Sweethearts plays with identity construction, with exaggerated fictional representations of women who are navigating the private/public divide in an era of individualism. Drawing on characters in soft-core porn like “Sweethearts” (1986), who appear in “tasteful and sexy scenes,” that “couples will enjoy,” and the Mills & Boon heroine who ensures the reader is “able to relate to her, laugh with her, cry with her - as it’s through her that we fall in love with the hero,” the characters in Sweethearts perform for an anonymous multiplicitous audience rather than one (male) hero character. In these performances, Schmidt explores common conceptions of beauty, gender, ageing, as well as self-love/self-care, in order to reveal transgressive, aspirational and alternative portrayals of subjectivities, abstracted by contemporaneity, yet strangely nostalgic. Travel the world with Sweethearts without leaving your armchair.
