So if it wasn't already obvious by posts in prior years about Valentine's Day or my gift guide for the jaded, I have mixed feelings about the holiday. I mean, I love the idea of VDay as a High Femme Holy Day (and will revisit that idea over the weekend), and always enjoyed Pillow Fight Club in San Francisco, but have a lot of issues with the commercialization of love generally, never mind a holiday dedicated to those messed up ideals.

If you're similarly inclined, and in the London area, you should join me and the boy at "Love on Trial", Mutiny's nod to the Hallmarking of romance. Here's the blurb:

On a bi-monthly basis, we organise carnivalesque political evenings to explore and debate social issues of the day. Next week, to mark the corporate schmaltz of Valentine's day in our own special way we'll be putting Love under our intrusive microscope, asking (amongst other important questions); How does romantic love work as an ideology, and can we escape the singular vision of it that saturates our airwaves? What is the relation between our historically specific conception of romantic heterosexual love and late capitalism? What other kinds of love might be valuable? Do we have enough love for our public services to save them?

How does the state institutionalise, police and teach its citizens to love? How have schools, the church and the law helped and hindered the shift towards acceptance of a greater diversity of types of love? How did we build resistance in the past and where are the points of prejudice and control we need to confront today?What relation do love and other emotions bear to activism? Can daring to love differently be an efficacious political act in itself? Is it possible to separate our private lives from our political acts? What might love look like after the revolution?

Along with our special brand of anti-panel debate also known as the pub table audience participation model, we'll have Nina Power on Kollontai and Love in Revolt; Dr Christian Klesse on the politics of polyamory; Deborah Philips providing a feminist perspective on narratives of love; Beatboxer R-tizt, comic Helen Arnie, perfomance poet Alison Brumfitt and of course Shit Theatre…

With live music, performance poetry, and original live theatre, it's a political party not to be missed!   

I'm excited for this as it sounds like my cup of tea- political debate over romance with a bunch of my awesome queers, activists, artists and academics! You probably know that politics get me hot, especially if you've ever read my blog (I did have PIV sex for the first time thanks to a socialism debate after all) so I think this'll be fantastic good fun. 


It's on Facebook here: http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=192156327467868       
Their twitter account is: @TweetTheMutiny      
And there's also have a website here WHERE TICKETS ARE STILL 2-FOR-1 (so bring a date!):      
http://jointhemutiny.wordpress.com/