Singular Selves

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.

List of Figures ix

List of Tables x

List of Contributors xi

Acknowledgments xv

Introduction 1

Ketaki Chowkhani and Craig Wynne

PART I

Laying the Field 9

1 Changing Thinking, Changing Language, Changing Lives: The Power and Promise of Singles Studies 11

Bella DePaulo

2 What We Talk about When We (Don’t) Talk about Singlehood 21

Adriana Savu

3 Single (Never Married), Black, and Middle Class by the Numbers 40

Kris Marsh and Olivia James

PART II

Singlehood, Media, and Literature 57

4 Singlehood and Valentine’s Day: A Study of Discursive Representations and Emotions in the Media 59

Saumya Sharma

5 “New Uncertainties and Fresh Concessions”: Edith Wharton’s Ambivalent Single Fictions of Middle Age 77

Katherine A. Fama

6 Unwitting W;t: A Case Study in the Relationship between Literary Stereotypes and Real-Life Discrimination 92

Joan DelFattore

7 The Single Woman’s Thousand Shapes of Love in Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse 104

Elizabeth Foulke

PART III

Singlehood, Space, and Well-Being 117

8 Japanese Singles and Solo-Life 119

Laura Dales and Nora Kottmann

9 Singles in the Workplace: Benefits and Challenges 138

Elyakim Kislev

10 Exploring Satisfaction with Singlehood among Diverse

Groups of Singles 151

Dominika Ochnik

Afterword 169

Sarah Lamb

Index 175