CELEBRATION OF MATURE LOVE IN ROBINSON’S 2312                            459



Sara Martín

A Celebration of Mature Love: Posthuman Sexuality, Gender,
and Romance in Kim Stanley Robinson’s 2312
Narrating Climate Change through Romance: A Genesis of 2312. Kim
Stanley Robinson’s 2312 (2012) narrates the establishment of an interplanetary
political alliance among Mercury, the Saturn League, and Mars aimed, apart
from other mutual benefits, at the regeneration of backward Earth, almost
irreversibly altered by the effect of human-caused climate change. Earth is in
a catastrophic situation:
   It was almost an ice-free planet now, with only Antarctica and Greenland
   holding on to much, and Greenland going fast. Sea level was therefore eleven
   meters higher than it had been before the changes. This inundation of the
   coastline was one of the main drivers of the human disaster on Earth. (90)
Ninety-two percent of all mammal species survive only thanks to the thousands
of terraria carved out of asteroids; seventy percent of these “function as zoo
worlds, either dedicated to sustaining an eco-region’s suite of animals and
plants, or else to creating new combinations of suites, called Ascensions”
(211). This is a novel, then, that should certainly be read from the perspective
of environmental fragility. “By positioning the contemporary climate crisis as
the historical backdrop to the societies of the accelerando,” Chris Pak argues,
“the communities depicted in 2312 function as instances of societies informed
by the failure to ground societal configurations in relation to the fragility or
otherwise of the planetary environments in which they are embedded” (508).1
Pak’s point is valuable, but it does not take into account the manner in which
the story unfolds—nor the individual human beings whose actions drive the
plot. Robinson’s novel is not narrated through the clash of these communities
but through the interactions of the two main characters, Swan Er Hong and
Fitz Wahram, who gradually fall in love with each other as the narrative
progresses.
    This is in part a matter of narrative convenience. Robinson himself has
stated in relation to his SCIENCE IN THE CAPITAL trilogy (Forty Signs of Rain
[2004], Fifty Degrees Below [ 2005], and Sixty Days and Counting [2007]) and
2312 that “It seemed as if the story of climate change was going to have to be
told as some kind of daily life, which in narrative terms meant it could not be
a thriller” because “when you shrink the novel to the thriller then you run into
problems in representing ordinary realities” (Canavan and Robinson 245).2
Attempting, then, to depict ordinary life as the background to his political
plot, Robinson wrote 2312 as romance. In this essay, I unpack the fuller
ramifications of reading this novel within that genre, in contrast to most prior
criticism, arguing that 2312 is more remarkable for its love story than for its
sf themes. Its protagonists, Swan and Wahram, are mature individuals, not
460           SCIENCE FICTION STUDIES, VOLUME 49 (2022)

particularly attractive or likeable, but singular in their anatomical and
psychological characterization. Robinson takes narrative risks with their
romance that not all critics and readers have welcomed but that, as I propose
here, result in an intriguing novel and an unhurried, serene love story
deserving more appreciation than they have so far received.
     The author declared in an interview that 2312 did begin “with the idea of
the romance at the center of the novel, between two people from Mercury and
Saturn who were (surprise!) mercurial and saturnine in character, and thus a
real odd couple” (De Guardiola 54). For their love story to work, Robinson
fills in their home planets and the whole solar system with a complex
post-apocalyptic, diasporic human interplanetary society set in the early
twenty-fourth century. “The project of describing this high-tech future
civilization,” he insists, “became a major component of the novel, but it all
began by trying to give the central romance its proper setting” (54). At the
same time, the three centuries between the present and that future forced
Robinson to consider which changes in sexuality and gender could have been
implemented by then and how they would affect the love story. “I wanted the
estrangement effect ... to be strong,” Robinson explains, “but also based in
things we are already seeing, so it seemed natural to play with gender, along
with size, longevity, and so on” (Wark).3 Being familiar with the tradition of
feminist and utopian science fiction thanks to reading authors such as Ursula
K. Le Guin, Joanna Russ, Octavia Butler, Samuel R. Delany, Geoff Ryman,
Carol Emshwiller, and others, Robinson proposes in 2312 alternatives to
current notions of gender that are worth examining, particularly because he
links them to a love story that considers not only sexuality and gender but also
the meaning of marriage in the posthuman future of our species.
     The reception of Robinson’s reflection on these issues has been,
nonetheless, far from unanimous. On the negative side, reviewer Bryan
Cebulski protests that 2312 “collapses and confuses gender and sexuality” and
is “for all its starry-eyed optimism about human progress, surprisingly
conservative about pronouns” (online). This refers to the use of he/him/his
and she/her/hers for Wahram and Swan, respectively, even though they are
described as intersexual (I offer a more nuanced discussion of their anatomy
in the next section). The harshest critique of 2312 comes from Robinson’s
admirer and fellow sf writer Vandana Singh. Apart from decrying Robinson’s
approach to the Earth’s regeneration as blatantly colonialist, Singh complains
that “despite its apparent imaginativeness on the subject of human sexuality,
gender and variations thereof, the book seems to idealize heterosexual mating,
although between hermaphroditic beings. (Come on!).” In Singh’s view,
beyond the questionable approach to sexuality, the romance between Swan and
Wahram “does not come across as believable” because there is “no fire
between them.” Hannes Bergthaller finds that the novel’s conclusion with the
main couple’s wedding “dramatizes the synthesis of immunity and community,
sublating the conflicting principles in a unity of opposites” (10). He remains
skeptical, nonetheless, noting that “Surely, the real biopolitical challenges of
         CELEBRATION OF MATURE LOVE IN ROBINSON’S 2312                       461

the Anthropocene cannot be resolved with such allegorical neatness” (10), no
matter how helpful the novel’s “conceptual map” (10) can be for that task.
     These negative opinions contrast with the positive appreciation of Claire
P. Curtis, author of two articles discussing the representation of love in 2312.
Curtis argues in the more recent article (2017) that the romance is made
attractive by Wahram’s respect for Swan’s extreme bodily experimentation.
Although genital modification, hormonal therapies, and longevity treatments
are common among the posthuman citizens of Robinson’s solar system, Swan
has gone further than most; her body includes lark and warbler song cluster
implants, feline purr vocal cords, a subdural quantum computer (nicknamed
Pauline) and even a suite of tiny aliens from Saturn’s moon Enceladus, which
she has ingested for the sake of bodily experimentation. When her former
lover Zasha chides Swan for having become “some kind of post-human thing.
Or at least a different person” (99)—possibly, this is one of the causes of their
break-up—Swan defends herself, arguing that “Every thing I’ve done to
myself I consider part of being a human being. I mean, who wouldn’t do it
if they could? I would be ashamed not to! It isn’t being post human, it’s being
fully human. It would be stupid not to do the good things when you can, it
would be antihuman” (99; emphasis in original). Unlike Zasha, Curtis
observes, Wahram “does not use Swan’s ‘strangeness’ against her. Nor is he
attracted to her through that strangeness; he does not fetishize her. Instead her
changes are simply fodder for conversation. Wahram is not surprised by the
fact of Swan’s bodily differences: he is simply interested (and this may be the
initial interest of their love relationship)” (22). Theirs is not, in any case, a
sudden romantic passion but a slow process of mutual recognition taking
several years in which their personal strangeness (for Wahram is certainly a
peculiar man) becomes a source of attraction and the foundation for what
might be if not ever-lasting love, at least a long-lasting union.4
     In her other article Curtis follows the work of philosopher Martha
Nussbaum in Political Emotions (2013) to argue that the main value of love
in 2312 and in the other two novels she analyses—Marge Piercy’s He, She and
It (1992) and Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Talents (1998)—is that “the love
the characters in these works have for their own communities, illustrated in
their personal love relationships, awakens in the reader a sense of possibility
for how we might live together” (5). Curtis traces thus a direct connection
between each love story and communal justice, claiming that the love stories
help to present the protagonists’ communities “as hospitable places; as places
that we, as readers, would want to love” (9). It seems correct to assume in the
case of 2312 that Swan’s eventual acceptance of Wahram’s marriage proposal
connects their two planetary communities, since they are both involved in the
political efforts to form a new alliance between them and Mars, the planet
where they marry in the novel’s epilogue. Since, however, Swan and Wahram
are mostly presented in scenes of interpersonal interaction5 and hardly ever,
if ever, in the context of larger communal interplay, the connection between
romantic love and civic love is not as apparent as Curtis argues. I am not
suggesting that there is not a larger communal dimension in Swan and
462            SCIENCE FICTION STUDIES, VOLUME 49 (2022)

Wahram’s love, since their wedding does seem to have a symbolic value, but
I am remarking that both the communal dimension and the symbolic value are
either insufficiently stressed or less significant in their relationship than Curtis
maintains.
    In what follows I would like to reconsider the negative criticism to argue
that Robinson’s 2312 is a unique instance of the representation of mature
romantic love in science fiction—beyond Robinson’s alleged mismanagement
of sexuality and gender and beyond Curtis’s view of romance as a symbolic
communal celebration. Apart from analyzing in more detail how Robinson
characterizes the sexual anatomy and the gendered identity of Swan and
Wahram, I would like to consider, using Judith Butler’s notion of the
heterosexual matrix in Bodies That Matter (1994), to what extent Vandana
Singh’s claim that the couple are just thinly disguised heterosexuals is
accurate. In my view, Robinson’s treatment of sexuality in this couple’s
romance is notably progressive, much more so than Singh’s critique suggests,
though it is no doubt problematic. On the other hand, I use French
philosopher Alain Badiou’s influential volume In Praise of Love (2009) to
argue that Robinson is resisting in 2312 Zygmunt Bauman’s view of liquid
love as part of liquid modernity, by focusing on love, in Badiou’s terms, as
a long-lasting “quest for truth” (22). Swan’s and Wahram’s longevity, with
both past the century and likely candidates to live perhaps hundreds of years
more, is an essential factor in the slowing down of the tempo of romance in
2312 and in Robinson’s vindication of a type of love that points back to a time
when marriage was mostly a union for life but also to the future, when “for
life” might mean an extended posthuman timespan we can hardly imagine
today.
Posthuman Anatomy, Sexuality, and Gender: Queering the Future. I will
begin with the question of whether Swan and Wahram are queer at all—in the
sense of non-normative—or, as Vandana Singh complains, a gimmicky,
hypocritical representation of heteronormative sexuality. Wendy Gay Pearson
has explained that “the purpose of applying queer theory to sf is not primarily
to recuperate a gay and lesbian history of the field ... [so much] as to examine
the conceptual bases of all possible depictions of sexualities within sf” (157).
The problem, however, is that, as Veronica Hollinger warns, “heterosexuality
as an institutionalized nexus of human activity remains stubbornly resistant to
defamiliarization” (“(Re)Reading Queerly” 24). It is quite possible indeed to
see gynandromorph Swan and androgyn6 Wahram as just Robinson’s clumsy
attempt to defamiliarize heterosexuality, but they can also be read more
productively as the opposite: as a bold attempt at defusing heterosexuality
itself and at disrupting what Judith Butler calls the heterosexual matrix.
    As Butler argues, this template is maintained following the “logic” by
which “he” is the penetrator and “she” the penetrated: “As a consequence,
then, without this heterosexual matrix, as it were, it appears that the stability
of these gendered positions would be called into question” (51; emphasis in
original). To be specific about the anatomical details, gynandromorph Swan
         CELEBRATION OF MATURE LOVE IN ROBINSON’S 2312                              463

possesses, apart from a functioning uterus, “a small penis and testicles, about
where her clitoris might have been, or just above” (166), whereas androgyn
(or wombman) Wahram possesses, apart from regular-size male genitalia, a
vagina and female organs of reproduction. Leaving aside any considerations
of sexual preference for later comment, this is what happens in the only sex
scene which Robinson describes in 2312:
   Now it was said that their particular combination of genders was the perfect
   match, a complete experience, “the double lock and key,” all possible
   pleasures at once; but Wahram had always found it rather complicated. As with
   most wombmen, his little vagina was located far enough down in his pubic hair
   that his own erection blocked access to it; the best way to engage there once
   he was aroused was for the one with the big vagina to slide down onto the big
   penis most of the way, then lean out but also back in, in a somewhat acrobatic
   move for both partners. Then with luck the little join could be made, and the
   double lock and key accomplished, after which the usual movements would
   work perfectly well, and some fancier back-and-forths also. Swan turned out
   to be perfectly adept at the join, and after that she laughed and kissed him
   again. They warmed up pretty fast. (424)
Of course, this is not a “particular combination of genders” but of matching
genitalia. As the sex scene shows, in Swan and Wahram’s case penetration is
mutual and simultaneous, so that the heterosexual matrix is indeed disrupted
even though a penis penetrates and a vagina is penetrated. Butler notes that
“The heterosexual logic that requires that identification and desire be mutually
exclusive is one of the most reductive of heterosexism’s psychological
instruments: if one identifies as a given gender, one must desire a different
gender” (239; emphasis in original). Nonetheless, although Robinson’s use of
pronouns can be said to be traditionally binary (a point to which I will return),
Swan and Wahram’s intercourse is significantly different from heterosexuality.
Furthermore, the previous sexual activity they comment on is not all limited
to the type described above. Both have had sexual relationships with diversely
gendered persons and there is enough reason to call them pansexual.
    The negative reviews, nevertheless, indicate that 2312 fails to meet current
expectations about how gender and sexuality should be represented in
progressive sf. It is implicitly understood that sf authors describing the future
must imagine it from a queer, inclusive point of view on the assumption that
the current struggle to redefine gender and sexuality will bear its fruits in the
following centuries. Yet as Kilgore observes, “The central problem ... is not
in imagining what a queer future would look like but how we might get there
from where we are” (235). In 2312 and other novels, Robinson, therefore,
presents human gendered identity as work in progress because, Hollinger
observes, “Becoming-posthuman necessarily remains an unfinished project: in
Robinson’s universe, ‘we’ are always becoming other to ourselves”
(“Humanity 2.0” 278).
    Citing imaginary anonymous academic sources, as he does in several
sections of the novel describing twenty-fourth-century civilization, Robinson
writes that “principal categories of self-image for gender include feminine,
464           SCIENCE FICTION STUDIES, VOLUME 49 (2022)

masculine, androgynous, gynandromorphous, hermaphroditic, ambisexual,
bisexual, intersex, neuter, eunuch, nonsexual, undifferentiated, gay, lesbian,
queer, invert, homosexual, polymorphous, poly, labile, berdache, hijra,
two-spirit” (205). Hollinger stresses how “Robinson imagines that, given the
choice, most humans will value some kind of multisexed and imaginatively
enhanced embodiment, but he does not naively assume that everyone will
welcome such heterogeneity” (“‘Strangers to Ourselves’” 554) or the intensive
focus on gender. In a veiled, playful allusion to Le Guin’s The Left Hand of
Darkness (1969), in which Gethenians remain genderless and sexless except
for the periods when they are sexually active, Robinson writes that “cultures
deemphasizing gender are sometimes referred to as ursuline cultures, origin
of term unknown, perhaps referring to the difficulty there can be in
determining the gender of bears” (205).
    Fredric Jameson observes in “The Future as Disruption” (2005) that in the
search for utopia, including sex and gender utopia, “we have been plagued by
... our discovery that our most energetic imaginative leaps into radical
alternatives were little more than projections of our own social moment and
historical or subjective situation” (211). He refers here to the posthuman in
general, but the observation is valid for how sexuality and gender are
represented in 2312, since in this novel human beings are imagined as the
posthuman products of choices that we are considering in the present,
specifically in connection to the aspiration to prolong longevity. Robinson
supposes that the future research on the extension of human life finds a direct
link between biological sex and an extended lifespan. This results in
“sophisticated surgical and hormonal treatments for interventions in utero, in
puberty, and during adulthood” (204) that, while maintaining the XX/XY
dichotomy have transformed it in depth. Intersexuality prolongs life, so
parents may choose to turn their fetuses into androgyns or gynandromorphs;
individuals born with unmodified genitalia and reproductive organs can also
transform their bodies once past childhood. As Robinson writes, “XX humans
with conserved Wolffian ducts are gynandromorphs; XY humans with
conserved Müllerian ducts are androgyns” (205); hormonal treatments and
surgical procedures allow both types of intersexual persons to be mothers and
fathers, although “gynandromorphs can ordinarily father only daughters, as
the construction of a Y chromosome from an X chromosome” is
“problematic” (205). Swan has parented two daughters, one as a father and
one as a mother, and Wahram has given birth as a mother to a child, whose
sex is not mentioned, being himself the son of two androgyns, one of whom
acted as a mother.
    Robinson’s description of Swan and Wahram’s genitalia as double-sexed
rather than ambiguously sexed, however, does complicate matters. On the one
hand, the list I have previously cited of “principal categories of self-image for
gender” does mix sexuality and gender, so that androgynous and
gynandromorphous, which are anatomical intersex categories, wrongly appear
as gender categories. On the other hand, the words hermaphroditic and
intersexual also appear on this list, and this confounds matters from another
         CELEBRATION OF MATURE LOVE IN ROBINSON’S 2312                        465

angle. “Hermaphrodite” is a term that ceased being used in medical literature
after the publication in 2005 of a key article by Dreger et al. asking for a new
system of intersex nomenclature and taxonomy. The term “hermaphrodite” is
anatomically incongruous, since no individuals can be simultaneously fully
male and fully female. Intersex persons have, instead, mixed anatomies in
which the genitalia might not correspond to the chromosomes or the gonads,
or in which the genitalia appear to be ambiguous (not double). As Sytsma
stresses, “There are many different kinds of intersexuality, and many different
degrees of each” (xvii).7 It might appear, though, that Swan and Wahram are
intersexual but also impossibly hermaphroditic and, in addition, clearly
gendered as feminine and masculine respectively.
    Biological sex, however, is not an indicator of sexual preference nor of
gendered identity. Swan and Wahram could have been indeed heterosexual (or
gay, or bisexual) but, supposing my assumption that Swan and Wahram are
pansexual is correct, this still leaves open the question of their gendered
identity. They, by the way, do not refer to themselves as a woman or a man,
though this is how they are identified by others, including the author. This
does not mean, in any case, that the gendered identities “woman” and “man”
correspond to current twenty-first-century categories. Gender labels are
currently in flux with constant debate about their meaning among gender
activists. Richards, Bouman, and Barker write in their introduction to their
edited volume Genderqueer and Non-Binary Genders (2017) that “In general,
non-binary or genderqueer refers to people’s identity, rather than physicality
at birth; but it does not exclude people who are intersex or have a
diversity/disorder of sexual development who also identify in this way” (5).
Furthermore, they note, some individuals may reject all references to gender
and identify as genderless, gender-free, non-gendered, or ungendered. Swan’s
and Wahram’s fantastic double-sexed posthuman bodies in conjunction with
their gendered binary identities may thus be used both to affirm and deny
Jenny Wolmark’s view that the posthuman subject can “be envisaged within
a frame of reference that enables bodies to escape categorization in terms of
familiar binaries” (77).
    On the other hand, androgyny, a category that used to be more present in
gender discourse and that might be relevant to a reading of 2312, seems to be
disappearing from current debates. Androgyny, Tracy Hargreaves writes, “is
not a stable or a transcendent category, but is subject to historical and cultural
change” (3); today, androgyny, understood as the mixture of feminine and
masculine features either in endosex anatomy (excluding intersex) or in
gendered self-presentation, is rejected as supportive of the essentialist gender
binary. This stance neglects the fact that, as Shaheen notes, beyond physiology
“androgyny is and always has been a concept that reaches far beyond the
genitalia, bespeaking a sense of masculine-feminine duality beyond mere
anatomy” (11). Virginia Woolf—author of the classic Orlando: A Biography
(1928)—praises the “androgynous mind” in A Room’s of One’s Own (1929)
as an intellect that “is resonant and porous,” that “transmits emotion without
impediment,” and that is “naturally creative, incandescent and undivided”
466           SCIENCE FICTION STUDIES, VOLUME 49 (2022)

(97). Nevertheless, in her recent article “The (Ir)Relevance of Science Fiction
to Non-Binary and Genderqueer Readers” (2018), Anamarija Šporèiè calls for
a replacement of the old-fashioned androgynous characters appearing in late
1960s and 1970s sf, which “owe their existence to the binary division” (60),
by non-binary characters that can help non-binary readers to connect with
relatable representations (it is implied that there are no androgynous readers).
In view of this, it appears that Robinson’s lovers are framed by outdated
references to androgyny coming from twentieth-century sf rather than by the
up-to-date urgent discussions about how to escape the binary that should be
present in twenty-first-century sf.
    The matter of the pronouns is, likewise, double-edged. What Helen
Krauthamer has called the Great Pronoun Shift is now in its third phase in a
process started in the early 1970s and that has consisted so far of “(1) the loss
of generic he, (2) the ‘workarounds’ that included the adoption of strategies
to avoid using a singular generic pronoun, and (3) the eventual acceptance,
even in formal academic writing, of singular they” (22; emphasis in original).
Science fiction has distinguished itself by being a major source of
neopronouns, defined as “any set of singular third-person pronouns that are
not officially recognized in the language they are used in, typically created
with the intent of being a gender neutral pronoun set” (LGTBA Wiki online).
The analysis of the fiction by Dorothy Bryant, June Arnold, Marge Piercy,
and Ursula K. Le Guin in Anna Livia’s ironically titled volume Pronoun Envy:
Literary Uses of Linguistic Gender indicates that women authors have on the
whole invested much more energy in creating neopronouns than male authors
(though some, like Greg Egan, have made significant contributions). This view
seems confirmed by the lists of pronoun-progressive recommended science
fiction and fantasy that can be found online (such as Huff’s). Robinson’s
choice of “he” and “she” can be, therefore, read as a conservative option and,
in the worst case scenario, a frontal challenge to the Great Pronoun Shift. It
is also possible to argue, however, that in the twenty-fourth century “he” and
“she” could be neopronouns, taking into account Swan’s and Wahram’s
anatomies and gendered identities, and also the author’s confirmed gender
awareness. After all, Robinson makes in 2312 other significant choices as
regards pronouns, completely avoiding them in relation to Swan’s former
partner Zasha and using for this character an epicene name—a choice which
calls readers’ attention to how personal names are mostly discounted in the
debate on gender-neutral self-presentation.
     The provisional conclusion, in any case, is that Robinson has put himself
in a no-win situation. Swan and Wahram can be read both as innovative and
clichéd characters, queer and heteronormative constructions, a sincere and a
hypocritical contribution to a differently-gendered posthuman future. My view
is that they do disrupt intersexuality, heterosexuality, and how we may
understand femininity and masculinity from a progressive point of view, but
also that in 2312 anatomy, sexuality, and gender are less relevant issues than
love, to which I turn in the next section.
         CELEBRATION OF MATURE LOVE IN ROBINSON’S 2312                        467

Posthuman Romance: Reformulating Love and Marriage. In his
philosophical novel On Love (1993), Alain de Botton argues that those thinkers
who have considered love distinguish between “immature” and “mature” love
(5). These categories, he adds, have nothing to do with age but with other
factors: whereas immature love is focused on desire, “the philosophy of
mature love is marked by an active awareness of the good and bad within each
person, it is full of temperance, it resists idealization, it is free of jealousy,
masochism, or obsession, it is a form of friendship with a sexual dimension,
it is pleasant, peaceful, and reciprocated” (5). Persons who enjoy
representations of passionate love (to give immature love a less censorious
label) may even deny that mature love is romantic love at all. Swan and
Wahram are a perfect example of de Botton’s mature love, which is why some
readers may resist the idea that 2312 is a fulfilling romance, as I am defending
here.
    Alain Badiou’s conversation with Nicholas Truong, published as the
volume In Praise of Love (original publication 2009)—a title inspired by
Jean-Luc Godard’s film Éloge de l'amour (2001)—is particularly appropriate
to analyze Robinson’s view of romance. Badiou’s volume appeared six years
after Zygmunt Bauman’s extremely influential Liquid Love: On the Frailty of
Human Bonds (2003), a volume in which the Polish philosopher discussed
how “An unprecedented fluidity, fragility and in-built transience (the famed
‘flexibility’) mark all sorts of social bonds which but a few dozen years ago
combined into a durable, reliable framework inside which a web of human
interactions could be securely woven” (91). Trapped by this fluidity, all bonds
including love “need to be only loosely tied, so that they can be untied again,
with little delay, when the settings change—as in liquid modernity they surely
will, over and over again” (vii). Love in particular, Bauman explains, is
viewed as a “yearning for the security of togetherness” (viii), but also as a
burden that limits personal freedom, even though having no relationship is as
anxiety-inducing as being in one. In long-lasting, committed relationships,
“There is always a suspicion,” Bauman notes, that “a vital obligation to one’s
own authentic self has not been met, or that some chances of unknown
happiness completely different from any happiness experienced before have
not been taken up in time and are bound to be lost forever if they continue to
be neglected” (55). The diagnosis is impeccable but offers no comfort,
whereas Badiou defends a radically different perspective. In his transcendental
view, love “takes us into key areas of the experience of what is difference
and, essentially, leads to the idea that you can experience the world from the
perspective of difference” (17). This opposes not only the classic R/romantic
view of love as the fusion of two different persons into one single unit but also
Bauman’s insolvable liquid solipsism. Badiou sees love as the bridging of the
difference separating two individuals and the construction of a new mutually
sustained “truth procedure” (38), and so does Robinson. Love—what Badiou
calls the “Two scene” (38)—that “embraces this experience of the world from
the perspective of difference produces in its way a new truth about difference”
(39). In this context, selfishness is “love’s enemy” (60).
468           SCIENCE FICTION STUDIES, VOLUME 49 (2022)

    Love, Badiou notes, “always starts with an encounter” which takes on “the
quasi-metaphysical status of an event, namely of something that doesn’t enter
into the immediate order of things” (28; emphasis in original). In 2312
Robinson delays the introduction of the “event” for as long as he can, using
the first quarter of his romance to establish how unlikely it is that polar
opposites Swan and Wahram should be interested in each other. Besides, he
makes a point of eschewing romantic convention by making “good-looking”
(11) Swan quite cantankerous and not particularly likeable, and Wahram far
from attractive in an almost parodic way. Using free indirect style, Robinson
reports Swan’s negative impressions when she first meets him: “Prognathous,
callipygous, steatopygous, exophthalmos—toad, newt, frog—even the very
words were ugly” (15). Considering, besides, that she is a Mercury-based
nomadic landscape artist and he the Iapetus-based ambassador of the Saturn
league, there seem to be few chances for any relationship, even a friendship,
to progress at such enormous distance. Robinson nonetheless ignites their love
story with an unusually extended chapter (129-84) during which Swan and
Wahram are trapped in an underground set of tunnels in her home planet
Mercury, following a terrorist attack against her city, Terminator, and a solar
flare that leaves her severely poisoned by radiation. The twenty-four days they
spend surviving together give Swan and Wahram time enough to know their
weaknesses and strengths though, once they are rescued, neither sees the other
as a love interest yet. In a second episode of survival against all odds, placed
much later in the novel after other encounters scattered over about three years
(including sex), Swan and Wahram are stranded in outer space protected only
by their suits for twenty long hours. Facing death, they realize that, as Swan
says, “Ever since the tunnel ... we’ve had a relationship” (493). This prompts
Wahram to declare his love.
    As Badiou notes, “To make a declaration of love is to move on from the
event-encounter to embark on a construction of truth” (42). The declaration
“marks the transition from chance to destiny, and that’s why it is so perilous
and so burdened with a kind of horrifying stage fright” (43), particularly when
the other person, as happens with Swan, has not reached the same stage even
though she is on the same path. Thinking of his words, Swan reflects that “He
interested her. She was drawn to him as to a work of art or a landscape. He
had a sense of his actions that was sure; he drew a clean line. He showed her
new things, but also new feelings. Oh to be calm! Oh to pay attention! He
amazed her with these qualities” (495). Although she recognizes this as love,
Swan is not sure it is of the same type that Wahram professes for her. As
Badiou explains, love is a “construction” (31) and one of its main “enigmas”
is “the duration of time necessary for it to flourish” (32). Calling it a
“tenacious adventure” (32), Badiou claims that “Real love is one that triumphs
lastingly, sometimes painfully, over the hurdles erected by time, space and the
world” (32). In 2312 there is no immediate obstacle beyond Swan’s
insecurities, but this is a hurdle real enough for Wahram to require immense
tenacity. Self-confident but also self-hating, Swan feels that “It was hard for
her not to feel that a person loving her was making a big mistake. Because she
          CELEBRATION OF MATURE LOVE IN ROBINSON’S 2312                        469

knew herself better than they did, so knew their love was given in error”
(499); she, however, does crave for “Someone who likes you despite yourself,
someone more generous to you than you are” (499). Wahram is certainly that
person, but for love to function Swan must also become generous towards
him, and it takes her a mighty effort to leave her intense individualism behind.
    Michael Gratzke makes three basic claims about love: “Firstly, that we
cannot grasp its full potentiality (it is always yet to come); secondly, that it is
performative (it needs to come into being in individual occurrences of love);
and thirdly, that changes to the ways in which people experience and represent
love happen through countless iterations of what I will call ‘love acts’” (2).
Saying “I love you” is one of those love acts, but before he first declares his
love, Wahram performs love by other means that connect with the political
core of the novel, though in ways far more personal than Curtis has suggested.
Swan and Wahram first meet when he visits Mercury to attend the funeral of
her grandmother Alex, a person she defines as “my everything” (8).
Replacing Swan’s dead parents, “Alex had been her friend, protector, teacher,
step-grandmother, surrogate mother, all that—but also, a way to laugh. A
source of joy” (12). Alex was also the main elected officer of her planet and
as the Lion of Mercury she had been developing plans to regenerate Earth. As
a key politician, Wahram was part of Alex’s closest circle of interplanetary
allies (the Mondragon Accord), of which Swan knew nothing because she is
artistically, not politically, inclined. Before they meet, Wahram already
admires Swan through the portrait Alex has drawn of her beloved
granddaughter. Understanding that Alex is the main person in Swan’s life, as
the alliance to implement Alex’s plans progresses, Wahram makes a crucial
decision which can be read as possibly the most spectacular act of love ever:
he starts the animal repopulation of Earth that Alex dreamed of, and that
results in the rewilding by which extinct species preserved in thousands of
hollowed-out zoological asteroids are returned to Earth.8 When Swan sees the
creatures descending from the sky, she feels this is “the most beautiful thing
she had ever seen”; she muses “‘I love you. You have done a great thing.’
Whether she was talking to Alex, or Wahram, or the world, she couldn’t say”
(397). When later in the novel Swan ponders how to reply to Wahram’s
declaration, she considers that the key “philosophical” questions are “how to
be? What to care about? And how to become a little less solitary?” (542).
Badiou declares that “To love is to struggle, beyond solitude, with everything
in the world that can animate existence” (104). Swan concludes that “with
Alex gone, though she talked to many people, in the end she was missing
someone to tell things to in the way she had always told Alex” (542). This is
the gap Wahram can fill in with his love.
    Patricia Monk appears to be the only scholar to have considered marriage
in science fiction, in an article published in 1984. She prefers using the word
“gamos,” meaning generically a committed long-lasting union, to avoid being
more specific about the legal and social strictures binding marriage in each
novel’s imagined universe. Monk divides the authors she analyzes into
conservatives (Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, Larry Niven, and John
470               SCIENCE FICTION STUDIES, VOLUME 49 (2022)

Brunner), radicals (C.J. Cherryh, Anne McCaffrey, Frank Herbert, and M.A.
Foster), and mixed (Marion Zimmer Bradley, Robert Heinlein), offering the
following conclusions:
      On the one hand, the conservatives, if they see problems with the traditional
      gamos at all, see the resolution of them in terms of change (whether
      technological, or psychological, or social) in the environment of the gamos. On
      the other hand, the radicals see the resolution of the problems of the traditional
      gamos in terms of change in the human beings themselves. What is not fully
      concealed by this fundamental difference of approach to the resolution of
      problems, however, is the shared pessimism about the future of the gamos.
      (221)
This future, Monk concludes, “remains imperfect” (221). The historian of
marriage Stephanie Coontz maintains that, paradoxically, “Marriage has
become more joyful, more loving, and more satisfactory than ever before in
history. At the same time it has become optional and more brittle. These two
strands of change cannot be disentangled” (306). Nor will they be presumably
in the centuries to come, though it seems likely that marriage will survive as
an institution, accommodating changes in sexuality and gender. As Coontz
argues, marriage “remains the highest expression of commitment” (309) and
might remain so for as long as humanity lasts in whatever form gamos takes.
    When Wahram proposes marriage to Swan, he is 113 and she 135, though
their posthuman bodies look and feel much younger. Neither has been
married. Yet, unlike Swan, who has been in open relationships with individual
partners (and declares herself not monogamous), Wahram has been for many
years part of a crèche, consisting of six parents and eight children. This is an
option among the ones Robinson lists for cohabitation: “traditional marriage,
line marriage, group marriage, polygamy, polyandry, panmixia, timed
contracts, crèches, roommates, sexual friendships, friends, pseudosiblings,
fellow travelers, soloists” (431). As Wahram tells Swan, crèches were formed
in the planets of the Saturn league, including his native Titan, for the sake of
the children:
      Almost everyone thought of it as a child-raising method and not a lifelong
      arrangement. Thus the name crèche. Eventually there were a lot of hurt
      feelings involved. But if you’re lucky, it can be good for a while, and you just
      have to take that and move on when the time comes. I still stay in touch with
      them; we’re even still a crèche. But the kids are grown, and we very rarely see
      each other. (172)
His marriage proposal emerges, thus, from the realization that while he need
not abandon the crèche, part of its function is over and he needs, like Swan,
to feel less lonely. His wording is quite pragmatic, not particularly romantic:
“So I have been thinking that we ought to get married, in the Saturnian crèche
I am already part of. It would solve so many problems more than it would
create that I really think it is the best thing for both of us. For me, certainly.
So I am hoping you will marry me, and that’s the long and short of it” (515).
It is, however, hard to think of Swan entering the crèche for his sake.
         CELEBRATION OF MATURE LOVE IN ROBINSON’S 2312                      471

Marriage, besides, is for her “a concept from the Middle Ages, from old
Earth—an idea with a strong whiff of patriarchy and property. Not meant for
space, not meant for longevity” (544) and to cap this, an impossible “promise
somehow not to change” (544).
     Swan eventually realizes that Wahram is not proposing that kind of
obsolete union and that she does need someone “you could depend on,
someone who was steady, reliable, predictable, resolute; decisive after due
thought; generous; kind” (546). The tipping point comes for her when she
discusses Wahram’s proposal with her grandfather Mqaret, who married Alex
when he was already 130 and enjoyed 70 years of happy marriage with her.9
When he asks Swan what happened in the tunnels, the “event” that started her
romance with Wahram, she reminisces about their whistling together for hours
and Mqaret suggests that “Maybe that’s what a marriage is.... Whistling
together. Some kind of performance. I mean, not just a conversation, but a
performance” (544). Funnily, when Wahram repeats his proposal he does not
ask Swan but Pauline, the AI embedded in her brain. Pauline’s eager response
irritates Swan but she ultimately realizes that Wahram’s recognition of her AI
is proof of his full acceptance of her strangeness, as Curtis notes; having
herself accepted “the saturnine person” (546), as she jokingly calls Wahram,
their wedding soon follows. Their friend Inspector Genette marries them on
Mount Olympus, simply asking them to affirm that they “have decided to
marry and become life partners, for as long as you both shall live” (560),
quoting a poem by Emily Dickinson to celebrate their “symbiogenesis” (560),
and declaring them “married” (not husband and wife), once they reply in the
affirmative.10 The words that close the novel, Swan’s “This is for life,” can
be read both as a declaration that only death can separate them or that they
have married to celebrate life, a time longer than ever for Robinson’s
posthumans in 2312.
Conclusion. The reading I have offered here does not contradict other
interpretations of 2312 as relevant climate change sf, but aims at calling
attention to the fact that this novel is also classifiable as romance. Against
negative criticism, I have tried to demonstrate that Kim Stanley Robinson has
put much care into the representation of posthuman sexuality, gender, and
love in 2312, and that the effort he has made is progressive, despite his not
always coherent incursions into the debates surrounding these categories. It has
been my aim to persuade readers that the central love story is unusual, even
unique, and that Robinson succeeds in presenting an excellent example of what
Alain de Bottom calls mature love in the relationship involving Swan Er Hong
and Fitz Wahram.11 In the view I have defended, Swan and Wahram’s search
for what Alain Badiou calls a “truth procedure” (38) celebrates love with a
depth that is hardly found in sf, and this is a solid argument to call 2312 an
exceptional achievement. Its love story resists Zygmunt Bauman’s view of
human bonds as frail ties that cannot endure the push of individualism, and
denies that romantic love must be always liquid, now or in the future. As
regards the analysis of gender issues, it has been my aim, following what
472            SCIENCE FICTION STUDIES, VOLUME 49 (2022)

Robinson does in 2312, to stress that the emphasis on sexuality and on identity
is becoming too narrow and quite limited for the interpretation of the emotions
attached to romance. Who Swan and Wahram are anatomically and in their
sexual choices matters far less, as I have tried to show, than how and why
they love each other, and their capacity to bridge significant personal
differences and interplanetary distances—no mean feat in their circumstances.
Robinson believes in Swan and Wahram’s commitment to each other and
invites readers to share that belief, taking considerable risks as regards the
reception of his novel. This has not been as positive as 2312 deserves, but it
is my hope that this situation can be reversed and that Robinson’s romantic
philosophy can be better appreciated.
NOTES
     1. Patrick Murphy also reads 2312 from this perspective, focusing on whether this
is a dystopian or a utopian novel: “In sum, a reader finds increasing pessimism about
curbing global warming before disaster, but glimmers of optimism remain that
humanity will eventually experience a sufficient catalyst to assume responsibility for
the damage it has done to the biosphere” (162). Ursula K. Heise notes that Robinson’s
Earth in 2312 is “just as dystopian as Bacigalupi’s world” in The Windup Girl (2009),
though the diasporic spacers visiting the planet feel both “bewildered, frustrated, or
put off by the difficulties of life on Earth” and “intrigued, fascinated, and delighted
by what they find” (18).
     2. Robinson incorporates, nonetheless, a low-key thriller subplot dealing with
Inspector Genette’s pursuit of the elusive qubanoids, the humaniform avatars of the
quantum computers that have started self-programming and threaten to end human
dominance in the solar system.
     3. Humans are divided in the novel into the smalls, the talls, and the average.
Inspector Genette is a small. They are the result of genetic engineering, following the
realization that smaller sizes help to prolong human life. No small has died yet of
natural causes, and they are expected to live for hundreds of years.
     4. Autistic blogger Ada Hoffman reads Wahram as an autistic character on the
grounds that the word “autistic” is used twice to describe him and because he behaves
in what she calls a “believable autistic way.” Hoffman praises Robinson for neither
flagging his character’s behavior as autistic nor othering him: “Wahram is just
Wahram; Wahram’s actions are Wahram’s actions.” Hoffman may be right, but the
sentence in which Swan defines Wahram as autistic, denying that she likes him, is far
from positive: “He’s slow, he’s rude, he’s autistic. He’s boring” (30). My own view
is that Robinson simply sees Wahram as a person of saturnine temperament, as the
declaration I have quoted indicates.
     5. The chapter titles are mostly those of the main characters involved: “Wahram
and Swan,” “Swan and Zasha,” and so on.
     6. Robinson prefers this spelling to the more habitual androgyne, which means that
in the context of 2312 the two categories are different.
     7. The MedilinePlus article “Intersex” speaks, however, of four main categories:
46, XX intersex; 46, XY intersex; true gonadal intersex and complex or undetermined
intersex. In true gonadal intersex, “The person must have both ovarian and testicular
tissue.... The external genitals may be ambiguous or may appear to be female or male”
(online). This is quite different from what Robinson imagines for Swan and Wahram.
          CELEBRATION OF MATURE LOVE IN ROBINSON’S 2312                            473

     8. This is the action that Vandana Singh has read as colonialist, since Earth’s
inhabitants are not consulted in this decision: “It turns out that not all natives
appreciate the return of the animals—Swan feels the need to lecture to Earthlings about
animals being our ‘horizontal brothers and sisters.’ An admirable sentiment, which I
share, but again it speaks to a colonialist ‘let me tell you what’s good for you’ spiel
that I find I am unable to stomach.”
     9. The Worldwide Marriage Encounter website honored Californian married couple
Ralph and Dorothy Kohler as the winners of its 2020 Longest Married Couple Project.
The Kohlers have been married for 86 years now. There are in the early twenty-first
century many couples who have been married for more than 50 years but what seems
unlikely is that there will be many in the early twenty-second century as marriage for
life seems to have lost its appeal.
     10. The choice of the poem, “Forever at His Side to walk” (1861), is problematic
considering it begins with the lines “Forever at His side to walk—/The smaller of the
two!”, lines which Genette does not quote. The ones he quotes are: “Brain of His
Brain—/Blood of His Blood—/Two lives—One Being—now—/ … All life—to know
each other—/Whom we can never learn—/ … Just finding out—what puzzled
us—/Without the lexicon!”
     11. Brian White called my attention in a personal e-mail communication (February
2021) to The Cage of Zeus (2004) by Japanese author Sayuri Ueda, a novel in which
a new posthuman species of hermaphrodites is created to prevent the binary divide to
interfere in space exploration. The review by Alex MacFarlane of the 2014 English
translation notes that the new division between hermaphroditic Rounds and the
normative Monaurals results in yet another binary divide, showing that Ueda
approaches gender with counterproductive “rigidity,” ultimately concluding that
“humans are unaccepting of gender variance, perhaps indefinitely.” This is, of course,
very different from Robinson’s optimistic approach.
WORKS CITED
“2020 Longest Married Couple Project—Winning Couple Announced.” Worldwide
    Marriage Encounter. 10 Oct. 2020. Online.
Badiou, Alain, with Nicholas Truong. In Praise of Love. Trans. Peter Bush. Serpent’s
    Tail, 2009.
Bauman, Zygmunt. Liquid Love: On the Frailty of Human Bonds. Polity, 2003.
Bergthaller, Hannes. “Ecological Immunity and Kim Stanley Robinson’s 2312.” The
    Journal of Ecocriticism 8.1 (2018): 1-11.
Butler, Judith. Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of ‘Sex.’ Routledge, 1993.
Canavan, Gerry, and Kim Stanley Robinson. “Afterword: Still, I’m Reluctant to Call
    This Pessimism.” Green Planets: Ecology and Science Fiction. Ed. Gerry Canavan
    and Kim Stanley Robinson. Wesleyan UP, 2014. 243-60.
Cebulski, Bryan. “How Do We Establish Speculative Fiction’s LGBTQ+ Canon?”
    Tor.com. 10 Sep. 2018. Online.
Coontz, Stephanie. Marriage, a History: How Love Conquered Marriage. Penguin,
    2005.
Curtis, Claire P. “Post-Apocalyptic Fiction as a Space for Civic Love.” English
    Studies in Africa: A Journal of the Humanities 58.2 (2015): 4-14.
))))). “Standards of Justice for Human Being and Doing in Kim Stanley Robinson’s
    2312 and C.S. Friedman’s This Alien Shore.” Open Library of Humanities 3.2
    (2017): 1-30.
De Botton, Alain. On Love. 1993. Grove, 2015.
474            SCIENCE FICTION STUDIES, VOLUME 49 (2022)

De Guardiola, Susan. “The Future Is Fun.” Publishers Weekly 259.10 (Mar. 2012):
    54.
Dickinson, Emily. “Forever at His side to walk.” The Complete Poems of Emily
    Dickinson. Ed. Thomas H. Johnson. Little Brown, 1951. 112.
Dreger, A.D., C. Chase, A. Sousa, P.A. Gruppuso, and J. Frader. “Changing the
    Nomenclature/Taxonomy for Intersex: A Scientific and Clinical Rationale.” Journal
    of Pediatric Endocrinological Metabolism 18.8 (Aug. 2005): 729-33.
Gratzke, Michael. “Love Is What People Say It Is: Performativity and Narrativity in
    Critical Love Studies.” Journal of Popular Romance Studies 6 (2017): 1-20.
Hargreaves, Tracy. Androgyny in Modern Literature. Palgrave Macmillan, 2005.
Heise, Ursula K. “Terraforming for Urbanists.” Novel: A Forum on Fiction 49.1 (May
    2016): 10-25.
Hoffman, Ada. “Vintage Autistic Book Party, Episode 6: 2312.” Ada Hoffman: Spec
    Fic Writer, Poet, Aspie. 6 May 2018. Online.
Hollinger, Veronica. “Humanity 2.0: Retrospection, Abjection, and the
    Future-to-Come.” Paradoxa: Studies in World Literary Genres 26 (2014): 267-82.
))))). “(Re) Reading Queerly: Science Fiction, Feminism, and the Defamiliarization
    of Gender.” SFS 26.1 (1999): 23-40.
))))). “‘Strangers to Ourselves’: Gender and Sexuality in Recent Science Fiction.”
    The Cambridge History of Science Fiction. Ed. Eric Carl Link and Gerry Canavan.
    Cambridge UP, 2015. 550-64.
Huff, Crystal. “Trans and Nonbinary Characters, Neopronouns in SFF.” Include
    Better. 10 Oct. 2019. Online.
“Intersex.” MedilinePlus. N.d. Online.
Jameson, Fredric. “The Future as Disruption.” Archaeologies of the Future: The
    Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions. Verso, 2005. 211-33.
Kilgore, De Witt Douglas. “Queering the Coming Race? A Utopian Historical
    Imperative.” Queer Universes: Sexualities and Science Fiction. Ed. Wendy Gay
    Pearson, Veronica Hollinger, and Joan Gordon. Liverpool UP, 2008. 233-51.
Krauthamer, Helen Seltzer. “The Great Pronoun Shift.” CEAMAG Journal 28 (2000):
    21-35.
Livia, Anna. Pronoun Envy: Literary Uses of Linguistic Gender. Oxford UP, 2001.
MacFarlane, Alex Dally. “Post-Binary Gender in SF: The Cage of Zeus by Sayuri
    Ueda.” Tor.com. 4 Mar. 2014. Online.
Monk, Patricia. “The Future Imperfect of Conjugation: Images of Marriage in Science
    Fiction.” Mosaic: An Interdisciplinary Critical Journal 17.2 (1984): 207-22.
Murphy, Patrick D. “Pessimism, Optimism, Human Inertia, and Anthropogenic
    Climate Change.” ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment
    21.1 (2014): 149-63.
“Neopronouns.” LGTBA Wiki. N.d. Online.
Pak, Chris. “Terraforming and Geoengineering in Luna: New Moon, 2312, and
    Aurora.” SFS 45.3 (2018): 500-14.
Pearson, Wendy Gay. “Science Fiction and Queer Fiction.” The Cambridge
    Companion to Science Fiction. Ed. Edward James and Farah Mendlesohn.
    Cambridge UP, 2003. 149-60.
Richards, Christina, Walter Pierre Bouman, and Meg-John Barker. “Introduction.”
    Genderqueer and Non-Binary Genders. Ed. Christina Richards, Walter Pierre
    Bouman, and Meg-John Barker. Palgrave Macmillan, 2017. 1-8.
Robinson, Kim Stanley. 2312. 2012. Orbit, 2013.
          CELEBRATION OF MATURE LOVE IN ROBINSON’S 2312                          475

Shaheen, Aaron. Androgynous Democracy: Modern American Literature and the
    Dual-Sexed Body Politic. U of Tennessee P, 2010.
Singh, Vandana. “Why KSR’s 2312 is a Fail on Many Counts.” Antariksh Yatra:
    Journeys in Space, Time and the Imagination. 19 Mar. 2013. Online.
Šporèiè, Anamarija. “The (Ir)Relevance of Science Fiction to Non-Binary and
    Genderqueer Readers.” ELOPE: English Language Overseas Perspectives and
    Enquiries 15.1 (2018): 51-67.
Sytsma, Sharon E. “Introduction.” Ethics and Intersex. Ed. Sharon E. Sytsma.
    Springer, 2006. xvii-xxv.
Wark, McKenzie. “A Functional Form Has Its Own Beauty: An Interview with Kim
    Stanley Robinson.” Los Angeles Review of Books. 1 Sep. 2013. Online.
Wolmark, Jenny. “Staying with the Body: Narratives of the Posthuman in
    Contemporary Science Fiction.” Edging into the Future: Science Fiction and
    Contemporary Cultural Transformation. Ed. Veronica Hollinger and Joan Gordon.
    U of Pennsylvania P, 2002. 75-89.
Woolf, Virginia. A Room of One’s Own. 1929. Harcourt, 2005.
ABSTRACT
Kim Stanley Robinson’s novel 2312 (2012) has been mainly approached from an
ecocritical perspective. I focus here, however, on the love story between its
protagonists, Swan Er Hong and Fitz Wahram. Robinson considers posthuman
sexuality and gender, and the meaning of marriage in the posthuman future of our
species. Swan and Wahram disrupt intersexuality, heterosexuality, femininity, and
masculinity from a progressive perspective, but Robinson’s main challenge to his
readers is his focus on love. Relying mainly on Alain Badiou’s In Praise of Love, I
argue that, beyond the freedom which humans enjoy regarding sex and gender in
Robinson’s twenty-fourth-century solar system, in 2312 he is specifically celebrating
mature love beyond superficial passion. Robinson considers, besides, how posthumans
aspiring to extreme longevity may see marriage from an angle that defies Zygmunt
Bauman’s views about the ephemerality of romantic relationships and the current
questioning of marriage itself.