It Is What It Is - Sophie Lewis on Love Island, game shows, and the banality of capitalist eros

On the blockbuster "reality" tv show "Love Island," an even number of conventionally attractive cis men and women compete to partner up and win the audience's affection in a spectacle that, like most of its kind, sees producers push heteronormative cliches to their absurd and humiliating limits. On this episode, theorist and author Sophie Lewis joins us to explore the show's popularity in a late capitalism era marked by pervasive "heteropessimism" and the relentless gamification of romance.

Sophie Lewis is an ex-academic, freelance writer, and independent scholar with teaching affiliations at Center for Research in Feminist, Queer, and Transgender Studies at the University of Pennsylvania and the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research. In 2022, they published Abolish the Family: A Manifesto for Care and Liberation from Verso and they have an upcoming book called Enemy Feminisms set to be published in 2025 from Haymarket Books.

For full transcript and show notes please visit weirdeconomies.com.

Credits:

Founder and organizer of Weird Economies: Bahar Noorizadeh

Host: Max Haiven

Producer: Halle Frost

Sound editor: Faye Harvey

Sponsor: Canada Council for the Arts

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