Emotion, politics and literary space in Your Heart is a Muscle the Size of a Fist

Sunil Yapa's Your Heart is a Muscle the Size of a Fist is a book about the redeeming power of love in political struggle, but the nature of that love as it finds congruence with the political can be read in different ways. This paper offers a reading of the text that highlights both the constructive potential and the normative trappings of love as a political principle. Ultimately I argue that all-encompassing or totalizing forms that love often takes are themselves forms of power and domination. I use Your Heart in conjunction with the theories of Sara Ahmed and Kojin Karatani to illustrate this point. This paper also contributes to discussions at a broader level of abstraction, in terms of how a book about love and politics, written by a geographer in a clearly spatial tone, intersects with the political events it describes.