Love as Practice, Power, and Politics

You often hear people say, “Love is a feeling; you can’t help who you love.”
bell hooks and Martha Nussbaum both push back: if love is just a feeling, how can we hold anyone responsible for how they love—or fail to?

In All About Love, bell hooks argues that most of us grow up with a broken concept of love. We think love can coexist with neglect and abuse as long as strong feelings are present. She insists on a stricter standard: “Love is a combination of care, commitment, knowledge, responsibility, respect, and trust.” In another well‑known line, she writes, “Love is as love does. Love is an act of will—namely, both an intention and an action. … We do not have to love. We choose to love.” That definition makes love into a practice of justice in miniature, not just an emotion. Martha Nussbaum, in Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions, develops a complementary picture. Emotions like love are not blind surges; they are intelligent value‑judgments about what matters to us. Love, on her view, involves seeing another person as centrally important to your own flourishing, with all the vulnerability that entails. That means love can be educated or deformed by social structures. Racist or sexist norms can quietly shape who is “lovable” in your eyes and who remains invisible. Feminist and queer theorists take this further by asking how love is entangled with power. Who is expected to do unpaid care work in families and communities? Whose love is recognized as legitimate (straight married couples) and whose is treated as suspect or second‑class (queer, poly, disabled, or undocumented relationships)? hooks calls love “profoundly political” because changing how we define and distribute love—who gets real care, who gets performative sentiment—changes the shape of oppression and resistance. Love becomes a site of struggle, not a safe space outside politics.

“Love is a combination of care, commitment, knowledge, responsibility, respect, and trust. … To begin by always thinking of love as an action rather than a feeling is one way in which anyone using the word in this manner automatically assumes accountability and responsibility. We are often taught we have no control over our ‘feelings.’ Yet most of us accept that we choose our actions, that intention and will inform what we do.

Love is as love does. Love is an act of will—namely, both an intention and an action. Will also implies choice. We do not have to love. We choose to love.”

— bell hooks, All About Love: New Visions, Introduction & Chapter 1 (wording combined from standard English editions)

hooks first gives you a checklist: care, commitment, knowledge, responsibility, respect, trust. If any of these are structurally missing, she says, love is not really present—no matter how intense the declarations feel. Then she flips the usual order: love is not primarily a feeling that sometimes leads to action; it is a pattern of action informed by intention and will. That move is meant to make you “automatically assume accountability.” If love is what you consistently do to nurture someone’s growth, then “I love you” and “I keep harming you” cannot sit comfortably together. The second paragraph pushes even harder: “Love is as love does. Love is an act of will.” Saying that love is chosen might sound unromantic, but hooks wants to expose how cultures excuse abuse and neglect by hiding behind uncontrollable feelings. If love is a choice, then failing to love—failing to act with care and respect—is also a choice, not just an accident. That’s where the politics sneak in. When whole groups are systematically denied the actions that constitute love—safe housing, healthcare, affirmation of identity—you can ask not just who feels warmly about them, but who is choosing against loving them in practice.

Think about queer youth kicked out of their homes after coming out. Parents often say things like, “I love you, but I can’t accept your lifestyle,” while withdrawing housing, money, and contact. On hooks’s definition, the absence of care, commitment, and responsibility undercuts the claim that love is present at all. At the same time, queer chosen families and community shelters step in to provide daily meals, beds, emotional support, and advocacy. These networks may feel less “biological,” but in hooks’s terms they are enacting love far more fully—extending will, time, and resources to nurture the young people’s growth and safety.

If love is partly a political practice, can you ever keep it “pure” and private, or is it always shaped by structures of race, gender, and class? And if love is a choice, how do you make sense of the parts of it that really do feel like they just happened to you?