Love Objects: Emotion, Design and Material Culture - Hardcover

The particular strength of this book resides in the perfect balance between the originality of the case studies (if the object they illustrate are very usual, the examples that illustrate them are often quite the contrary) and the capacity of the authors to enrich their own methodology, which is either theoretical (the common denominator being in many cases a certain emphasis on anthropology) or practice-based (the volume contains several contributions by artists with a strong theoretical interest), with a strong sensibility of the political dimension of the personal. All essays offer very innovative interpretations of femininity and masculinity, defeminizing and sometimes even queering them not only through the analysis of the cultural and historical conventions that surround them but also through the lines of resistance and empowerment that love objects may disclose. -- Jan Baetens * Leonardo * These studies of 'love objects' are a fitting testimony to the pioneers of material culture studies. * Journal of Design History * Love Objects introduces a wonderfully rich array of ideas, objects and approaches as a means to question the relationships that we have with the things that we make, use, and own, it poses that important question: `how do I love thee'? -- Cheryl Buckley, University of Brighton, UK An attractive book examining the power of 'things' like clothes to evoke emotion, their role as fetishes, symbols and so on. Includes design, fashion, social values, identity and more * Books Ireland, issue 358 * Love Objects is a timely exploration of why and how we love objects. Probing the intersections of design and emotion across friendship, religion, sexuality, memory, identity, class and taste, the book unpacks our relationships with the material world as one deeply entangled in the fundamentals of the human condition. -- Kjetil Fallan, University of Oslo, Norway Love Objects presents a dozen intriguing perspectives on how significance arises in the using and making of material things. The collection shows how exploring the roles objects play in articulating emotion helps account for the variability of meanings attached to any thing and invites us to re-imagine design. -- Tim Putnam, formerly University of Portsmouth, UK

How are love and emotion embodied in material form?

Love Objects explores the emotional potency of things, addressing how objects can function as fetishes, symbols and representations, active participants in and mediators of our relationships, as well as tokens of affection, symbols of virility, triggers of nostalgia, replacements for lost loved ones, and symbols of lost places and times.

Addressing both designed 'things with attitude' and the 'wild things' of material culture, Love Objects explores a wide range of objects, from 19th-century American portraits displaying men's passionate friendships to the devotional and political meanings of religious statues in 1920s Ireland.