On January 29th, The Department of Digital Humanities welcomes Carolina Bandinelli for a talk on love in the digital age, followed by a drinks reception. Students and staff are all welcome.

On love that does not hurt: the rise of the postromantic utopia

In this talk, I interrogate the contemporary love in digital societies, with a focus on heterosexual and gendered codes. Drawing on seven years of qualitative research, including narrative and reflexive ethnography as well as the analysis of media and cultural products, I shed light on an emerging structure of feeling, which I call the postromantic condition. Marked by a profound disenchantment with romantic codes, the postromantic condition is rooted in the acknowledgment of the ideological and illusionary nature of romantic narratives, especially in the rejection of the trope that ties love with pain. On the one hand, this indicates the desire to overcome a certain eroticisation of suffering, which leads to a renewed interest in love as philia. On the other hand, the fantasy of eliminating pain gets entangled with the promise of a disembodied, techno-efficient love offered by artificial intimacies (AI). Beyond the different variations that the postromantic ethos can take, it articulates the new utopia of love that does not hurt; it is love finally devoid of risk, freed from the threat of trauma.

Carolina Bandinelli is Associate Professor in Media and Creative Industries at the University of Warwick, where she co-direct the Centre for Digital Inquiry. She is the author of Social Entrepreneurship and Neoliberalism: Making Money While Doing Good (Rowman and Littlefield, 2019) and Fashion as Creative Economy, with McRobbie and Strutt (Polity, 2023). She has published widely on the creative and culture industries, and the digital culture of love. In 2024 she published the personal essay Le Postromantiche (Laterza) on the new cultures on love, and the novel La più brava (Nutrimenti) – both in Italian.