Spillover: Feminist Love Praxis

Abstract

Spillover: Feminist Love Praxis is a dialogical interplay with a cine-poem, SpilLover (2020), where both are inspired by the fragment as a mode of enquiry. The film fragment as mode is about ongoing processes of exploratory potentialities through which the artwork and knowledge reveals an open-endedness. This is enabled by a conception of the film fragment as “enunciation” which offers “a world that is constantly invented” (Mignoloas cited in Gaztambide-Fernández, 2014, p. 198); a fragment is mobile, responsive, malleable and mutable. Spillover: Feminist Love Praxis is concerned with an exploration of love and love relations as political possibilities and acts “to envision, theorize, and compel politics” (Abbas, 2017, p. 200) towards liberatory and transformational conceptions and relations of love. The project disavows romantic love, which is love conceived through an “ethic of domination” (hooks, 2006, p. 289) as opposed to a “love ethic” (hooks, 2006, p. 290). Love, when conceived through a “love ethic” (ibid.), is an expansive, creative, transformational and a relational force. I explore appetite in relation to love where love is conceived of as “abundance” (Abbas, 2017, p. 201) so that love has many forms. A consideration of appetite with respect to love is about an affirmation of love for love. It is an assertion of love: to be willful in love and be willing to love. But, appetite is also about a lack of appetite. It is about what you demand, refuse, insist on, and let go of. Love as “a series of propositions and objections” (Abbas, 2017, p. 201); love as a political possibility for itself: an erotic move through power (Lorde as cited in Sandoval, 2000). This is about a refusal of the innocence of love in order to consider it as a “practice of freedom” (hooks, 2006) and as a transformational space (Berlant, 2011) for feminist love praxis. These ideas are explored and live inside the experience of the cine-poem film, which complements and contrasts with the written fragments. The intention is for the film to compel one towards the written fragments. But the writing is not in “service” of the film nor an exegesis. Rather, the film and writing spill over into each other, creating a relationship that informs one another. The writing world and film world come together to form sensuous spaces where different “enunciations” take place