Date: Thu, 01 May 2003 12:13:07 +1100
From: hbone <hbone-AT-optonline.net>
Subject: Re: love and difference


Eric/All,

So many definitions, so many possibilities in each word.

Love being possible only to a person who, normally, has gender and
eventually has sexual inclinations such as  Hetero, Homo, Bi-sexual, male or
female - i.e. six flavors.

Difference being  inevitable between any two individuals.

As a child, one is attracted to same sex, opposite sex.

Many kinds of Love:

Child to parent, male or female, parent to child, male or female.

Child to adoptive parent, male or female, hetero, homo, bi.

Adoptive parent to child.


I think of Romantic love is cultural.

People who are blind or deaf  or both must have different love experience
than persons without those handicaps..

Love is individual experience socially conditioned by family friends from
infancy, then by nursery school, other schools, other communities.

Love, or lack of love condition all sorts of childhood experiences.

The experience of loving or hating has influenced chararacter and
personality long before a child reads with understanding about romantic
love, or ideal love or the ideas of philosophic abstract  love that writers
write about.

When  an author's narrative about love strikes a chord, a resonance, that
echoes  a reader's  experience of love, it may produce new insights into
ones' self, but one who had never loved would not learn loving from the
printed page.

Attitudes and potential for loving are formed long before puberty.

Gender and role-playing are both biological and cultural; pursuing and being
pursued;  marrying, mothering, fathering,

A few years ago, a documentary on pregnancy of poor inter-city girls
explained that they know the danger and problems they face, but are
passionately desire their own  baby which they will love, so they
deliberately get pregnant.

Perhaps women, or most women would understand that feeling, drawing on their
own feelings.  I think men could not have the same understanding as women.

regards,
Hugh











> Steve, Geof, Karen, all:
>
> I'm not sure what I have to add to this conversation. Please regard
> these note as more a series of notations than actual arguments.
>
> The whole nature/culture divide strikes me as very problematic and it is
> interesting that either side of the / can be used to legitimize
> particular positions. Thus, at one time gays tended to appropriate the
> 'gayness is biological' argument in order to argue against
> fundamentalists who argued that it was merely a lifestyle choice.  In a
> similar way, feminists have argued against biology in more cultural
> terms to extend the elasticity of gender definitions.  To the extent
> that both the gay and feminist positions are progressive, what kind of
> aporia is it when contradictory modes of argumentation are used to
> support their respective positions?  Is there another way to legitimize
> these things without falling into the nature/culture divide?  And will
> the current genome project serve to mandate a kind of genetic
> essentialism that is really more political than biological?
>
> On love, most of what I have read tends to place it's origins in the
> middle ages rather than the nineteenth century.  The so-called 'courtly
> love' tradition was certainly a revolution of the sensibility when it
> first emerged.
>
> Two brief points:
>
> 1. Since marriage among the nobility tended to be based on property
> relationships and power alliances, courtly love usually was adulterous
> or transgressive.  Consider as examples - Lancelot and Guinievere,
> Tristan and Isolde, Abelard and Heloise.
>
> 2. Perhaps on account of 1, courtly love could not easily be
> consummated.  Thus, it led to a strong fantasy component which tended to
> be productive of the imagination's latent tendencies.  Dante was married
> to someone other than Beatrice, but his wife never once appears in
> either 'The New Life" or the 'Commedia.' Similarly, Petrarch never
> consummated his love for Laura.
>
> What does it mean that an anima figure who does not exist in reality
> becomes the 'muse' engendering the great poetic tradition of the West?
> Subtract Dante, Petrarch, the minnesingers, and much of what we call
> Western literature disappears.  The ironic thing about this, of course,
> is that historically, one of the major sources for this tradition
> appears to have come from Islam.
>
> eric
>
>
>
>