This introductory course explores the ways that love, sex, and desire are negotiated through technology and are structured by race, gender, and sexuality. Theoretically rooted in Black and Caribbean feminist thought, we will unpack and assess the ways that anti-blackness and white supremacy, as axes of power, stratify racialized people according to the most and least desirable as well as those most and least worthy of love. Black and Caribbean feminist thought offer a critical lens that helps us understand how power acts upon and determines the kinds of love available to Black women and other people of color. Through this lens, we will explore and critique controlling images and stereotypes through which Black women and men are presented and against which people across racial difference are contrasted. Discussions for this course will pivot around cultural objects called “desire machines” that include social media and dating apps which produce and circulate knowledge about racial “preferences” in dating culture. Finally, we will explore two emergent responses, therapy and theory, to love, sex, and desire. Women of color who struggle to find love and to feel desired have turned to technology to help contextualize love’s fugitivity. Advice that circulates on digital platforms leans toward self-management and individual choice which ignores the ways that structures of power intervene into people’s love lives. However, radical love, as a theory of justice, presents a more comprehensive framework that troubles systems of oppression, queers love, and offers community as a way to rethink how love can be accessed and enacted. Some key questions animating the arc of this course include: how is technology influencing the ways people actualize love in their personal lives? In what ways are their choices determined by race, gender, and sexuality?
School of Arts and Sciences
