ABSTRACT

This chapter addresses consensual bonding in terms of its socio-emotional but also political power. It defines the two aspects of power through the possible meeting points of the feminist-Marxist, global trans-feminist, and ecological positions. The chapter helps to understand the consensual plurality of bonding as a precarious and peripheral transgression of normativity that seeks to undermine the dominant codes of culture, such as the patriarchal preservation of the nuclear family. It considers the precarious traits of bonding in light of the emerging feminist-informed theories on love power. The possessive dimension of love as the most intense form of human bonding has been a key source of contestation in the first- and subsequently second-wave feminist critique of patriarchal structures. In recognizing the differences, feminist socialists created the most radical vision of the global societal transformation, which they believed could only be achieved gradually, through a process of socio-political revolution of the monogamous family structure.