Learning to love at the violent periphery of Philippine society

Abstract

This article seeks to contribute to a scholarly conversation about love beyond dominant assumptions of romance, desire, and attraction by exploring what love comes to mean as situated in and governed by violence and marginalization in the shadows of political conflict. Based on ethnographic fieldwork among Muslim women in Palawan, the Philippines, I unpack the empirical notion of learning to love as it occurred in their stories of marriage. The article argues that learning to love reflects the women's struggles to survive socially, emotionally, and materially, and to make a life and selves. In this way, love is rooted in patriarchal relationality, the cultivation of moral and religious ideals of womanhood as well as in the social and material dependency in the family revealing love as familial togetherness, attachment, and support. On this basis, the process of learning love captures the women's work of learning to live, reclaiming sociality and social worth within the violent and confining conditions that structure their lives.