to a feminist sociology of emotion, intimacy and desire. The book provides a scholarly, in-depth study of the field by drawing skillfully on Foucault's genealogy of sexuality, applying his methdology whilst engaging with other key feminist thinkers in the field such as Lauren Berlant, to explore shifting discourses and patterns of intimacy from the Greeks and Romans through to Medieval society and then through to the cult of Romantic love and its commodification in the 20th Century and beyond. Brooks also discusses the shaping of sexuality and desire in relation to postcolonialism and contemporary constructions of sexuality within the latemodern context, where discourses of reflexivity create new modes of intimacy that are mixed in a complicated way with hope and cynicism and the unsettling of old gendered positions. This book is a timely publication and recommended for students and researchers engaging with the sociology of emotions and intimacy. Candida Yates, Professor of Culture and Communication, Bournemouth University. Author of The Play of Political Culture, Emotion and Identity. (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015).