Love as a Hollow: Merleau‐Ponty's Promise of Queer Love

Abstract

This article argues that Maurice Merleau‐Ponty advances a queer notion of love. In particular, I argue that his notion of love as an institution, as a hollow fueled by the imaginary dimension of existence, shows that love unhinges petrified ideals of gender. I suggest that the crucial insight to be found in Merleau‐Ponty's account of love is that love is a lived openness that invites us to seek out new ways of being.

Intimate Exposure: A Feminist Phenomenology of Sexual Experience and Sexual Suppression

“…6My focus is most centrally the models of sexuality and the problems of sexual violation related to sexist and heterosexist oppression, and thus those associated with a cissexual man–woman binary. The experience of those who inhabit positions that have been less culturally salient, however, will come to the fore especially in consideration of the social pressure brought to bear on the above binary, in relation to which Merleau-Ponty's account is particularly rich (see also Guenther 2011; Burke 2017). Because of the nature of sexual being-in-the-world, “new” and “other” ways of and visions for being-in-the-world sexually transform those that inhabit the designation “traditional,” and can sometimes answer more robustly to the normative structure implied by sexuality as flesh.…”

Existential selfhood in Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception

“…In the terms of this later work, the emergence of the love involves the "institution" of new sense on the basis of redefinition of the significance of one's own past, as also happens with the event of puberty. For more on this issue, seeBeith (2018, ch.4) andBurke (2017). escaped…”