The Love Stories Approach: Theoretical and Methodological Concerns About Studying Actually Existing Love Among Argentinean Gay Men

MARENTES, MAXIMILIANO

Melbourne

Congreso; XX ISA World Congress of Sociology; 2023

International Sociological Association (ISA)

Even when love is a widespread complex emotion in our Western societies, as social scientists we face several issues to study it. In this communication, I introduce the approach I followed for my doctoral dissertation about love specificities among Argentinean gay men. As the research project’s goal was to study how love was experienced, the empirical-oriented perspective pushed me to reconstruct these gay men’s love stories.The communication is organized into five stages. The first describes how the love stories approach contributes to embracing a situational insight of this feeling. Because people fall in love with someone, focusing on the narrative that frames that love is necessary. The second stage explains how analyzing love stories enables incorporating other people and things that are taking part in the love relationship. Thus, rather than being taken for granted, the couple may emerge as a result of the couple-assembling process. The third stage draws on methodological concerns about how to work with love stories when conducting interviews: not disregarding plural experiences and being open to other empirical tools. The fourth stage reflects on the process of re-constructing stories and participants of the research and the researcher co-producers of those narratives. Being an active agent in re- constructing love stories implies making decisions about connections with biographical approaches, when do stories start and end, and other considerations about temporalities. The fifth stage focuses on love stories’ principle of reversibility which unfolds the limitations of some ways of inquiring about love: heteronormative concerns, power balance within couples, and open and closed relationships. The love stories approach examines those issues from a more productive insight. In the conclusions, I argue about this approach’s theoretical, methodological, political, and ethical assets.