Dean Spade’s latest book, Love in a F*ucked Up World: How to Build Relationships, Hook Up, and Raise Hell Together (2025), is a self-help volume with a distinctive mission. The book’s self-improvement stylings arrive amidst the highly intentional teachings of an established social movement activist, organizer, and institution-builder writing here primarily for a younger generation on or open to the political left. The book leverages hardscrabble wisdom wrought from Spade’s years on the political front lines as deepened by serious psychological study and reflection. The result is a book offering readers a space for meaningful self-witness. Love encourages readers to discover via self-reflection that many of the forces they oppose “out there” in the social world also operate within themselves. The book’s self-help resources then guide readers toward the transformative self-healing that may follow—producing selves capable of new intimacies, relationships, and social movement work that may yet set them, and the rest of us, free.
Love’s self-help advice unfolds across digestibly structured chapters. These carve-ups give readers opportunities to process the book’s instruction and self-exam prompts, making the experience almost dialogic. The book braids self-help advice with political argument and complements both with first-person narrative and fictionalized vignettes that supply readers with additional layered contact points for approaching its ideas, questions, questionnaires, assessment tools, and worksheets.
Early substantive chapters orient Love’s readers to their self-transformative possibilities through accounts describing leading cultural forces that pervasively shape and script the social world, its systems, and individual selves, including inner experience. In doing so, these chapters reveal how these same social forces condition individual capacities for building and sustaining relationships.
Along these lines, Love’s chapter materials spotlight the old cis-heteropatriarchal romance narrative storied as the best and truest path to self-realization, happiness, and flourishing. Recasting this narrative and its scripts in critical relief empowers Love’s readers to recognize how the romance narrative may have podified them and placed them on “autopilot” while providing the basic, if occluded, terms for their social being, social horizons, and thus their political selves. (P. 20.) Love builds on this discussion in a subsequent chapter treating still other cultural forces and scripts, not least including those associated with U.S. political economy, that can likewise alienate people from their authentic selves by “numb[ing]” them and shrinking their “emotional range” and interconnective capabilities. (P. 78.) Understanding this numbness as socially determined positions Love’s readers to imagine that they, too, could become more sensate: present, awake, and available for intimacy, including in all manner of relationships—and politics. “[D]ismantling . . . systems [of domination] inside and outside ourselves requires being able to feel more.” (P. 93.)
Subsequent chapters explore how individual childhood and other personal histories also construct us, while offering practical advice on tracing and changing those histories’ effects. Love reckons with how to avoid pitfalls that can create challenges for oneself and social movement living, like gossiping, “campaigning,” and seeking vengeance against exes. (P. 177.) Readers also encounter strategies for handling “[n]egative [s]elf-[t]alk, [f]ear, and [a]nxiety,” and for sustaining relationships when they are psychically activated. (P. 213.) Elsewhere, the book tackles relationship conflict, and “[c]ommunication and [r]epair,” emphasizing “[l]istening,” “[a]pologizing,” and “forgiving” as skills that are about relationships with others as well as with oneself. (Pp. 225, 238, 243, 247.) A final substantive chapter, entitled “[r]evolutionary [p]romiscuity—[and] [g]etting [f]ree [t]ogether,” considers issues of difference, safety, and security, and different forms of interpersonal connections, jealousies, and the challenges of accepting change. (P. 264.) This discussion returns to the romance myth as constraint and condition for self-transcendence. Love maintains that the understandings and skills it promotes are not only about individual social flourishing, but also about individual and collective “surviv[al]” in a wide sense, through, in part, the collective movement politics that Love sees as the best hope for tomorrow. (P. 318.) Love concludes by collecting various points and offering a picture of existing socio-political conditions. The point is not to shut down readers newly opened up, but rather to steel them for the challenges they will face, armed now with Love’s teachings and better able to relate “with as much integrity and compassion as possible” as they liberate themselves and others from the “old cultural scripts [and] coping mechanisms that undermine effective action” required to build a freer future “in this gorgeous, fucked-up world.” (P. 326.)
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As a matter of form, Love—as a self-help book—is hardly classic legal academic scholarship. Substantively viewed, the matter is somewhat more complicated—and interesting. Legal academic readers generally familiar with left-liberal and progressive anti-subordinationist theorizing will see it circulating and doing important lifting in Love’s affirmative argument.
Love’s tally of the social world does not overly emphasize the state’s and the law’s distinctively significant roles in instantiating and reproducing hierarchical social relations. The choice of relative emphasis is almost certainly related to Spade’s anti-statist leftism. Still, the state and the law are characters in Love’s narrative. They surface in the book’s references to the government, judges, police, prisons, military, “the school discipline system, the family policing system,” the “[s]ystems of taxation, property, healthcare, housing, and immigration,” and the legal institution of marriage. (Pp. 280, 24.) Like other social forces that Love attends to, the state and the law in these iterations involve systems: “systems of domination” and “illegitimate systems of authority” that, in a larger sense, make up “[t]he systems we live under,” elsewhere more colloquially termed “the system” itself. (Pp. 271, 280, 17, 35.)
In more traditional left-liberal and progressive legal scholarship, views like these are commonly predicates that ground follow-on calls to halt and reverse the state’s and the law’s role in social inequality’s reproduction. Love, by contrast, does not advance its anti-subordinationist positions primarily by imagining seizing and then wielding control of the state and the law to drive everyone into a leftist egalitarian future.
Love pursues its liberatory anti-domination politics by means that appear more immediately interested in enhancing voluntaristic individual and collective action—a voluntarism whose dynamics vitally include individual and collective self-reform and self-healing. These are the forms of self-change that may generate the interpersonal and structural movement politics and thus the world-altering effects that Love ultimately dreams about. Seen this way, Love’s self-help project is both end and means. As means, it is, by design, astute social movement governance. Should its self-help proposals take root and flower, they will reduce intra-movement frictions and their movement costs, giving social movement participants and social movements themselves access to a much larger array of interior and interpersonal resources to use in their shared work. (See Pp. 2–4.)
In doing this, Love does not show up as an exercise of Taylorist workplace efficiency nor as so much “woo woo” utopianism in its political dream-scaping. (P. 15.) Navigating the polarities, Love’s overall outlook is realistic and pragmatic, as suggested by its refusal to mince words when describing the social world as “fucked up,” “brutal,” and filled with “much loss and suffering.” (Pp. 9, 1, Ch. 2 (online edition).) Improbably and nevertheless, Love remains persistently hopeful, even joyful, about the prospects of individual and collective change—from small, individual change to change of more collective and even world-historic proportions. This will make the book especially alluring for those readers today who are yearning for blessed release from a sometimes gripping, sometimes enervating, worldly pessimism. Love fires its readers up so they may break into brighter and more sustainable political affects.
Love does warn that nobody should think its hopeful politics imply a politics of ease. The work that Love refers to, including its self-help work, is serious and difficult, and it demands committed “practice.” (P. 66.) The resulting ardors are not of a world-denying asceticism, but, if anything, closer to its opposite. They arise in and as world-affirming and world-making liberatory politics. These politics, which partly trace an important queer lineage, encompass more than the pains of self-estrangement and extend to the pains and pleasures associated with new possibilities for desire, pleasure, intimacy, relationships, and thus new ways of being-in-the-world and being-in-the-world-together-with-others. Love’s title trumpets relationships, sex, and “raising hell, together,” while imagining people actively reshaping their lives and the social world as part of a larger sensual, sensuous leftism.
Love’s particular politics advance an abiding faith in humankind and plasticity. Love thereby inevitably re-raises age-old questions about human nature and good versus evil, as well as questions about just how pliable humans actually are after a certain point of psycho-social development. Understanding these issues, Love engages them to some degree, but defers many details. (See Pp. 57–61.) Its realistic conviction is that people are at least pliable enough to do this kind of self-work by themselves and with others. Love takes a somewhat similar stance in relation to critiques that stand waiting in the wings, ready to point out how this effort in political psychology might be coopted by reactionary political foes happy to claim the work shows that social hierarchies’ injuries and social hierarchies themselves reduce to subaltern psychology. Refusing the distraction, Love prepares terms for future battle and effectively answers in the present tense that no, thankyouverymuch, it is not finally saying that social hierarchies’ harms or social hierarchies themselves result from socially subordinated peoples’ mental states. “I’m [n]ot [s]aying [i]t’s [a]ll in [y]our head,” Spade says. (P. 22.) No, Love’s whole point, after all, is that self-aware self-adjustments that “align our values with our actions in relationships” will be required along with social movement mobilizations to remake the social world in freer directions. (P. 3.)
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How legal academics will react to Love and its call is not among the book’s special concerns. Still, its offerings provide space for legal academics, too, to get introspective. This might only be in relation to their nonacademic lives, but there is also the prospect that they might reconsider aspects of their academic life and work, including their scholarship and teaching. (Teaching is a subject that Spade has written about before.)
On the scholarship front, Love practically delivers a reminder of the productive possibilities of the long under-attended but far-reaching law-and-psychology terrain. Re-opening the particular dynamism between and among inner experience, “outer” social world, and individual and large-scale change, Love might inspire next-generation breakthrough scholarship that will leverage political psychology and inner life’s power to reshape front-line politics and thus the future on any number of matters of import to left-liberals and progressives. By its example, Love’s methods could also prompt new legal academic scholarship that returns to older critical traditions of first-person narrative and storytelling and that gives those methods and their transformative capacities a fresh lease on life. Reengaged, this work might be undertaken at an important intersection with more recent social movement theorizing.
Among the many other types of law scholarship that Love may give a new chance, however, one in particular warrants mention given its thematic significance to the book. This is the prospect of a new egalitarian-minded legal scholarship on love itself.
Love talks about “love” in different registers. The book critically interrogates love’s place as head-trip, as in in the old heterosexualized and economically determined cultural romance narratives and scripts that herald love in interpersonal romance terms and as the golden ticket to self-realization, happiness, and flourishing. More positively, the book depicts love as an interpersonal and structural social affect and a powerful motivating, indeed world-changing, social force. Love surfaces on this level as interpersonal feelings that individuals have for one another in platonic, erotic, and political relationships in their various combinations, and as feelings that are structurally inflected and widely diffuse. Love bears witness, for instance, to the “love of solidarity” and social movement efforts undertaken with an “open and loving heart.” (Pp. 27, 325.)
Actually, Love discusses love quite a bit, though the book declines a fully systematized and worked-out theory of the term. Rather, Love fills and empties love with different meanings, while finally leaving it to function as an essentially empty concept.
Legal academic readers who prefer their concepts poured analytically straight amidst more formal theory tallies may regard Love’s treatment of love as—if not an occasion for some dashed hopes—then as a shortcoming of the work.
There is, however, another way to see it. And that is that Love’s seemingly superficial and promiscuous use of love productively leaves love’s ultimate meaning open and subject to readerly self-reflection, definition, and collective negotiation, including through social movement. Readers must decide for themselves what love is and what love has to do with their lives, relationships, and political movement efforts. If Love boasts that it is “pro-risk, pro-sex, and pro-love of all kinds,” the book still—somehow—manages to hint that it feels the pull of social movement activities that would fix love as a political north star. (P. 27.) Among other flashes hinting at the prospect is the epigraphic trumpet quoting an old protest print saying: “Your heart is a muscle the size of your fist. Keep Loving. Keep Fighting.” (P. 77.) Love here precedes—and animates—freedom struggle. The book’s dedication to “lovers and fighters” shows its deeper resonances when read in this light.
If Love itself keeps up the loving while leaving love open-ended and open to practice centering it, the book might well enlarge the campfires of love scholarship that have, over time, appeared in left-liberal and progressive legal scholarship. A new left-liberal and progressive love law scholarship might take many different forms: from studying love’s past and present as a left-liberal and progressive political and legal value to considering why, even now, it seems so difficult to imagine a serious and burgeoning body of academic, including legal academic, writing on the subject.
A new love scholarship in law might, in all events, prove no more than a flash-in-the pan, or worse, a dead-end that distracts from all the other serious work that there is to do and that thus generates serious social costs.
Those and other possibilities must be countenanced, but Love’s appearance testifies that Spade is tracking, and perhaps joining, others working outside the academy in left-liberal and progressive circles where love is rising as a political and spiritual force, one that, with Amanda Gorman’s “The Hill We Climb,” may “become[] our legacy” and change the next generation’s “birthright.” Love’s rise and rise away from law may mean it was only a matter of time before the dawn of a new generation of legal scholarship on love. Spade’s Love book may hasten the development, and with it, the individual, collective, and generational transformations that love may bring about.
Ultimately, Love’s self-help stylings offer both instruction and an occasion for reflection on love’s many forms. The book may thus serve as an antidote to the pessimism and isolation that many people these days, even some involved in social movements, are experiencing and reporting out. Spade’s Love stands as that rare work by an author who happens to daylight as a law professor that may help its readers realize, broadly, “the possibility of being here for what’s here.” (P. 326.) And how being here like that, while “treating others and ourselves as well as we can,” allows us to experience the thrills of presence and everything else that comes along with living “together, in this gorgeous, fucked-up world” in the days and years and years ahead. (Id.)
