Culture and Romantic Love

3 units

This course delves into the emotional domain of intimate relations to explore romantic love from a cross-cultural perspective. It attempts to address the following questions: What is the nature of romantic love? Is romantic love universal? How do specific cultural practices shape intimate relations? Is romantic love the product of modernization? How is romantic love expressed cross-culturally? Are love and money necessarily opposed? How have the romance industries reshaped romantic experiences? How has gender, racial, and ethnic stratification created unequal experiences of intimate relations? Why does love fail? And finally, how is romantic love expressed, experienced, and imagined in the age of transnationalism and new technologies?