Articulated love: Neoliberalism and the romantic couple in popular culture

Articulated Love surveys the articulations of romantic love and neoliberalism within popular culture from the U.S.A., Canada, and the U.K. [1973-2023]. In the last fifty years, neoliberalism has remade economy, subjectivity, and emotionality, reversing decades of economic redistribution and nearly realizing a truly global capitalism. At different scales, popular culture has both resisted and facilitated such social changes, yet romantic love - with or without marriage - is continuously upheld as a personal solution to the social and economic problems of life under neoliberalism. Deconstructing the determination of our desire by the commodified culture of our contemporary moment, Articulated Love approaches music, poetry, cinema, and theoretical writing to argue that our cultural obsession with the romantic couple is a constituent part of the exploitative, oppressive, and dominating social relations inherent to neoliberal capitalism. No exception, romantic relations have been increasingly articulated with capitalism while being upheld as its outside. Disenchanting love's special status, Articulated Love grounds its analyses in the cultural rearticulation of those material practices so often subsumed to love's idealistic abstraction. Yet neoliberalism's relation to romance is not simply repressive or instrumentalizing: to the extent that we can improve our competitive positioning by upgrading our existing connections, we go "back on the market," leveraging our own capital in search of a better love. Attuned to the subtleties of popular culture as they refit normative love to the just-in-time social reproduction or on-demand subject-forming apparatuses of our economy, Articulated Love ravels the contradictions and dead-ends of neoliberal romance: its temporality of now and forever, its emotional capacity to induce unwaged work, its ideological separation from economy, its cultural status as an expression of individual agency, and its interpenetration of broad swaths of social life. Within a world where romance is considered mandatory but a living wage is not, where precarity has again become the defining affect of capitalist subjectivity, the loveless subjects of neoliberalism now turn to corporate platforms in search of love. The couple-form becomes an extension -- albeit a tenuous one -- of neoliberal subjectivity, an emphatically non-monetary relation that secures subjective pleasure.