We often think of a love as something natural and powerful—a mysterious feeling we experience spontaneously, deep in the recesses of our essential selves. But our love, and our capacity to love, may have a lot more to do with our society than we acknowledge.

Recently on Verso Books's blog, Dalia Gebrial published a powerful critique of how colonialism complicates love. For Gebrial, love—like any other interaction between people in society—is encoded within existing power structures. Gebrial writes:

Embedded within the constituent discourses of love—of desirability, emo劳动、支持和承诺——是分配给某些机构的社会价值准则;值得被爱的人的工作。

为了探索社会如何以不同的方式衡量不同的身体，Gebrial调查了越来越多关于Averil Clarke所说的“爱的不平等”的文献。Gebrial covers the literature of Junot Diaz, who coined the term "Decolonial love," in his novelMonstro，讲述了一位加勒比女子在一个不认为她可爱的世界里寻找爱情的故事。她探讨了Sandra Ponzenesi关于殖民时期性政治的作品，比较了欧洲艺术和文学中对非洲和中东女性的不同刻画。

Just in case that all feels a bit theoretical, Gebrial also surveys data from online dating websites. The conclusions drawn are grim: there are clear racial biases in the number of positive replies a person gets.

Gebrial raises vital points that problematize love—a category many of us might prefer to think of as apolitical. Her essay is worth reading in its entirety. As she concludes:

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.

Read the full essay here:http://www.versobooks.com/blogs/3094-decolonising-desire-the-politics-of...

Image credit:Olympiaby Edouard Manet (1865)