Feminist and Anti-Racist Philosophies of Love [Online]
Full Tuition: $320 — Scholarship options are available in the drop-down enrollment menu for you to self-select.
Instructor: Dahiya | 5 Weeks | Thursdays | January 25 - February 22 | 7:00 - 9:00 PM ET | ONLINE
Our everyday conceptions of love are over-saturated with stereotypical and heteronormative Hollywood ideas rooted in capitalist consumption. Expressing love means buying a diamond or a box of chocolates. But what if those ideas aren’t just normal (or worse, boring), but instead can even be violent: encouraging capitalist exploitation that drives us farther apart and reinforcing the very norms that ostracize those that can’t fit within it. Is love too co-opted to be saved? Or is there a political possibility for love? In this course, we’ll consider other versions of love, grounded in powerful political action and alternative ideas of relationality.
We’ll begin to study the nature of love itself by reading psychology, anthropology, and theory to ask if love is an emotion, a drive, an anticipation of, or desire for a union. We’ll also explore the relation between love, emotion, and affect. We will then study how systems of oppression warp and destroy love through how they encode who is worthy of love and how we practice love, and how it is for precisely this reason why it is urgent that to reimagine a feminist, anti-colonial, and anti-racist conception and practice of love. How have imperialism, racism, sexism, and classism shaped what black feminist theorist bell hooks calls the “culture of domination” that we live in, one that is fundamentally anti-love? How does this culture of domination inform and shape our relation to ourselves and to each other? Following hooks, what does it mean to understand love as the practice of freedom? We’ll end the course by re-imagining how love as a practice can reframe and transform our relations with ourselves, each other, and political life more broadly.
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Recordings may be provided upon request for missed classes.
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Scholarships: We are currently able to offer three full scholarships per class. Our full scholarship tier is a nonrefundable offering, limited to one per student per month. Because our scholarship funding is limited, selecting multiple full scholarships in a single month will result in disenrollment from all classes. If the scholarship tier you need is sold out please email us directly, and we will add you to a waitlist and notify you if additional scholarships become available. Please see our FAQ for more information, including installment plans and refund policy.
Asynchronous Auditing: Classes are discussion-based and designed to be taken synchronously. However, we do offer an asynchronous audit option for most online classes if you need to follow along at your own pace. You must choose the audit option to receive all course recordings; please do not register using a scholarship if you do not plan to attend the majority of class sessions as you will not receive the recording materials to follow along. We do not automatically offer scholarships for auditors, but if you need one, you may request one by filling out this form.