Loneliness is a feminist issue

Abstract

Loneliness is often described as a deadly epidemic sweeping across the population, a silent killer. Loneliness, we are told, is a social disease that must be cured. But what does it mean to think of loneliness as a feminist issue, and what might a specifically feminist theorisation bring to conceptualisations of loneliness? In this paper, I argue that feminism helps us see that loneliness is not just personal but political. I trace how stories of loneliness surface, circulate, shift and compound within the specificity of the present, centring on recent strategies proposed by the UK government in their ‘national mission to end loneliness’. I outline how this policy discourse upholds certain normative attachments as having the promise to alleviate loneliness: coupled love, the family, community. Such framings serve to depoliticise contemporary conditions of loneliness, positioning loneliness as a personal failure, with the cure for loneliness as the responsibility of individuals and communities. Absent in government depictions of the problem of loneliness are the wider mechanisms that condemn people to lonely lives, when infrastructures fail, when people find themselves violently cut off from the world. Finally, I speculate on what might happen if we were to challenge this framing of loneliness as always and only a problem in need of a cure. I seek to uncover some of the political potentials of loneliness, asking what can be learnt through reflecting upon shared experiences of loneliness? For, as feminist politics has shown us, feelings of disaffection and alienation can help us imagine other worlds.

The Rage of Lonely Men: Loneliness and Misogyny in the Online Movement of “Involuntary Celibates” (Incels)

“…Overall, our analysis is committed to the project of critical phenomenology (Guenther 2019;Loidolt 2022;Oksala 2022); it explores the incels' experiences from the standpoint of subjectivity, while critically reflecting on their social embeddedness and analyzing how these experiences, their description, and political mobilization are permeated by and used to reproduce and reinforce oppressive structures such as patriarchy, white supremacy, heteronormativity, and racism. In this regard, our analysis is in line with the key presumptions of feminist theory, in that it treats misogyny and loneliness not as psychological features of individual subjects but rather as social and political phenomena (Magnet and Orr 2022;Manne 2018Manne , 2021Srinivasan 2022;Wilkinson 2022).…”

Changing the narrative: Loneliness as a social justice issue

“…Individuals are advised by policymakers to seek these corrective measures, get out more, and join group activities (see, for example, NHS, n.d.; NIA, n.d.). As Wilkinson (2022) points out, the dominant idea is that "we must constantly work to avoid loneliness" (p. 24).…”

“…Public discourse and media representations of loneliness are not separate from academic scholarship. As pointed out by other scholars, public discourse and media representations in western societies frequently depict the lonely person—often confused with the person who prefers solitude or even merely lives alone—as sad and deficient, or even violent, resentfully turning against others (Wilkinson, 2022). Although representations of loneliness in public discourse or in the media are empirically underinvestigated, in their theoretical analysis Wilkinson refers to the images of “the violent incel” and the “crazy cat lady” as examples of this phenomenon.…”

The lonely activist: On being haunted

“…By ‘loneliness’ we mean ‘feelings of unwanted aloneness, seclusion and isolation that result from a lack of meaningful connection with human and non-human animals alike’ (Magnet & Orr, 2022, p. 7). To put it another way, loneliness is a ‘mismatch between the social connections we have and the social connections we desire’ (Wilkinson, 2022, p. 25). This loneliness seems antithetical to activism since the raison d’être of activists is building community and solidarity to address grievances.…”