Majczak, Ewa;
(2024)
Love burnout: young women, mobile phones, and delayed marriage in Yaoundé, Cameroon.
Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute
, 30
(4)
pp. 953-972.
10.1111/1467-9655.14118.
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Abstract
This article examines how work towards the promise of love marriage comes to be exhausted. It focuses on young urban women living in Yaoundé, Cameroon, trying to ‘catch’ a husband using digital technologies in which photographs figure prominently. Focusing on the visual production of dating profiles, I show how mobile phones place young women at the centre of their own husband‐catching pursuits. Through digital actions, these young women produce the promise of love marriage, but at the same time their actions require increased volumes of emotional work. As phones constantly compel young women to intensify their husband‐catching efforts and amplify the promise of love marriage, they rarely bring the desired results. Thus, young women, burdened by the emotional work necessary to sustain this promise, experience a form of love burnout, suspend their actions, and delay marriage. In highlighting the emotional laboriousness of intimate relations in technologically mediated worlds, this article draws out the limitations of the way in which the promise of love marriage is circulated and points to how neoliberal economies of affect may be temporarily suspended.
| Type: | Article |
|---|---|
| Title: | Love burnout: young women, mobile phones, and delayed marriage in Yaoundé, Cameroon |
| Open access status: | An open access version is available from UCL Discovery |
| DOI: | 10.1111/1467-9655.14118 |
| Publisher version: | https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9655.14118 |
| Language: | English |
| Additional information: | This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License. The images or other third-party material in this article are included in the Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in the credit line; if the material is not included under the Creative Commons license, users will need to obtain permission from the license holder to reproduce the material. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ |
| UCL classification: | UCL UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH > Faculty of S&HS UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH > Faculty of S&HS > Dept of Anthropology |
| URI: | https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10218158 |
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