Znanstveno discipliniranje ljubavi
Scholarly Disciplining of Love

Summary/Abstract: Love does not enjoy a privileged position ‡ and why should it? ‡ to be able to escape the theoretical cultivation of its natureness or the naturalization of its cultureness. The theoretical plot of this antagonism has for the most party led on the crossroads of two scholarly groups. We can imagine in one to be the essentialists and in other social constructivists. Michel Foucault has provoked the scholarly turn in the understanding of sexuality in his post-structuralist theory. He introduces the idea that the image we have of sexuality is a product of the discourse of power, its consequence, not the cause. On the example of the nineteenth-century sexuality, Foucault shows how the Western society has developed its own truth about sex that is scholarly, public and medicated ‡ all these in order to gain more control over sexuality. It was only during the 1880s that a completely new and general discussion about researching sexuality was initiated. Marginal groups in urban centers of the West, with their political demands that encompass the area of sexuality as well, turn the rooted theory about sexual identities, sexual behavior and sexual orientation upside-down. The appearance of AIDS has merely accelerated the change of paradigm about clear categories of human sexuality. The West was forced to create a certain revision of its own myths of love, to re-think the appropriateness of terms such as perversion, natural sex, marital love and to turn to domestic (ethnographic) field.

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