Consuming gay love reality

analyzing love in act

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to reflect about the consumption of gay love reality. Some scholars specialized in sociology of love, as Eva Illouz, consider that the way in which we love is pre-coded by loving narratives from the mass media, emerging a romantic utopia. I try to question the function of this utopia. Even it is true that media contribute to consolidate and legitimize love stories that idealize it, when people try to reappropriate them, they offer cultural resistance to this codification. From a qualitative approach based on in depth interviews with 18-33 years-old gay men who lived in Buenos Aires, I reconstruct 44 love stories. This paper is structured in three parts. In the first I analyze different ways of detachment, such as parodies or pointing them as ridiculous, to criticize that romantic utopia. In the second part, I try to go back to the story of relationships in order to understand the real meaning of romance in those affective trajectories. In the third part I focus on magnitude of things that make the consuming love related to small and simple goods and not to luxury gifts. In the conclusion section, I emphasise the necessity to connect love dimension with other spheres of live, from which emerge the romantic senses that people give to their experiences.