This course is designed to enable advanced Women's and Gender Studies students to engage in vital research on interdisciplinary topics. Both sexuality, in all its permutations, and "marriage" as a social and economic institution have been the subject of widespread and intensive scholarship, analysis and theorizing within women's studies, gender studies, and queer studies. Less strenuously examined is the category we often turn to to resolve and redeem our ambivalences about both: romantic love. This course will focus on the concept of romantic love from a variety of disciplinary and interdisciplinary perspectives, including history, literature, philosophy, anthropology, and psychology. We will look at the development of the concept from its supposed "invention" in twelfth-century France, through its establishment as the only "proper" foundation of marriage in nineteenth-century Britain and America, to the present-day emphasis on same-sex romantic love as the most compelling reason homosexual couples both need and deserve the right to marry. Key questions we will consider include: Is romantic love a fundamentally Western concept? How have our ideas about it been shaped by gender ideology and gender roles? Should we view it as a genuine ideal? a concept in need of "revisioning"? a dangerous mystification? Students will have wide latitude in designing individual research projects. Format: seminar. Requirements for the course include weekly 1- to 2-page critical response essays and one substantial research paper (15-20) pages. Prerequisites: Women's and Gender Studies 101 and two electives (one of which may be taken during the spring term in which the seminar is held). Enrollment limit: 15 (expected: 10). Required course for the Women's and Gender Studies major.