2023-11-25 23:35:44
Everything is destined to fail. At first, this sentence may seem absolutely fatalistic. What could get worse? This is the beginning of Super emotional. A defense of love (Continta Metienes, 2023), the essay by Juanpe Sánchez López that for months has gained popularity and praise thanks to the multi-genre approach to the feeling that we like the most and the one that we curse the most: love. What differentiates it from so many approaches throughout the history of art, culture, thought or even science, is that the author creates a generational portrait on which he reflects slowly, dwelling on as many edges as the complexities this feeling arouses, incorporating cultural elements from the last decade. Recently the third edition has been announced of a work in which Sánchez López “invites us to think about what love can mean in a contemporary framework, accepting that this is a historical concept, moved and moved by contexts, dispositions of gender, class, raciality, disability and orientation sex-affective, among others,” according to the synopsis.
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Juanpe Sánchez López (Alicante, 1994) is a writer and university researcher. He has studied Theory of Literature and Theory and Criticism of Culture. He has participated in the collective volumes (h)amor7 roto (2022, Continue You Have Me) and What do we talk about when we talk about love (2023, Editorial Cántico). His poems have been published in magazines and in catalogs of artistic exhibitions. In 2021 she published the collection of poems From the stands (Letraversal), the first installment of a trilogy about love, the second of which was released last spring with the essay Super emotional. A defense of love (Continue You Got Me).
The writer Belén Gopegui warns in the prologue that “although [Juanpe] say ‘love’, you make with those two words a new syntagm, not pathetic, not closed, not equal to itself, not lacking in movement and life. Love in this essay is, in his precise expression, ‘given to openness.'” And we are faced with a meticulous analysis of love supported by fragments of Tamara Tenenbaum, Remedios Zafra, Byung-Chul Han, Rolan Barthes or Judith Butler, but also in the songs of Charli XCX, Caroline Polachek, Julieta Venegas, Mitski or Lana del Rey (whom he thanks for having written the impeccable Venice Bitch) to be able to look to the future, but above all to the present. Juanpe explains how intersectional feminism plays a crucial role in this journey. “Seeing people around you, who are not part of the academic or thought structures, establish feminist reasoning in the popular sphere because these have been favorably inserted is optimistic, something that is changing,” she tells elDiario.es by video call. .
Deconstruction of romantic love
But there is something else; the idea of how the way of sharing love for and with friends is a solid basis for deconstructing romantic love and looking at the collectivization of care. “That is the driving force of my life, thinking that I want to spend time with my friends gives me the framework of wanting to live in this. And giving importance to that link is essential. A friend knows everything,” she details enthusiastically. The author narrates how in 2008 when the film saga was released Twilight Conversations were born with her friends about love and the topics that interested them; Being able to think together with them was key to her growth. “Being able to give importance to the idea of ’we’, I have always had mostly female friends, was essential for me. Starting with the notion of girl things, talking about what is considered ‘our things’, which has become an enormous learning, of a philosophical nature. “Friends are the place where I always want to be.”
Talking about the revival who live series like Sex in New Yorko Girls, and that at the time were cultural artifacts with which to begin to dismantle the ideas of romantic love in the 21st century, he states: “As soon as there is a woman who is talking about her experiences in life, it is considered something that is apart of the big problems, which are the male ones. Virginia Woolf already said this more than 100 years ago. And yet, it keeps happening. What is considered feminine has historically been treated as something of second degree; the confessional, what talks about feelings, the small group of friends or friends that talks about ‘his things’. But the big problem has always been war or sport, in the big issues of our society.” Spinning about how matters’girls and fags’ have been denied cultural value, Sánchez comments that “there is a certain very normative masculinity that is fixed in the emotional and linguistic unavailability of expressing oneself. What you feel, or how you feel it, is something that has to permeate the darkness.”
As soon as there is a woman who is talking about her experiences in life, it is considered something that is removed from the big problems, which are male problems.
Juanpe Sánchez López — Author of ‘Superemocional’
Something very relevant Super emotional It is how it situates the extrapolation of capitalist culture to our relationships, with concepts such as emotional entrepreneurship, detachment or individualism. At the same time, it proposes a mirror on our realities, in which we will fail and in which we will suffer, but we will be more prepared for other forms of love and an experience outside of neoliberal indicators. “The skeleton of the book is my final project of the Master’s Degree in Critical Theory of Culture at the Carlos III University of Madrid. Before the pandemic hit, I was planning to go abroad to do my doctorate, in the end they didn’t give me the scholarship and suddenly I asked myself, “What am I going to do with all this?” He explains.
The academic path of his obsession
“How can I understand this idea about how I feel, through research? I decided to write about love, because I also felt that it was what obsessed me. Not only literary, because I also write about love in another way in poetry collections. But it’s also something that has obsessed me my entire life; since you’re little, a gay teenager and all your friends are having their great teenage boyfriends and you suddenly don’t have access to that. That in the end obsesses because the fictions and the story of the expectations of our lives are closely linked to romantic love and having a family, a partner, and making a future with that, right? Then my obsession walked, walked and keeps walking,” she describes.
Love has obsessed me all my life because since I was little, as a gay teenager, my friends were having their great teenage boyfriends and suddenly I didn’t have access to that.
Juanpe Sánchez López — Author of ‘Superemocional’
Another of the most powerful points of the book is the criticism of emotional entrepreneurship, which is presented to us, questionably, socially supported in therapy as the only solution to control our emotions, and not only as a matter of access to the public health system. “I try to illustrate this through the dating program Women and men and vice versa (2008-2021), and it is the idea of being tronistas [los protagonistas del programa, que se sientan en un trono] or entrepreneurs of ourselves, who try to understand ourselves as a product that can be improved, and who choose certain accessories that make them better, like their partner. How do I find someone who has the same tastes as me, the same hobbies, who shares ways of working or shares ways of thinking. And that in the end leads us to a scenario of commercialization of our affections and people,” argues Sanchez López.
“This is closely related to this introduction of the business sphere into our relationships, and closely linked to the psychological jargon used when talking about managing or working on our emotions, and that is absolutely very dangerous. There is an undercurrent that I have to dedicate time, effort, hours, dedication to being better, to relating, to overcoming this trauma through work with oneself, etc… In the end I believe that the solution really lies in creating community networks , a network of affections, of friends, of traditional or chosen family that listens to you, that values you, that knows who you are, how you can act. And for that solution to occur we must have more time for ourselves, we have to stop being so tired and we have to stop taking on ourselves,” he concludes.
A strange phenomenon often occurs when people face the mirror that represents approaches to the ways of living love in the 21st century: seeing themselves between a rock and a hard place, between the deconstruction of a normative system and a gravitational inertia towards the romantic love. In short, how do we confront the programming that Disney has made about our identities? Sánchez gets this right when he speaks about the mirage of false calm: “For me, reconciliation involves opening the concept of love and de-hierarchizing the idea of a couple as the only objective of love. I can dedicate the same time to my friends, my mother or other people with whom I want to spend time. Being able to form nuclei that are foreign to those expectations, and that creates cracks in our expectations for the future and in what we understand by love.”
Analysis of The bridges of Madison o The Devil Wears Prada They happily coexist with fragments and quotes from Engels or Sarah Ahmed. Pop music has its great moment in rehearsal. The author’s observation about Melodrama (Republic Records, 2017), the album by New Zealander Lorde, has several successful layers. On the one hand, the recognition of a generational work but also, incorporated as a story of the loss of innocence. “Melodrama It is an incredible portrait of how you go from adolescence to being an adult, and, above all, what interested me a lot, beyond the formal, is this adolescent manifestation of using onomatopoeia as forms of rhythm in songs. I feel that the album captures that feeling of invincibility of the teenager, and more precisely the moment in which he begins to lose himself.”
Of course, if there is a figure that represents a paradigm in the feminisms of the 2010s for the author, it is Lana del Rey. “In the first reviews, Lana del Rey was called a bad feminist. I relate this to something we currently experience: fictions and how we consume them, as if they should be a perfect model of morality or behavior when precisely what songs do is propose worlds with problems in which we can see ourselves reflected. “Lana del Rey proposes performances that she sings about, she does not legitimize them.” Juanpe is a fan of the American artist, whose debut album Born To Die the middle Pitchfork had to rectify to better the score he originally gave to a work that is indispensable today to understand pop music and its drift in the last decade.
Super emotional It is an honest, brave and rigorous look at something as difficult and as fantastic as love. Among its pages, a much greater breath is extracted than the possibility of a solution to everyone’s liking, in the neoliberal context that we live in, and that is that reaching it will be much easier and more exciting if we do it together with our friends. Like so many things in life, the searching process can be much more exciting than what is about to be revealed.
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