Singular Selves

This book examines, for perhaps the first time, singlehood at the intersections of race, media, language, culture, literature, space, health, and life satisfaction. It adopts an interdisciplinary approach, borrowing from sociology, literary studies, medical humanities, race studies, linguistics, demographic studies, and critical geography to understand singlehood in the world today.

This collection of essays aims to establish the discipline of Singles Studies, finding new ways of examining it from various disciplinary and cultural perspectives. It begins with laying the field and then moves on to critically look at how race has shaped the way we understand singlehood in the West and how class, age, gender, privilege, and the media play a role in shaping singlehood. It argues for a need for increased interdisciplinarity within the field, for example, analyzing singlehood from the perspective of medical humanities. The volume also explores the role workplace, living arrangements, financial status, and gender play in single people’s life satisfaction. With an interdisciplinary and transnational approach, this interdisciplinary volume seeks to establish Singles Studies as a truly global discipline.

This pathbreaking volume would be of interest to students and researchers of sociology, literature, linguistics, media studies, and psychology.

Ketaki Chowkhani is Assistant Professor of Sociology at Manipal Centre for Humanities, Manipal Academy of Higher Education, India, where she teaches India’s first-ever course on Singles Studies. Her writing on gender, sexuality, and singlehood has appeared in the Indian Journal of Medical Ethics, Journal of Porn Studies, The New York Times, Square Peg, The Hindu, as well as in edited volumes published by Routledge and Cambridge University Press. Chowkhani has a PhD in Women’s Studies from Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai, where she researched sexuality education and adolescent masculinities in urban India.

Craig Wynne is Associate Professor of English in the Division of Arts and Humanities in the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of the District of Columbia, USA. His research interests include composition pedagogy, writing and psychology, Singles Studies, critical discourse analysis, and rhetoric and popular culture. He has presented at a variety of conferences on these subject areas, and his work has been published in Teaching English in the Two-Year College, Journal of Creativity in Mental Health, Journal of American Culture, Spark: A 4C4 Equality Journal, Revista Feminismos, Psychology Today, and Writer’s Digest. He has recently published a book, How to Be a Happy Bachelor (Kendall-Hunt, 2020), which was inspired by his themed Composition courses on Singlehood and Marriage.