ABSTRACT
Love-or, more precisely, the concept of ‘love power’—is at the center of my theoretical analysis of ‘formally equal patriarchy’, an attempt to explain why men still dominate contemporary western societies. I began this work in 1980, and published my Love Power and Political Interests. Towards a Theory of Patriarchy in Contemporary Western Societies in 1991 (hereafter LP or, when quoted, Jónasdóttir 1994).1 Yet, ‘love’, sexual or otherwise, was not my focus at fi rst.2 I moved into the landscape of love through a critical and reconstructive application of Marx’s method (his materialist premises and general social theory) to feminist questions that arose in many different countries from the 1960s about the persistent inequality between women and men. My use of Marx’s method led me to identify love and love power as a creative/productive-and exploitable-human capacity, comparable in signifi cance to labor or labor power. In other words, sociosexual relationships (alias gender relations), love practices and the struggle and control over the use of love power in the process of the production/reproduction of people comprise a particular societal dimension, distinguishable as such for studying societies and social change.
