Love in the Time of Contagion

In this timely, fiercely argued, keenly insightful, and hilarious investigation, the acclaimed author of Against Love asks: what does living in dystopic times do to our ability to love each other and the world?

COVID produced new taxonomies of love, intimacy, and vulnerability. Will the cultural afterlife of Covid-19 be as lasting as that of HIV, which reshaped consciousness about sex and love in the intervening decades, even after AIDS itself had been beaten back by medical science? Will COVID end up making us more relationally conservative, as some think HIV did to gay culture, for which legalized marriage rather than the anti-domestic ecstasies of anonymous sex became the signature program? Will it send us fleeing into emotional siloes or coupled cocoons despite the fact that pre-Covid domestic coupledom had been steadily losing fans?
In Love in the Time of Contagion, Laura Kipnis bravely weaves her own (ambivalent) coupled lockdown experiences and those of others against a larger backdrop: the politics of the virus, economic disparities, changing gender relations, the ongoing institutional crack-ups prompted by #MeToo and #BLM, even as she maps their effects on our everyday routines of love and sex.