Nuclear family

• But in carrying out my research on Renaissance literature and gender, I’ve been struck by how many of that period’s love poems were not for lovers.
• These sonnets, composed for friends and family, are not just beautiful; they’re also a reminder that love and Valentine’s Day aren’t exclusively for couples.

The love sonnet is born

• The sonnet was invented in 12th century Italy as a 14-line poem with 11 beats per line and various rhyming patterns.
• Its originator, Giacomo da Lentini, was a poet in the Kingdom of Sicily who had been inspired by older Arabic and French poetry.
• He penned the collection for a woman named Laura, whom he loved from afar in life and after her death.

Playing with sonneteering stereotypes

Thomas Wyatt is thought to have written the first English sonnets, in the early 16th century. His poems strongly relied on Petrarch; some of the best known, like “Whoso list to hunt,” are quasi-translations of the Italian poet’s work. Writing a half-century later, Shakespeare changed the form, ending his sonnets with a rhyming couplet, giving birth to the “Shakespearean sonnet.”

• Many valentines will find themselves compared to a summer’s day or swearing there can be no impediments between the marriage of true minds.
• In any case, it introduces an element of queerness, in that there’s homoeroticism and a challenge to what society deems natural.

For friends and lovers

• A number of his poems were composed for friends, with several of them for the Florentine poet Sennuccio del Bene.
• The short poem mixes his love and grief for both people, his beloved and his friend.
• Take the verses of Venetian writers Orsatto Giustinian and Celio Magno, who published their poetry in a single book in 1601.
• That doesn’t cancel out the homoerotic tension in the men’s poems to each other, but it does make classifying their sexuality challenging.

Sororal sentiment

• Existing in a single copy in a library in Siena, Italy, is a joint poetry collection written by two sisters, Speranza Vittoria and Giulia di Bona.
• They lived with their mother and four other sisters.
• The poems traded between Speranza and Giulia are brighter, exhibiting an abundance of love and admiration.

Love is big

• They serve as reminders of what the love poem can be.
• If writers could describe different types of love during the Renaissance, why limit what we can envision for ourselves?

Shannon McHugh does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

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• The global panic around AI’s co-option of children’s play and cultures has manifested unpredictably.
• Earlier this year, a Swiss comedian created a film trailer for an imagined remake of the beloved children’s story Heidi using the AI tool Gen-2.
• This isn’t the first time AI has been used to re-imagine representations of childhood through the creation of cultural artefacts.

M3GAN and AI dolls

• One of the most successful horror films of 2022, M3GAN, depicts the disturbing results of a grieving girl’s friendship with an ultra-lifelike AI-powered doll.
• A clip of M3GAN dancing (her face expressionless as her body emulates moves from youth dance trends on social media) went viral to an extent the director called “unbelievable.” M3GAN strikes a cultural chord, embodying our discomfort with how AI co-opts and twists children’s culture.
• The Artifice Girl (2022) depicts an AI-generated nine-year-old designed to lure predators online, highlighting debates about AI ethics.
• When AI tools pervert children’s culture, they spark our deepest fears about AI’s inhuman modes of intelligence.

The long history of childhood techno-phobia

• Cultural anxieties about AI’s infiltration of children’s culture continue a long history of pop cultural preoccupations with dangerous interactions between children and technologies that cannot be trusted.
• With Poltergeist (1982), the world was enthralled by five-year-old Carol Anne’s haunting statement, “They’re here…” She was listening to poltergeists through the family’s television.
• This resonated with parents concerned with children’s screen time, as well as video games, Dungeons and Dragons and Satanic ritual abuse.

AI is a lightning rod for fear

• In May, AI companies made headlines when they linked AI to potential human extinction.
• While experts dismissed these claims, perceptions of AI as a significant threat echoes the horrors of AI depicted in film.
• While we shouldn’t be swept up by moral panics, children’s use and understanding of AI should be addressed.
• UNICEF is embedding children’s rights into global AI policy and the World Economic Forum has released an AI for children toolkit.

• But it also disguises how much love is also work: a labour performed disproportionately by women.
• Review: They Call it Love: The Politics of Emotional Life – Alva Gotby (Verso) Gotby’s book is a fascinating account of how this makes women subordinate carers (or apologist secondary co-workers) within nuclear families.
• She crusades to unmask the “naturalness of feminine care” – and to expose care inequalities and incite political awareness.
• Love can thus be used to extract an ongoing, infinite amount of labour – a work relationship that may stretch over a whole lifetime.

Class and ‘emotional elites’

• Alternative forms of attachment have been discredited, while children’s emotional needs have expanded – so, the care required from mothers has intensified.
• Now, argues Gotby, working-class children destined for the service economy also need to learn and deploy emotional skills.
• Emotional elites include bosses, managers, owners – people with resources and privilege who can displace their emotional difficulties onto others.
• Read more:
  What is emotional labour - and how do we get it wrong?

Invisible work, female anger

• Gotby argues that the capitalist economy relies on invisible reproductive work to survive.
• But for women, it reflects weakness, flaws and excessive emotion:
  feminised workers are mainly made to absorb anger and frustration […] masculinity, on the other hand, works through the displacement of anger onto others.
• feminised workers are mainly made to absorb anger and frustration […] masculinity, on the other hand, works through the displacement of anger onto others.
• She champions women’s use of anger to ignite solidarity against male backlash and aggression.

Abolish it all?

• She argues that getting men to do more childcare without challenging “the conflicting needs and contradictions within capitalism” will have limited effect.
• She even claims true equality is impossible within existing gendered categories:
  Sexual difference already contains a construction of hierarchy, making “gender equality” a contradiction in terms.
• This means “following black, indigenous, trans, and intersex feminists” and embracing the openness and pleasure of queer sexual identity.

A convincing call to arms?

• Conceiving of emotional care work as “capital”, which can be learned, allows for change.
• For example, men can learn caring skills in teaching and nursing work – albeit with greater difficulty, later in their lives.
• The ebb and flow of emotional capital allows for emotional winners and losers to emerge, beyond Gotby’s conventional male-oppressor and female-oppressed binary.
• Gotby’s strong critical feminist Marxist position risks inflexibility – and a degree of highly gendered structural determinism.
• Women’s agency to avoid or resist exploitation – and men’s agency to become involved in care work – is underplayed throughout the book.