The Politics of Love: Rediscovering the Contribution of Black Feminist Thought

Defined in terms as different as emotion, affective disposition, passion, act, practice, labour, power, system of exploitation, ideology, historical code, commodity, energy, bond, revolutionary force, and methodology, the concept of love seems doomed to to suffer from an irreconcilable divergence between academic and lay conceptions. Nonetheless, precisely because of its manifold and complex nature, the subject of love has become a reputable and increasingly important academic area of study on its own terms for both feminist and non-feminist scholars.

For the feminist theorists, the subject of love has been a political and intellectual issue for a long time. Despite the wide variety of perspectives and approaches, the common denominator of such theorisations has been a focus on the deeply oppressive nature of love as a site of reproduction of inequalities and discriminations. Nevertheless, this complex field of study can also include a political and social ideal of love in terms of emancipation, social inclusion, liberation from oppression, and empowerment.

Until recently, several gaps have characterized such field, among which the gap between limited, reductive interpretations of love and more complex, (post-)intersectional analyses of love and its multiple implications. With regard to this latter point, the insights of US Black feminist thought have been crucially important, but consistently overlooked.

Without ignoring the vastity and the complexity of love studies, this contribution focuses on one specific aspect of them, i.e., the politics of love, and has four main goals: 1) relocating the roots of love studies in the longstanding and still largely ignored contribution of Black Feminist thought; 2) bridging different conceptions of the subject of love as theory and method; 3) shedding light on the alleged limitations of identity-politics and intersectionality; 4) advancing and queering current debates on the theoretical, methodological, and political implications of Black Feminist politics of love.