Introduction:

Intimacy and the Politics of Love

“…In particular, it seeks to illustrate how love has become increasingly a politicized site of contestation in everyday relations of sexuality, marriage, gender, kinship as reflected in the realms of the media, law, policy, electoral politics, and nationalism. While intimacy, love, sexuality, and marriage have been subject to detailed examination in a wide range of Annual Review of Anthropology articles and of anthropological studies (see for instance Boellstorff 2007;Borneman 1996Borneman , 2001Brettell 2017;Carsten et al 2021;Constable 2009;Hirsch & Wardlow 2006), this account-although by no means exhaustive-seeks to focus particular attention on intimate relations and the circuits of governance through which they become visible as political contestations or "love jurisdictions" (Mody 2013a) and to give space to discussions of politicized love that have hitherto been on the margins of anthropological discourse. The perspective focuses on anthropological studies of kinship with politics where love can be seen variously as an intimate and political subjectivity, as an aspect of self-making, as the making of kinship, or as something politically objectified within a nationalist ideology.…”