Single: Arguments for the Uncoupled(Sexual Cultures)

A radical defense of a solitary life What single person hasn't suffered? Everyone, it seems, must be (or must want to be) in a couple. To exist outside of the couple is to assume an antisocial position that is ruthlessly discouraged because being in a couple is the way most people bind themselves to the social. Singles might just be the single most reviled sexual minorities today. Single: Arguments for the Uncoupled offers a polemic account of this supremacy of the couple form, and how that supremacy blocks our understanding of the single. Michael Cobb reads the figurative language surrounding singleness as it traverses an eclectic set of literary, cultural, philosophical, psychoanalytical, and popular culture objects from Plato, Freud, Ralph Ellison, Herman Melville, Virginia Woolf, Barack Obama, Emily Dickinson, Morrissey, Georgia O'Keeffe, and Hannah Arendt to the Bible, Sex and the City, Bridget Jones' Diary, Beyoncé's "Single Ladies (Put a Ring On It)," and HBO's Big Love. Within these flights of fancy, poetry, fiction, strange moments in film and video, paintings made in the desert, bits of song, and memoirs of hiking in national parks, Cobb offers an inspired, eloquent rumination on the single, which is guaranteed to spark conversation and consideration.

About the Author :
Michael Cobb is Professor of English at the University of Toronto. He is the author of God Hates Fags: The Rhetorics of Religious Violence, also published by New York University Press.

Review :
"Using the rhythms of banter, suggestion, and willful claims, even hyperbolic, assertive pronouncements, Cobb creates a unique vantage point from which to assess a remarkable topic, one he nearly makes his own. Loneliness has been much discussed of late, but singleness has not, not in this way. The result is an unforgettable mix of witty analysis of pop culture and a targeted dropping of deep, decisive anchors in a few canonical but unexpected texts. Most impressive, therefore, is Cobbs deployment of deft transitions that make his switches back and forth between and among discursive registers workand matter. With these artfully crafted links, Cobb guides the reader to each new perch. And if there is a unifying style that paradoxically lubricates and glues together his dynamics, I would call it conversational lyric: a personal tone and direct engagement of the reader that slightly slips that bond to slant past where you thought that Cobb was holding you." (Queer Theory) "The author offers a smart and stunning look at the 'moribund desperation' of coupledom." (Advocate.com) "Although the book is deliberately provocative, with its evocations of the couples 'steely, enduring logic' and 'toxic emotional restraints,' its most helpful to see Cobbs radical critique not as an ode to unattached monasticism but as suggestions for how the single perspectives solitude, privacy, and freedom can open up vistaseven in the lives of the happily coupled." (Publishers Weekly) "Singleis impressive because its focus is original and discreet and so is his arguments which center heavily on details, at times even the use of single words or on an interpretation." (Metapsychology)