Imagining We in the Age of I

<p><strong>Winner, MeCCSA Edited Collection of the Year</strong><strong>, MeCCSA Outstanding Achievement Awards 2022</strong></p><p>In the early twenty-first century shifts in gender and sexuality, work and mobility patterns and especially technology have provoked interest in perceived threats to social bonding on a global scale. This edited collection explores the fracturing of couple culture but also its persistence.</p><p>Looking at a variety of media sites—including film, television, popular print fiction, new media and new technologies—this volume’s diverse range of contributors examine how mediated scenes of intimacy proliferate, while real-life experiences are cast in a newly uncertain light. The collection thus challenges a latent but growing tendency towards perceptions of romantic decline, in a variety of cultural contexts and with attention to the impact of COVID-19. </p><p>This is an accessible and timely collection suitable for scholars in gender studies, media, cultural studies and communication studies.</p> <p>Introduction: Romance and Social Bonding in Contemporary Culture – Before and After COVID-19; 1 Abject Desires in the Age of Anger: Incels, Femcels and the Gender Politics of Unfuckability; 2 Love Technologies: Televisual Matchmaking and Algorithmic Attraction; 3 Negotiating Romantic Relationships in the Cell Phone Age: The Jamaican Context; 4 Facing the Fig Tree: Contemporary Intimacy Culture in <em>Master of None</em>; 5 Open (to) Marriage: Saving Sanctioned Coupling through Consensual Nonmonogamy Narratives; 6 Aliens, Mermaids and Cartoons: Neoliberal Gender Politics in Twenty-First Century South Korean Dramas; 7 Romantic, Transnational and Messy: Intimate Spaces/Cosmopolitan Spaces in <em>Already Tomorrow in Hong Kong</em>; 8 Mixed Feelings: (Inter)Raced Romance and the Post-Millennial Romantic Comedy; 9 The Bittersweet Queer Romance: Affect and Temporality in <em>Weekend and Paris 05:59: Théo & Hugo</em>; 10 <em>Plaisirs d’amour</em>: Love and Popular Fiction in Contemporary France; 11 His Baby Daddy is an Alien?!: Mpreg Fantasies and Queer Reproductive Intimacies in Contemporary M/M Science Fiction Romance ; 12 Bibliographic Traces: The Material Book and the Quest for Intimacy in Spike Jonze’s <em>Her</em></p>