Love Stories: Language, Private Love, and Public Romance in Georgia by Paul Manning (review)

in Love Stories, Paul manning effectively explores the distinctive traditional sexual practices of the khevsurs, a group living in the mountains of the country of Georgia. Their traditions could have easily been lost after their forced resettlement by Stalin in 1952, but their love poetry and the literature it inspired have kept the khevsurs in the minds of the people of Georgia. khevsur youth were expected to engage in clandestine expressions of heterosexual desire not leading to sexual intercourse with distant relatives and others from their home community. tradition as well as a code of honor and shame set strict parameters for physical contact. interestingly enough, those encountered in the process would not be marital candidates, since the khevsurs traditionally married outside of their own communities. rather than consider sexuality as an expression of identity, manning follows Deborah cameron and Don kulick’s approach to sexuality as an expression of desire in Language and Se...