Eva Illouz

Western culture has endlessly represented the ways in which love miraculously erupts in people’s lives, the mythical moment in which one knows someone is destined for us, the feverish waiting for a phone call or an email, the thrill that runs down our spine at the mere thought of him or her. Yet, a culture that has so much to...

Throughout the world, democracy is under assault from various populist movements and ideologies. And, throughout the world, the same enigma: why is it that political figures or governments, who have no qualms about aggravating social inequalities, enjoy the support of those whom their ideas and policies affect and hurt the most? To make sense of this enigma, the sociologist Eva...

From its beginnings in Twilight fan-fiction to its record-breaking sales as an e-book and paperback, the story of the erotic romance novel Fifty Shades of Grey and its two sequels is both unusual and fascinating. Having sold over seventy million copies worldwide since 2011, E. L. James's lurid series about a sexual ingénue and the powerful young entrepreneur who introduces...

Technology is conventionally viewed as dehumanising. Yet, as Eva Illouz shows in this concise book, Emotional Technologies, technology has become uniquely emotional, continuously tapping into and eliciting a great variety of emotions. From emojis, GIFs, and likes, to influencers, meditation apps, and virtual worlds, technology increasingly mimics and extends emotional life, turning feelings into quantifiable data and yielding extraordinary profits....

Few of us have been spared the agonies of intimate relationships. They come in many shapes: loving a man or a woman who will not commit to us, being heartbroken when we're abandoned by a lover, engaging in Sisyphean internet searches, coming back lonely from bars, parties, or blind dates, feeling bored in a relationship that is so much less...

We are in an explosive cultural moment. Whatever explanation for this is offered—inequalities, disaffection of political institutions, traumatic memory, woke culture, the rise of populism, the dominance of technology—it is the inescapable fact that we are in a period of palpable malaise. In Explosive Emotions, sociologist Eva Illouz explores the source of our discontent through a number of key emotions....

It is commonly assumed that capitalism has created an a-emotional world dominated by bureaucratic rationality; that economic behaviour conflicts with intimate, authentic relationships; that the public and private spheres are irremediably opposed to each other; and that true love is opposed to calculation and self-interest. Eva Illouz rejects these conventional ideas and argues that the culture of capitalism has fostered...