Deciding that they can't get enough of talking about love and marriage and TV, Anuja, Alev and Carly get together again and discuss of norms and (double) standards when it comes to determining what are the right ways to love and choose and make a (heterosexual) family; reflecting on awkward personal experiences, matchmaking/mail-order bride discussions, multiple critical feminist perspectives and of course representations of love and sex on TV. MMA student Vivien Dobran chimes in to talk about how young people take a shopping catalog approach to dating via Tinder.

Please note that we are not done talking about love, sex, relationships and would like to include more, especially non-heteronormative and gender-queer perspectives and critiques next fall!

Love episode reading list:

Abu‐Lughod, L. (2002). Do Muslim women really need saving? Anthropological reflections on cultural relativism and its others. American anthropologist, 104(3), 783-790.

Bachen, C. M., & Illouz, E. (1996). Imagining romance: Young people's cultural models of romance and love. Critical Studies in Media Communication, 13(4), 279-308.

Dhillon, M. and Dhawan, P., 2011. “But I am fat”: The experiences of weight dissatisfaction in Indian adolescent girls and young women. Women's Studies International Forum, 34(6), pp. 539-549.

Illouz, E. (1997). Consuming the romantic utopia: Love and the cultural contradictions of capitalism. Univ of California Press.

Illouz, E. (2007). Cold intimacies: The making of emotional capitalism. Polity.

John, M., 2014. Feminist vocabularies in time and space: Perspectives from India. Economic and Political Weekly. 49(22), pp. 121-130.

Liversage, A. (2012). Gender, conflict and subordination within the household: Turkish migrant marriage and divorce in Denmark. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 38(7), 1119-1136.

Mahmood, S. (2011). Politics of piety: The Islamic revival and the feminist subject. Princeton University Press.

Mohanty, C.T., 1988. Under Western Eyes: Feminist scholarship and colonial discourses. Feminist Review. 30, pp. 61-88.

Mohanty, C.T., 2003. “Under Western Eyes” revisited: Feminist solidarity through anticapitalist struggles. Signs. 28 (2), pp. 499-535.

Palriwala, R., & Uberoi, P. (Eds.). (2008). Marriage, migration and gender (Vol. 5). SAGE Publications Ltd.

Pateman, C. (2016). Sexual contract. The wiley blackwell encyclopedia of gender and sexuality studies, 1-3.

Plambech, S. (2009). From Thailand with love: Transnational marriage migration in the global care economy. Wagadu Volume 5: Anti-Trafficking, Human Rights, and Social Justice, 47-60.

Raj, R., 2013. Dalit women as political agents: The Kerala experience, Economic & Political Weekly, 48(18), pp. 56-63.

Shilpa Davé (2012) Matchmakers and cultural compatibility: Arranged marriage, South Asians, and American television, South Asian Popular Culture, 10:2, 167-183, DOI: 10.1080/14746689.2012.682877