"how shall I say love ": Reimagining a non-relational geopolitics of love in the time of COVID-19.

ABSTRACT

The pandemic as a portal has deeply changed life as we know it, including our homes. While countries continue to strengthen their health systems and policies, marginalized groups in local communities are absorbed, reassembled, and transformed in everyday 'portals' which generate mutually entangled and composite forces of unification and healing as well as forces of division and wounding. In this commentary, I argue that these forces can be taken as embodying a geopolitics of love already subsumed by intimate, proximal, and mediated relations, therefore leaving out aspects of love that are populated by voids, hollows, and liminalities. Here, I reflect upon Massey's spatial politics vis-a-vis Harrison's notion of non-relationality in order to puncture the representational limits of the geopolitical as a way to transform 'bad' love (i.e. love that eclipses pains, sufferings, and otherness) while simultaneously not succumbing to a desire for sameness underpinning 'good' love (i.e. love that promotes unification and healing). Specifically, I suggest that the nonrelationality of place making and its geographies of nowhereness may lead us back home to love as always already there.