Love in the Time of Contagion: A Diagnosis

In this timely, insightful, and darkly funny investigation, the acclaimed author of Against Love asks: what does living in dystopic times do to our ability to love each other and the world?

COVID-19 has produced new taxonomies of love, intimacy, and vulnerability. Will its cultural afterlife be as lasting as that of HIV, which reshaped consciousness about sex and love even after AIDS itself had been beaten back by medical science? Will COVID end up making us more relationally conservative, as some think HIV did within gay culture? Will it send us fleeing into emotional siloes or coupled cocoons, despite the fact that, pre-COVID, domestic coupledom had been steadily losing fans?

Just as COVID revealed our nation to itself, so did it hold a mirror up to our own relationships. In Love in the Time of Contagion, Laura Kipnis weaves (often hilariously) her own (ambivalent) coupled lockdown experiences together with those of others, and sets them against a larger backdrop: the politics of the virus, economic disparities, changing gender relations, and the ongoing institutional crack-ups prompted by #MeToo and Black Lives Matter, as she maps their effects on the everyday routines and occasional solaces of love and sex.

Author: Laura Kipnis
Publisher: Pantheon Books
Published: 02/08/2022
Pages: 224
Binding Type: Hardcover
Weight: 0.75lbs
Size: 7.10h x 5.60w x 1.00d
ISBN13: 9780593316283
ISBN10: 0593316282
BISAC Categories:
- Social Science | Human Sexuality (see also Psychology | Human Sexuality)
- Family & Relationships | Love & Romance
- Social Science | Disease & Health Issues

About the Author
LAURA KIPNIS is a cultural critic and former video artist whose work focuses on sexual politics, aesthetics, shame, emotion, acting out, moral messiness, and various other crevices of the American psyche. Her seven books have been translated into fifteen languages. Kipnis is a professor at Northwestern University where she teaches filmmaking. Kipnis's writing has appeared in The New York Review of Books, The Guardian, Slate, Atlantic, Harper's, Playboy, the New York Times Magazine, the New York Times Book Review, and Bookforum. She lives in New York and Chicago.