Or, Feeling and Meaning Across Cultures.

Young Royals broke my heart–and stitched it back up again. Many people seem to be healed, rehabilitated by their experience with Heated Rivalry. That happened to me with Young Royals. Because it’s a Swedish show, it wasn’t just the love story that got me but also the different way that Swedish writers and showrunners told that story. The tone of the show was angsty, but it was also austere, direct, straightforward. In other words, part of what worked for me was that the stakes were very high for the characters but not sentimental or smarmy (you know, the way American romance can be). It took that shift in perspective to make a familiar trope (royalty-commoner) feel fresh and vibrant to me.

Looking at love from the other side, where love feels familiar rather than unattainable, especially queer love, I first wondered whether the phenomenological experience of love was different, perhaps even unrecognizable, for queer and non-queer people. Love is love, but do we experience it in radically different ways? And then, of course, my comparatist brain kicked into gear: American love, Latin American love, European love, are these the same? Or species of the same? Or altogether different–analogous structures but different species? Is the love that each culture experiences, taken together, an example of convergent evolution, of the heart and mind, that gives us all a similar trait that, nevertheless, evolved quite differently?

Feeling and Meaning Across Cultures (the class) emerged out of these questions. It’s an attempt for my students and me to play with these questions in a way that opens up more questions about what it means to be human and what it means to love.

The collection of blog posts below (being written in the Spring of 2026) document this experiment, an experiment that hinges on intellectually playing with cultural products, to see to what extent we can say that love is love, that love is truly universal.

The Queer Parallax of Affect

1. Why Love?