ABSTRACT
This chapter provides a brief overviews of both feminist love studies and feminist affect theory as recent separate studies that have emerged; it contemplates what disciplinary or discursive obstacles might be preventing alliances between them; and it offers some possible points for future dialogue. It focuses on one point of intersection in particular: love conceived as an 'affective energy'. The chapter discusses how the discourse of 'energy' could provide a common ground between feminist love studies and feminist affect studies, but there is a larger connected discussion that could be pursued with regard to how materialist concepts of energy as labor and love as labor are connected. It explains that a more committed dialogue between the 'Feminist love studies' and 'feminist affect theory' is timely; the resulting conversations promise exciting and new theories of the phenomenon called love that would be beneficial to scholars in both areas, and feminist theory generally.
