Seducing, hooking-up, stabilizing: love and politics among Argentinean gay men

Abstract

This paper analyzes how loving and political trajectories of Argentinean gay men are intersected. In doing so, the goal is to critically review love self-referentiality’s hypothesis operating in contemporary societies and develop the complexity of the notion of sociability to explain political paths. The methodological approach was based in conducting in-depth interviews with 30 gay men who live in the Metropolitan Area of Buenos Aires to reconstruct their love stories. I identify three ways in which love and politics are intertwined. The first one refers to how politics becomes a principle of seduction. The second one implies thinking politics as a hooking-up space. The third one describes the ways through which politics contribute to stabilize couples. I conclude that the description of those crossroads advances in the understanding of love, relativizing self-referentiality’s hypothesis sustained in social studies of love, and unfolding the non-politics category, included in politization studies.