Carrie Jenkins

As a woman with a husband and other partners, philosopher Carrie Jenkins knows that love is complicated. Love is most often associated with happiness, satisfaction and pleasure. But it has a darker side we ignore at our peril. Love is often an uncomfortable and difficult feeling. The people we love can let us down badly. And the ways we love are often quite different to the romantic ideals society foists upon us. Since we are inevitably disappointed by love, wouldn’t we be better off without it? No, says Carrie Jenkins. Instead, we need a new philosophy of love, one that recognizes that the pain and suffering love causes are a natural, even a good part of what makes love worthwhile. What Jenkins calls “sad love” offers no bogus “happy ever afters”. Rather, it tries to find a way properly to integrate heartbreak and disappointment into the lived experience of love. It’s time we liberated love.

Romance and the Search for Meaning

Sad Love

Victoria Sees It is an experimental literary queer campus love story with a detective novel twist that delves into an under-explored phenomenon of women's mental health. Victoria is raised in a crumbling house in England by her working class aunt and uncle, visiting her mother at a psychiatric institution on the weekends. Her academic brilliance gains her entrance to exclusive schools and eventually Cambridge. There, free of her well-meaning aunt and abusive uncle, she meets her first true friend, Deb, a spacey artistocrat. Victoria and Deb create their own tiny bubble within Cambridge's strict class system, until one day, Deb goes missing. Victoria begins to unravel, until she meets an unlikely ally--a police officer named Julie with whom she begins a romantic relationship based on a search for Deb. They travel the countryside, visiting sites of suicides, murders, and accidents. But eventually, Julie's emotional demands of Victoria become too much for her. Victoria chooses a lonely life of academia, always teetering on the edge of emotional collapse as she remains obsessed with her missing friend. Wandering through a miasma of sexism, isolation, physical and mental health issues, Victoria's story is haunted by the spectre of her mother, whose own assault and subsequent pregnancy represent a break in her contract with the world.

Victoria Sees It

An exploration of the search for meaning in nonmonogamous relationships.

A More Than Two Essentials Guide

Nonmonogamy and Happiness

Carla Nappi

Plato's Symposium depicts a group of men giving a series of speeches about the nature of love, with themes ranging from religion and metaphysics to medicine and pregnancy. The lone woman in the room, a "flute girl," is sent away as the discussion turns to serious matters; at the same time, the wisest of the men attributes his theories to a woman, the possibly fictional Diotima. Despite their absence from this important intellectual exchange, women are part of Symposium. What can contemporary feminist readers do with this troubling yet immeasurably influential work? In Uninvited historian Carla Nappi and philosopher Carrie Jenkins talk back to Plato in poetry, inspired by the voices of women characters who were not previously permitted to speak. Images and ideas from Symposium are refracted through multiple lenses to reveal a tumult of mystical, intellectual, pedagogical, and sexual ideologies. Sometimes beautiful, sometimes horrific, these poems dance within and between the lines of Symposium, carving space for new kinds of conversations about love, with themes ranging from gender and voice to power and violence. Designed to be read with or without prior knowledge of Plato, this book invites the uninvited to join a strange, amorphous, and unending conversation on the nature of love and desire - and on the possibilities intellectual and creative activity can offer.

Talking Back to Plato

Uninvited

As a woman with a husband and other partners, philosopher Carrie Jenkins knows that love is complicated. Love is most often associated with happiness, satisfaction and pleasure. But it has a darker side we ignore at our peril. Love is often an uncomfortable and difficult feeling. The people we love can badly let us down. And the ways we love are often quite different to the romantic ideals society foists upon us. Since we are inevitably disappointed by love, would we be better off without it? No, says Carrie Jenkins. Instead, we need a new philosophy of love, one that recognises that the pain and suffering love causes are a natural, even a good part of what makes love worthwhile. What Carrie calls “Sad Love” offers no bogus “happy ever afters”. Rather, it tries to find a way to properly integrate heartbreak and disappointment into the lived experience of love. It’s time we liberated love.

A New Philosophy

Cuanto más ansiamos la felicidad, menos felices somos. Esto es lo que se conoce en filosofía como «paradoja de la felicidad». Lo mismo ocurre con el amor, cuya visión «romántica», defiende que el objetivo último es alcanzar una felicidad perpetua, que se impone como modelo de vida y nos hace paradójicamente infelices. Ha llegado el momento de liberar al amor. Nos hace falta una nueva filosofía que reconozca que el dolor y el sufrimiento que causa el amor son una parte natural e incluso buena que hace que valga la pena vivirlo. Lo que Jenkins llama «amor triste» no ofrece ningún falso «felices para siempre». Más bien trata de encontrar un modo de integrar adecuadamente el desamor y la decepción en la experiencia del amor que vivimos. Al rigor filosófico de esta obra, la autora suma su propia experiencia como mujer poliamorosa, enriqueciendo la reflexión sobre el amor concebido más allá de la monogamia y la heterosexualidad que la sociedad y la tradición imponen.

Las relaciones amorosas y la búsqueda de sentido

Amor triste

A queer psychological thriller from a beguiling, fresh new voice. Victoria is unraveling. Her best friend is missing, and she's the only one who seems to care: there are clues all over Cambridge, but Deb is nowhere to be found--and the harder Victoria looks, the less she sees. Victoria is raised in a crumbling house in England by her working-class aunt and uncle, until her academic brilliance gains her entrance to Cambridge. There, she meets her first true friend, Deb, a spacey aristocrat, and the girls create their own tiny bubble within Cambridge's strict class system. Until Deb disappears. In her search for her friend, Victoria finds an unlikely ally--a police officer named Julie. They travel the countryside, visiting sites of suicides, murders, and accidents. But eventually, Julie's emotional demands overwhelm Victoria, and she retreats into a lonely life of academia, always teetering on the edge of emotional collapse. Wandering through a miasma of sexism, isolation, physical and mental health issues, Victoria's story is haunted by the spectre of her mother, whose own assault and subsequent pregnancy represent a break in her contract with the world.

Purang Abolmaesumi

Michelle Stack

Jennifer Black

Lara Boyd

Hoi Kong

M. V. Ramana

Steven Reynolds

Sheila Teves

Y-Dang Troeung

Chromatic: Ten Meditations on Crisis in Art and Letters is a collection of essays and illustrations as diverse as the subject of crisis itself. Imagined and brought to life by leading UBC scholars in collaboration with local artists, Chromatic asks what it means to be in crisis and grapples with the personal and societal impacts of crisis during a time of unprecedented global upheaval. Each contributor to this diverse collection takes a profoundly different approach yet fascinating and unexpected connections emerge. The result is a book that juxtaposes gorgeous, colourful artwork with writing that will surprise and challenge you, outrage and enlighten you.

Ten Meditations on Crisis in Art and Letters

Chromatic

A rising star in philosophy examines the cultural, social, and scientific interpretations of love to answer one of our most enduring questions What is love? Aside from being the title of many a popular love song, this is one of life's perennial questions. In What Love Is, philosopher Carrie Jenkins offers a bold new theory on the nature of romantic love that reconciles its humanistic and scientific components. Love can be a social construct (the idea of a perfect fairy tale romance) and a physical manifestation (those anxiety- inducing heart palpitations); we must recognize its complexities and decide for ourselves how to love. Motivated by her own polyamorous relationships, she examines the ways in which our parameters of love have recently changed-to be more accepting of homosexual, interracial, and non-monogamous relationships-and how they will continue to evolve in the future. Full of anecdotal, cultural, and scientific reflections on love, What Love Is is essential reading for anyone seeking to understand what it means to say "I love you." Whether young or old, gay or straight, male or female, polyamorous or monogamous, this book will help each of us decide for ourselves how we choose to love.

Carrie Jenkins

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