Love Objects: Emotion, Design and Material Culture interrogates the physical embodiments of love by exploring the emotional potency of objects in our lives. How do they become fetishes, symbols, representations, as well as active participants in and mediators of our relationships with each other? What sort of ways can they be used as tokens of affections, symbols of virility, triggers of nostalgia, replacements for lost loved ones, symbols of lost places and times? These are not just Heidegger's tools, which only impinge on our consciousness when they break or fail to function, but are used continuously to engage our emotions subliminally, viscerally and vicariously. Taking an interdisciplinary approach to the topic, covering both designed 'things with attitude' and the 'wild things' of material culture, the essays are grouped together according to themes, rather than by topic or by object, in order to allow a more fruitful discourse between different methodological approaches to the concept of love, whether it is different expressions of religious devotion, familial bonds, or the complexities of sexuality and sexualisation. Each section forms a dialogue about the different ways in which the slippery concept of love, can be analysed, expressed, problematised and discussed. In contrast to existing studies of objects and emotion which operate within disciplinary boundaries, this anthology is rooted in the exploration of material culture, a field which brings together material and approaches from areas as disparate as social history, gender studies and cultural geography, while retaining a strong focus on the physical object inherited from archaeology and design history. The essays contained with the book cover a variety of media and object types - both material and immaterial - from nineteenth-century American men's portraits displaying passionate friendships to the commodification and objectification of Aer Lingus air hostesses.
Industry Reviews
The particular strength of this book resides in the perfect balance between the originality of the case studies (if the object they illustrate are very usual, the examples that illustrate them are often quite the contrary) and the capacity of the authors to enrich their own methodology, which is either theoretical (the common denominator being in many cases a certain emphasis on anthropology) or practice-based (the volume contains several contributions by artists with a strong theoretical interest), with a strong sensibility of the political dimension of the personal. All essays offer very innovative interpretations of femininity and masculinity, defeminizing and sometimes even queering them not only through the analysis of the cultural and historical conventions that surround them but also through the lines of resistance and empowerment that love objects may disclose. -- Jan Baetens * Leonardo *
These studies of 'love objects' are a fitting testimony to the pioneers of material culture studies. * Journal of Design History *
Love Objects introduces a wonderfully rich array of ideas, objects and approaches as a means to question the relationships that we have with the things that we make, use, and own, it poses that important question: 'how do I love thee'? -- Cheryl Buckley, University of Brighton, UK
An attractive book examining the power of 'things' like clothes to evoke emotion, their role as fetishes, symbols and so on. Includes design, fashion, social values, identity and more * Books Ireland, issue 358 *
Love Objects is a timely exploration of why and how we love objects. Probing the intersections of design and emotion across friendship, religion, sexuality, memory, identity, class and taste, the book unpacks our relationships with the material world as one deeply entangled in the fundamentals of the human condition. -- Kjetil Fallan, University of Oslo, Norway
Love Objects presents a dozen intriguing perspectives on how significance arises in the using and making of material things. The collection shows how exploring the roles objects play in articulating emotion helps account for the variability of meanings attached to any thing and invites us to re-imagine design. -- Tim Putnam, formerly University of Portsmouth, UK
