#decolonizing love

it can be hard not to feel like people are trying to nail me down in order to exclude me. it’s definitely happening on an institutional level. it doesn’t have to happen on an interpersonal level.

simultaneously, the idea that i HAVE to have total freedom of sexual expression in a partnership is absurd to me. i adore specificity. what gets you, my loved one, to a place of ecstasy? where does the edges of your desire meet mine? where’s the overlap? what can i learn to do with you that is keyed to our connection? that provides endless fascination to me. i keep hearing from partners that they fear they are not enough just because my proclivities are more wide ranging than theirs. like it’s a somehow a loss to love them and be with them and share in their journey, and i am just waiting for the right temptation to wake up from my self-delusion.

Like, love isn't a finite resource, it is absolutely possible, and happens absolutely often, for an individual to love more than one person platonically, sexually, romantically, etc. There's no use denying that.

I think a lot of problems in traditional monogamous relationships stems from that perception of love as a finite resource and as a colonized entity, like love is this finite, rivalrous thing that you have to claim for yourself and withhold from others, which is a fundamentally colonial mindset.

People have feelings towards more people than their spouse or significant other and feel bad about it and uncomfortable talking about it, which causes lots of tension and conflict, and then someone cheats and the whole relationship implodes. Cheating is bad, but the idea of wanting to love another person isn't bad. I think people need to unlearn the selfishness they have with regards to their partners and normalize talking about having a poly or open relationship.

No relationship can succeed if we fundamentally deny our desires and don't at least address them. Even if the consensus within that relationship is we are going to stay closed and monogamous, AT LEAST you talked about it and came to that consensus together instead of ignoring the need to have that conversation in the first place.

It is everywhere and in so many different forms

Within in different kinds of relationships and kinships

spoken and shown in different ways 

None of us have that one love. We’re bound to so many different loves. In a colonized mindset, we have disenfranchised ourselves from exploring the different ways loves manifests itself in our lives, the different ways to communicate and express it to various entities, human and non-human.

There are so many different kinds of love, and so many ways to show it, to so many different people. It is absurd how dominant the “couple” has become, especially over kinship. How we feel the need to constantly define ourselves in these rigid categories based around partnership and specifically romantic love. Thats not the natural way to be.  

MY POC BODY IS

a) LOVED

b) FETISHIZED

c) N/A

What is often missing from accounts of the racial dynamics of ‘love’ and being ‘loved’ is an understanding of where these codes – of who can be loved, who cannot be loved and whose love matters – come from. Why do we have such a robust and universally understood racial grammar of desire, to the point where porn is literally categorised according to racist tropes?

On one hand, the OBSESSIVE ATTRACTION TO THE EXOTIC EROTIC

On the other, the DISGUSTED REPULSION TO THE SEXUAL OTHER

The European attraction to the colonised bodies of the harem woman and the Hottentot was paradoxically underscored by revulsion. The Hottentot – a hallmark image of 19th Century eugenics – was continually associated in both art and medical literature with unbridled, pathologised sexuality.

Always in OPPOSITION TO THE DOMESTICATED WHITE WOMAN

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... Indeed, representations of other marginalised women – such as sex workers and queer women – were constituted across similar lines

WHY WHY WHY THIS DYSFUNCTIONAL STRUCTURE?

The problems of dehumanisation and fetishisation... began in a system of representation borne out of a power relation; a relation that existed for the purpose of material exploitation and resource extraction. Later, immigration policies, labour practices and distribution of resources would also feed into this racialised hierarchy of desire.

WHAT MUST BE CRITICALLY ADDRESSED

The labour of decolonising these representative paradigms is structural, and involves addressing their material histories. To believe – as Fanon says – in the possibility of love, we must comprehend the fact that we do not obliviously fall into it, but are coded in and out of it, and that this has implications beyond our individualised experiences.