“How Shall I Say Love … “: Reimagining a Non-relational Geopolitics of Love in the Time of COVID-19

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

12-21-2021

Abstract

The pandemic as a portal has deeply changed life as we know it; including our homes. While countries continue to strengthen their health systems and policies; marginalized groups in local communities are absorbed; reassembled; and transformed in everyday ‘portals' which generate mutually entangled and composite forces of unification and healing as well as forces of division and wounding. In this commentary; I argue that these forces can be taken as embodying a geopolitics of love already subsumed by intimate; proximal; and mediated relations; therefore leaving out aspects of love that are populated by voids; hollows; and liminalities. Here; I reflect upon Massey's spatial politics vis-a-vis Harrison's notion of non-relationality in order to puncture the representational limits of the geopolitical as a way to transform ‘bad' love (i.e. love that eclipses pains; sufferings; and otherness) while simultaneously not succumbing to a desire for sameness underpinning ‘good’ love (i.e. love that promotes unification and healing). Specifically; I suggest that the nonrelationality of place making and its geographies of nowhereness may lead us back home to love as always already there.

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