Feminist and Anti-Racist Philosophies of Love [6-weeks, $300 Suggested]
Instructor: Dahiya | Thursdays January 12-February 23 (no class 1/19) | 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 coopted 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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For each class, four (4) full tuition scholarships and five (5) 80% tuition scholarships are available. Due to limited scholarship funds, we are currently only able to offer one class per term at the full scholarship level to any individual student—if you need a full scholarship, please sign up for the class you most want to take and email us to waitlist for any additional classes. We will add you when funds become available. Direct student donations are a crucial aspect of our funding model, and without them, we are not able to pay instructors a living wage. We encourage you to pick the payment tier that corresponds with your needs, but ask that you please consider our commitment to fair labor practices when doing so. If the scholarship tier you need is sold out or you would like to pay tuition on an installment basis, please email us directly, and we will work with you.
If at any point up to 48 hours before your first class session you realize you will be unable to take the class, please email us and we will reallocate your funds to a future class, to another student’s scholarship, or refund it. After classes begin, we are only able to make partial refunds and adjustments.