Imagining "We" in the Age of "I" Romance and Social Bonding in Contemporary Culture

(Routledge Press, 2021)

By Suzanne Leonard

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.

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.　

This is an accessible and timely collection suitable for scholars in gender studies, media, cultural studies and communication studies.