This paper builds upon scholarly studies of emotion as a way bridge the divide between private and public, between the individual and the collective, through an examination of Tunisian youth in the 1960s. More specifically, it looks at love letters written by the predominantly urban, educated, and middle class readers of a fashionable women’s magazine, Faiza. While a minority, these upwardly mobile professionals were overrepresented in the young nation’s universities, intellectual circles, the ruling political party, government, and nationalist civil society organizations. By virtue of their privileged position, they were the most exposed to transnational media, consumerism, and youth culture. In evoking love, they deployed their emotions as communicative tools to convey ideals about gender roles, family life, and the desire for companionate marriage. At least at the moment they were perusing the magazine or writing letters to its editors, these readers formed an emotional community, and they utilized the epistolary genre to articulate the boundaries of new social norms surrounding gender roles, courtship, and the family through a discourse on love. The personal dramas narrated in their letters reveal a sense of self and awareness of generational change that is at once premised upon individual choice and deeply committed to the affective ties of the family. They suggest an individuation inherent to romantic love and companionate marriage that scholars associate with the modern subject but one that contradicts the assumption that the modern self exists in tension with family. Conversations about monogamy and companionate marriage dated at least to the beginning of the twentieth century in Tunisia as elsewhere in the Middle East. This paper considers the impact of national independence, the expansion of education, and personal status legislation on the notion of love as it was expressed and represented in the 1960s. Such topics were frequently debated in the pages of Faiza in features on mixed marriage, women and education, and women and employment. They came to a climax in a series of articles, interviews, and a stream of letters to the editors framed as “a debate about love.” How did particular configurations of youth make romantic love more acceptable? Why were certain patterns of courtship deemed a sign of modernity, while others were not? In asking such questions, I hope to delineate how the discourse on love, ideals of romance and courtship, constructed certain Tunisians as modern subjects while excluding others.

Abdullah Cevdet, the chief-editor of İçtihad, attempted to respond to a challenging question in an article dated to July 1931 in his column: “What is love?” A prolific author writing in polemical fashion, Abdullah Cevdet, explained what love must be by resorting to chemistry and physiology as well as psychology and social analysis, not to mention poetry and philosophy. He was neither the first nor the last one who would be troubled with what seemed like a basic question. Love, romance, and marriage had been under the scrutiny of public intellectuals and physicians as well as legal and religious authorities in the shadow of social transformations brought by political reforms, colonial encounters, and nationalist movements. Ottoman ruling elites and later Turkish bureaucrats engaged with debates on love, romance, and marriage in thinking about how to build modern self-governing individuals socially and morally tied to family and nation. Legal practices in contracting marriage and medical discourses seeking to maintain physically and emotionally proper and fit individuals constituted what these officials formulated in the recipes for love and marriage by the turn of twentieth century. This paper explores changing perspectives regarding love through the lens of articles and editorials penned in Ottoman-Turkish and published in the mainstream newspapers and magazines based in Istanbul at the turn of the twentieth century. It analyzes how Ottoman public intellectuals expounded upon love and proper marriage by engaging with legal discourses and medical concepts, especially those of pathological love and love sickness, which came to be an increasingly common theme among male intellectuals’ writings. Second, this paper will scrutinize the ways in which Ottoman feminist writings engaged with the overall debates regarding proper love and marriage. It will discuss why Ottoman feminists showed little interest in these medico-legal conceptualizations of love and they rather preferred to engage with the question of “love” by addressing freedom of and right to love. By highlighting agreements and contradictions among intellectuals over the debates on love, romance, and marriage, this paper will investigate what debates about love, romance, and marriage among late Ottoman intellectuals could reveal about the engagements of authority, subjectivity, and gender at the turn of the twentieth century.

Discourses of non-heteronormative love have been substantial to the organization of LGBTQ movements in various social contexts, including Turkey. This paper explores the relationship between queer love and political space in Turkey by focusing on two distinct yet related uses of love in LGBTQ political discourse and agency: first, as a response to “hate crimes” against LGBTQ people, and second, as a claim to public visibility, social inclusion and sexual justice. In Turkey, this discursive focus on love has gained more widespread public attention during and after the Gezi protests, the time when the LGBTQ presence and visibility reached a remarkable point among different political platforms. Since then, there has been growing public recognition of LGBTQ lives and prevalent public circulation of LGBTQ political discourse, also involving slogans based on love. Some of these slogans have become highly popular (i.e. “-Where are you my love? - Here I am my love!”), marking love as an essential item in the LGBTQ political agenda. Focusing on these slogans and other uses of queer love within the LGBTQ movement in Istanbul, I trace the following questions: How does love define the political subject of the LGBTQ movement? How do LGBTQ activists deploy the notion of love to delineate the sites for social change, sexual justice and gender equality? What does discourse of love entail for political action in general and LGBTQ politics in particular? What kind of possibilities does it open (or foreclose)? What kind of a role does love play in LGBTQ people’s claims to gender and sexual justice? Last but not least, following bell hook’s (2001) formulation, how can we approach love as an action instead of seeing it as a feeling within the specific context of the LGBTQ movement in Turkey?

Since their forced displacement to Algeria in 1975, Sahrawi women in particular, have built and sustained the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic in refugee camps. Their extraordinary effort during the years in which most Sahrawi men combated in the Western Sahara against an invading Moroccan army (1975-1991) sees its continuation in the current post-cease fire period, because as Sahrawi men live in permanent movement in and out of the Republic for the purposes of income generating activities and secure livelihoods, it is mostly women who continue to sustain the resistance of the Sahrawi Republic through their everyday labour of political leadership, administration and domestic care. For the pending decolonization struggle of the Western Sahara, the revolutionary archetype of the Sahrawi munaḍila (female militant, although in Hassaniya it carries the broader meaning of “struggler” or “revolutionary”) has become emblematic of the Sahrawi nation in and of itself. In this paper I discuss the prevalent complaint of a “lack of romance in the desert” I encountered among Sahrawi youth during my eighteen months of fieldwork working with the National Union of Sahrawi Women in the Sahrawi Republic (2011-2013). How can romantic love serve as a window to understand larger social and political transformation? What is the place of love in revolutionary processes? Through an analysis of the location assigned to love during the early revolutionary period (1975-1991) as well as the transformations in marriage practices initiated during this period, I argue the lament of love’s absence articulates a critique of the dominant model of female empowerment in the Sahrawi Republic that is suggestive of the way in which the figure of the munaḍila is being renegotiated under the conditions of a prolonged UN-mediated peace-process in the region