Hypatia vol. 32, no. 1 (Winter 2017) © by Hypatia, Inc. MUSINGS Hetero-Love in Patriarchy: An Autobiographical Substantiation LENA GUNNARSSON THE PERSONAL IS POLITICAL—AGAIN Feminist theorists have been leading in questioning notions of objectivity that omit the personal standpoint from processes of truth inquiry. Nonetheless, the taboo on drawing on the personal has a lingering presence even in feminist work. There seems to be no doubt, for example, that Luce Irigaray’s work on love (Irigaray 1996; 2002) or Teresa Brennan’s theory of affective transmission (Brennan 2004) are saturated with personal experiences, which, however, are never let out of their closet of implic- itness. The background of this piece is an awkwardness with my own silence about the role played by my personal experiences in the unfolding of my book The Contra- dictions of Love (Gunnarsson 2014). In the book I theorize the power relations between women and men as constituted in and through love, drawing in particular on Anna G. J onasd ottir’s theorization of men’s exploitation of women’s love (J onasd ottir 1994; 2009). I highlight the structural constraints that this exploitative order imposes on women, often leaving them in “a continuous struggle on the boundaries of ‘poverty’ in terms of their possibilities to operate in society as self-assured and self-evidently worthy people exerting their capacities effectively and legitimately” (J onasd ottir 1994, 225). I argue that the general tendency of female sociosexual poverty, coupled with the “sur- plus worthiness” (227) accumulated by men through their appropriation of women’s love, tends to make women’s need for men more acute than men’s need for women, creating painful contradictions that are most accentuated in heterosexual couple love but that also structure woman–man encounters more broadly. Having put much energy into arguing in my book for how “external” social condi- tions relentlessly hamper women’s possibilities of acquiring worthiness and being appropriately loved, I then go on, paradoxically it may seem, to emphasize women’s own agency and need to take responsibility for their situation. This is done in a broader context of relativizing my initial claims about the reality of patriarchal con- straint, where I argue that there is a deeper reality at the level of which women’s