Epistolary Narratives of Love, Gender and Agonistic Politics

Maria Tamboukou is Professor of Feminist Studies at the University of East London, UK, and Leverhulme Major Research Fellow (2022–2025). She is the author of Gendering the Memory of Work and Women, Education and the Self, and the co-author of The Archive Project.

• AcknowledgementsIntroduction: Rethinking Love through Arendtian EyesChapter 1: Feeling, Reading, Thinking, Writing LoveChapter 2: Portraits of Moments in BiosHistory EntanglementsChapter 3: Archival Agonism, Resistibility and Memory WorkChapter 4: Amor Mundi, or the Reality of Utopian LoveChapter 5: Epistolary Waves, Politics, Memory and the Force of LoveChapter 6: Nobody Knows what Love Can DoChapter 7: Even Workers Fall in Love: Eros in the Labour MovementConclusion: Epistolary Poethics and Agonistic PoliticsIndex

"For those who have been reading Maria Tamboukou’s books work over the years, this book is a denouement of sorts. For those not yet familiar with the pleasures of reading Tamboukou, a distinctive pleasure awaits. Everything comes together via Tambakou’s ‘epistolary poethics’, which put an Arendtian agonism of love into conversation with the private and political writings of four revolutionary women: Désirée Véret-Gay, Rosa Luxemburg, Emma Goldman and Rose Pesotta. Agonism is also in the archive, with Tamboukou’s focus on women whose love letters code private and public. And readers are in the archive with Tamboukou, searching for the shards of revolutionary women’s writing, dispersed into the archives of men made more famous, or reading Emma Goldman’s papers, aware of their pending move under precarious conditions from the reduced shelter of a neo-liberalizing university to a community center. The pain of loss, thrill of discovery, and responsibility of care are braided together as Tamboukou wondrously guides her readers through the epistolarium, its history, and its politics. A must-read for scholars or fans of women's and labour history, feminism, anarchism, or Hannah Arendt."- Bonnie Honig, Nancy Duke Lewis Professor, Brown University, USA"The lives of four ‘revolutionary women’ read through Hannah Arendt’s thinking and writing about love: Tamboukou offers us a compelling theoretical narrative on the fascinating entanglements between love and politics. This book convincingly – and joyously - argues that love is a crucial epistemological tool for feminist theory and a vital force for feminist practice."- Olivia Guaraldo, Professor in Political Philosophy and Director of the Hannah Arendt Center for Political Studies, University of Verona, Italy