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Announcements
Call for Papers: Special Issue of Passion: Journal of the European Philosophical Society for the Study of Emotions
Affective Lives Beyond Compulsory Sexuality, Romance, and Monogamy: Emotional Experience in Asexuality, Aromanticism, and Polyamory
Guest editors: Kristin Käuper (University of Leeds) and Sven Walter (Osnabrück University)
Invited contributors: Luke Brunning, Natasha McKeever, Anna Kurowicka, Joseph Jukes, and Laurin Tirpitz
Philosophers of emotion have devoted considerable attention to love, desire, jealousy, attachment, intimacy, and other affective dimensions of close relationships. Yet, philosophical reflection on these phenomena often rests on unexamined assumptions about sexuality, romance, and monogamy: for instance, that sexual desire is a central feature of human affective life, that romantic love constitutes a distinctive and especially significant form of intimacy, or that exclusive romantic partnerships are the paradigmatic form of intimate relationships.
This special issue asks what happens to familiar concepts in the philosophy of emotion once we look beyond these assumptions about sexuality, romance, and monogamy and no longer take them as common reference points. Asexual, aromantic, polyamorous, and related experiences do not merely add previously neglected cases to existing philosophical theories. They may require us to reconsider not only prevailing norms, but the concepts themselves.
Asexual experience, for example, raises questions about the nature and relations between sexual attraction, sexual desire, arousal, pleasure, romantic attraction, and love. Aromantic experience invites renewed examination of what, if anything, distinguishes romantic from non-romantic forms of love, and of the value we assign to different forms of attachment, care, and intimacy. Polyamorous experience raises questions about feelings of jealousy and compersion, trust, commitment, attachment, emotional exclusivity, and the norms through which these emotions are judged as fitting. More broadly, these experiences invite reflection on how social norms shape not only which emotions are judged appropriate, but also how people understand and distinguish forms of attraction, attachment, intimacy, and care in the first place.
Existing work has begun to show how attention to asexual and aromantic experience can unsettle familiar distinctions among sexual attraction, sexual desire, romantic attraction, love, and other forms of interpersonal attraction (Brunning & McKeever 2021), and how compulsory sexuality and romance can shape affective self-understanding and experiences of sadness, loss, anger, shame, alienation, and belonging (Vares 2022; Peters 2022; Walter & aus dem Bruch 2025). Feminist and queer scholarship has further presented asexuality as an affective and relational challenge to prevailing conceptions of sexuality and intimacy (Przybyło 2019). Research on polyamory has similarly shown how phenomena such as jealousy and compersion become intelligible against particular relational and normative backgrounds (de Sousa 2017; Brunning 2020; Yuen, Zörlein & Walter 2024). The special issue seeks to extend this line of inquiry by bringing together established scholars and emerging voices working across the philosophy of emotion, love, sexuality, and intimate relationships.
We invite philosophical contributions addressing these and related questions. Possible topics include, but are not limited to:
- romantic and non-romantic love;
- sexual and romantic attraction and desire;
- jealousy and compersion;
- intimacy, attachment, care, and friendship;
- queerplatonic relationships and relationship anarchy;
- emotional exclusivity, commitment, and trust;
- consent and negotiation;
- allonormativity, amatonormativity, and mononormativity;
- affective norms and affective injustice;
- emotional self-understanding, intelligibility, and the role of social scripts in interpreting affective experience;
- shame, guilt, relief, loneliness, grief, pride, and other emotions shaped by sexual, romantic, or relational norms;
- the conceptual and normative significance of asexual, aromantic, polyamorous, and other non-normative forms of intimacy.
The issue will have a clear philosophical focus, while also welcoming interdisciplinary contributions where empirical, social-scientific, cultural, or other perspectives illuminate questions of genuine philosophical significance for emotion and affective life.
Expressions of Interest
We invite expressions of interest prior to full manuscript submissions to this Special Issue. To register your interest, please send a short proposal (max. 300 words) to the guest editors until 1 January 2027. If your contribution is from outside of philosophy, please note this in your submission and briefly explain how your proposal is relevant to a philosophical discussion of these topics. You will then be invited to submit your manuscript for this issue or discuss the fit of your proposal with the editors.
Expression of interest: 1 January 2027
Submission deadline: 30 September 2027
Anticipated publication: approximately one year after the submission deadline
Guest editors: Kristin Käuper (kshl0382@leeds.ac.uk) and Sven Walter (svwalter@uos.de)
Submission guidelines: Full manuscripts should be no longer than 9,000 words and prepared for anonymous review according to the journal’s guidelines. You will need to submit your manuscript through Passion’s online submission system, selecting the Special Issue once available. Find more details about the submission guidelines here.
Any questions with regard to this Special Issue, please address them to the guest editors.
