Love and the Other: A response to Morrison et al.(2012)

This response to Morrison et al.'s work on love focuses on the uncritical use of 'the Other' in geographic scholarship and in geographies of affect and emotion more centrally. While broadly sympathetic to the arguments outlined in 'Critical geographies of love as spatial, relational, and political', I am concerned that in trying to critique the social sciences for an uncritical account of love the authors may fall into the same essentialist trap. The accounting of a singular and amorphous 'Other' in geographic scholarship flattens out difference and creates exclusionary boundaries that reinforce theoretical and subjective divisions that become sutured to the workings of white supremacy both within the discipline and also in wider society.