Love, Inc. – Lecture and Q&A with Laurie Essig
The notion of “happily ever after” has been ingrained in many of us since childhood—meet someone, date, have the big white wedding, and enjoy your well-deserved future. But why do we buy into this idea?
Love, Inc. – Lecture and Q&A with Laurie Essig
29 Apr 2019, 17:00 – 19:00
The Queer Anthropology Network is happy to welcome Laurie Essig (Middlebury College, Vermont, USA) to a public lecture at UCL Anthropology! Come around to a lecture and Q&A with Laurie Essig, presenting her recently published work Love, Inc., Dating Apps, the Big White Wedding and Chasing the Happily Never After.
“The notion of “happily ever after” has been ingrained in many of us since childhood—meet someone, date, have the big white wedding, and enjoy your well-deserved future. But why do we buy into this idea? Is love really all we need? Author Laurie Essig invites us to flip this concept of romance on its head and see it for what it really is—an ideology that we desperately cling to as a way to cope with the fact that we believe we cannot control or affect the societal, economic, and political structures around us.”
A drinks reception will be provided after the lecture.
Love, Inc.: https://www.ucpress.edu/book/9780520300491/love-inc
TLS Review of Love, Inc.: https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/public/review-love-inc-laurie-essig/
Laurie Essig is a Professor of Gender, Sexuality and Feminist Studies who teaches courses on Heterosexuality, White People, Freakishness and Feminist Blogging at Middlebury College in Vermont, USA. Her first book, Queer in Russia: A Story of Sex, Self and the Other (Duke, 1999) considered how sexual others are imagined and thus imagine themselves in Russia. Her second book, American Plastic: Credit Cards, Boob Jobs and Our Quest for Perfection (Beacon, 2010) argued that cosmetic surgery in the US is the subprime mortgage crisis of the body, with corporations squeezing profit from working class Americans who hope a more perfect body will lead to a better future. Essig writes for a variety of publications including the Washington Post, the New York Times, and Psychology Today. Her current project is Love, Inc: The strange marriage of romance and capitalism.