"Decolonising Desire: The Politics of Love"

"In 2014, OkCupid released data demonstrating how ‘response rate’ to dating profiles is profoundly affected by how you are racialised. There is a plethora of blogs and think pieces – particularly by women of colour – documenting traumatic and degrading experiences during dating and sex that specifically happens through and alongside their racialisation. Writer Junot Diaz – credited with coining the loosely defined term ‘decolonial love’ – explores in his novel Monstro the dynamics of a half-Dominican half-Haitian girl’s “search for – yes – love in a world that has made it a solemn duty to guarantee that poor raced girls like her are never loved.”...

Looking back at my own experience, a nascent adolescent sexual curiosity was rapidly crushed by a combination of bodily mockery and – most often – total invisibility. A series of small lessons learned through film, television and personal experience, accumulated to the eventual understanding that people who look like me cannot be the subject of love. If lucky, we can be objects of fetishisation – but that is very different to being perceived as lovable...

The construction of the racialised woman’s body during colonisation and slavery as dirty, hypersexual and close to nature was specifically through their opposition to the chaste cleanliness of the Victorian woman, who, for her part, was bound to domesticity... What connects these highly embodied categories of undesirable women is that they are specifically constructed in opposition to the discourses of love, romance, marriage and family. Their bodies are fascinations, adventures, scandals and pathologies – these subjects are not worth even the premise of the emotional labour of commitment."

http://www.versobooks.com/blogs/3094-decolonising-desire-the-politics-of-love?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=cpc&utm_campaign=UK+UTM+-+Decolonising+Desire%3A+The+Politics+of+Love

Related: Blak women Asian men; other essays...; violnce in the name of white women (after Dylann Roof);

FB: "we can build an understanding of how ‘love’, represented as an apolitical, transcendent realm of affect into which you unwittingly fall, is actually deeply politicized, and linked to broader structural violences faced particularly by women of colour globally."