How to Love, is of a contemporary photographic project which developed as a response to the commodification of love and to the changing face of romance in the digital age. Love and sexuality in their most traditional forms are heteronormative, this is inescapable. Queerness is prohibited in society since we have been socialized to feel uncomfortable with its appearance. Queerness is also systematically repressed because we have been taught to idealize heteronormativity over, and against, queerness.
As Sara Ahmed speaks of heteronormativity functioning as a form of comfort in public space, this project plays with that idea and highlights the ways that queerness in public space is uncomfortable, but in the juxtaposition with commercial images attempts to bring discomfort to the heteronormative lens by sexualising foods and desexualising sex toys. Alisha Doody is a visual artist and educator working within the mediums of photography and moving image. As a queer woman based in Ireland her work has emerged from her exploration of contemporary society through personal experience.
As a result of her experiences she began developing an interest in how histories and mentorship can influence the formation of identity within individuals but also collectively within communities. One could argue that one of the most dreaded forms of adult romantic partnerships is the long-distance relationship.
Couples fear the strain long distances place on their intimacy and avoid this type of romantic partnership if at all possible, but the precarious living and financial conditions that people have in the past fifteen years found themselves in have often left us with no other options but to try and make it long distance. These decisions inevitably affect our love lives. Since most of the time the couple is separated, the stability of their relationship rests on the strength of the fantasies about their next brief romantic encounter.
In the meantime, they are left with strategies of intimacy-by-proxy in the form of Skype video calls, text messages, sexting, phone sex, and other means of maintaining intimacy they have at their disposal. This paper will try to analyze various aspects of the long-distance relationship, focusing on fantasy, and its connection to desire and love, as an intricate segment of the structure of long-distance relationships. By presenting personal experiences in long-distance relationships in the form of notes, text messages, photographs, e-mails and descriptions of fantasies about upcoming encounters with my romantic long-distance partner and juxtaposing them to theoretical practices on desire and love, I will try to show how long-distance relationships open up new spaces for considering love and desire, and how major economic disruptions and changes force us to change our perceptions on what constitutes love, desire, and intimacy.
