Consuming the Romantic Utopia Quotes

“The culture of capitalism is self-contradictory, demanding that people be hard workers by day and hedonists by night.”
― Eva Illouz, Consuming the Romantic Utopia: Love and the Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism

“The intertwining of love and romance with hedonist and antimodernist themes marked the shift from Victorian morality to a consumption-oriented or 'hedonistic' one in which pleasure was encouraged actively rather than dealt with ambivalently.”
― Eva Illouz, Consuming the Romantic Utopia: Love and the Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism

“A cultural change is less a matter of content than a restructuring of relationships between subordinate and dominant elements.”
― Eva Illouz, Consuming the Romantic Utopia: Love and the Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism

“The beauty-romance link was extended to cover the desire for self-expression, and the new nexus of beauty, self-expression, and romance was in turn fostered by the culture of consumption. Love was thus made to reinforce a definition of selfhood centered around the commodities that provided youth, beauty, charm, glamour, and seductive power.”
― Eva Illouz, Consuming the Romantic Utopia: Love and the Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism

“As the centrality of religion declined during the closing decades of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth, romantic love was inevitably carried along by the new wave of secularization. The themes of selflessness, sacrifice, and idealism were more and more brushed aside. Romantic love ceased being presented in the terms of religious discourse, at the very same time it started playing a central role in the culture at large. In face, in the view of some historians, romance replaced religion as the focus of daily life.”
― Eva Illouz, Consuming the Romantic Utopia: Love and the Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism

“Culture is sometimes only a context in which people relate to each other, but sometimes culture has a power of its own to shape and transform social relationships.”
― Eva Illouz, Consuming the Romantic Utopia: Love and the Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism

“Emotions are activated by a general and undifferentiated state of arousal, which becomes an emotion only when appropriately labeled. For example, the same general state of arousal could trigger either fear or infatuation, depending on environmental cues. If this is indeed the case, we can then expect culture to play a considerable role in the construction, interpretation, and functioning of emotions. Culture operates as a frame within which emotional experience is organized, labeled, classified, and interpreted. Cultural frames name and define the emotion, set the limits of its intensity, specify the norms and values attached to it, and provide symbols and cultural scenarios that make it socially communicative.”
― Eva Illouz, Consuming the Romantic Utopia: Love and the Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism

“The systematic association between love, marriage, and bliss was different from nineteenth-century representations, in which love was more often tragic rather than a happy feeling.”
― Eva Illouz, Consuming the Romantic Utopia: Love and the Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism

“The transformations undergone by the meaning of love are characterized by:

1) the extrication of love from religion, that is, the secularization of the discourse of love

2) the increasing prominence of the theme of love in mass culture, especially in film and advertising

3) the glorification of the theme of love as a supreme value and the equation of love with happiness

4) the inclusion of 'intensity' and 'fun' in the new definitions of romance, marriage, and domesticity”
― Eva Illouz, Consuming the Romantic Utopia: Love and the Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism

“Love was central to Victorians' sense of self because through it they learned to know not only their partners but themselves. Love was a template for authentic, albeit restrained, expression of their inner self, but it was also a means to attain spiritual perfection, as was made clear by the consistent association of the romantic discourse with the values and metaphors of religion.”
― Eva Illouz, Consuming the Romantic Utopia: Love and the Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism

“Far from being a 'haven' from the marketplace, modern romantic love is a practice intimately complicit with the political economy of late capitalism.”
― Eva Illouz, Consuming the Romantic Utopia: Love and the Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism

“I am less interested in tearing down the veil than in pointing to its presence.”
― Eva Illouz, Consuming the Romantic Utopia: Love and the Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism

“Commodities have now penetrated the romantic bond so deeply that they have become the invisible and unacknowledged spirit reigning over romantic encounters.”
― Eva Illouz, Consuming the Romantic Utopia: Love and the Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism

“The liminal is an exploration of the limits of the permissible, controlled and ritually sanctioned by the group. It therefore contains elements of transgression as well as a mechanism designed to reestablish the 'normal' order of things.”
― Eva Illouz, Consuming the Romantic Utopia: Love and the Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism

“The political utopia envisioned by Marx and Engels clearly implied a total separation between commodity and sentiment, interest and love, as a precondition for authentic, fully human relationships.”
― Eva Illouz, Consuming the Romantic Utopia: Love and the Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism

“Culture thus is a matter of shared meanings, but it is not only that: it is also one of the ways in which exclusion, inequality, and power structures are maintained and reproduced.”
― Eva Illouz, Consuming the Romantic Utopia: Love and the Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism

“Emotions are the complex conjunction of physiological arousal, perceptual mechanisms, and interpretive processes; they are thus situated at the threshold where the noncultural is encoded in culture, where body cognition, and culture converge and merge.”
― Eva Illouz, Consuming the Romantic Utopia: Love and the Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism

“Romantic love is irrational rather than rational, gratuitous rather than profit-oriented, organic rather than utilitarian, private rather than public. In short, romantic love seems to evade the conventional categories within which capitalism has been conceived.”
― Eva Illouz, Consuming the Romantic Utopia: Love and the Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism

“Love as an ideal was far from new; it was already held by Victorians as a supreme value. What was new was not sentiments per se but the increasing visibility of romantic behaviors such as petting and kissing in the public settings, often opulent and glamorous, represented everywhere through the collective and ubiquitous mass media, and the merging of these behaviors with values opposed to the sexual and moral reserve of Victorians. Mass culture did not create the ideal of romance, nor did it inspire it in the actors of the period. What it did do, however, was transform the old romantic ideal into a 'visual utopia' that combined elements of the 'American dream' (of affluence and self-reliance) with romantic fantasy.”
― Eva Illouz, Consuming the Romantic Utopia: Love and the Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism

“Culture cannot be understood in terms of probabilities. To understand culture is to understand, in Michael Schudson's words, the social significance of the statistically insignificant, as well as the seamless web of meanings people draw on to make sense of social situations.”
― Eva Illouz, Consuming the Romantic Utopia: Love and the Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism

“Capitalism is characterized by an entire cultural mindset, in that 'exchange relationships, that of buying and selling, have permeated most of the society.”
― Eva Illouz, Consuming the Romantic Utopia: Love and the Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism

“Romantic love is a collective arena within which the social divisions and the cultural contradictions of capitalism are played out.”
― Eva Illouz, Consuming the Romantic Utopia: Love and the Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism