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Had some thoughts on love while walking earlier tonight...
Was imagining myself on a panel with Judith Butler and Amia Srinivasan, as you do, and I imagined what I would say were someone to ask me the vague question, "what are your thoughts on love?"
I began to think of how the metaphore of distance that we often use to describe our feelings towards others may have more metaphysical significance the we realize...what if certain emotions really were a function of distance? Imagine a stranger who you know nothing about and never think of as the furthist away (basically invisible); then aquantances are closer, definitely within sight, but not close enough to touch. People we like, and maybe also those we don't like, are closer, so that we may touch them but there's still distance between us; finally, people we love are the ones we keep so close as to almost always be touching. Due to their closeness they are constantly affecting us: how we move, what we hear, and how we feel.
Then I thought of Amia Srinivasan's essay, "the right to sex," and thought a similar argumant may be used for love. Love and sex, while two distict things, obviously overlap. In her essay, Srinivasan talks about how attraction is political; certain groups of people have been desexualized as a result of social marginalization (think fat people and disabled bodies). Others have been hypersexualized and fetishised (such as Asian women and Black men); both result from oppression.
In the same way sexual attraction is political, I think love is political. Certain groups of people have been seen as unlovable, whether by other individuals, social groups, religion, governments, or all of the above. If the distance metaphore is to be believed, this means that these people are in some way kept at a distance from whatever it is that doesn't love them (hegemonic society). Emotional distance is cruelty at the end of the day. However, the issue with this is that if there truly was space between the two, that would imply that one doesn't affect the other, which of course is wrong. Oppressive societies hurt those who are marginalized in very acute ways, which is the problem. I'm less sure this metaphysics works...
Anyway, it made me think that to create any kind of change we need to shorten the distance between us, that is, we need to decide to love more. Perhaps our emotions are subject to our own manipulation, and the decision to do so and to whom we extend those emotions is a political and ethical one. Many analytic philosophers have refused to allow emotions to be the subject of moral reasoning, they're supposed to be too mystical and uncontrollable for that. It's our actions that follow our emotions that are what we should analyze, rather than the emotions themselves. But what if this weren't the case? What if we saw emotions as actions themselves, and the decigion to feel a certain way, to lessen the distance if you will, was an ethical imperative?
Just some thoughts...