Durryle Brooks

Operationalizing Love: Utilizing a Critical Theory of Love in Our Social Justice & Movement Building Work

Love within the U.S. context is often defined in overly individualistic, anemic, and depoliticized ways. It is discussed almost exclusively in the context of romance and its familial dimensions. Why? What of love and its role in social transformation?

Grounded in Black liberation theology and Black feminist thought, this session will interrogate the Westernized construction of love. It will analyze the ways in which the everyday notion of love operates as a tool of oppression and perpetuates white supremacist ideology to shape our social realities, desirability, and diminish our possibilities for social transformation.

Instead, this session will offer us all an opportunity to interrogate what love is, how we have been socialized by it, and how it shapes our capacity to lead change and hold each other with loving accountability within the moment. Ultimately, this session is about reconceptualizing love in ways that help us resist erasure and dehumanization, and defining it in ways that help us heal.

We will explore a Critical Theory of Love framework to interrogate our own social justice practices to ensure that we are not perpetuating oppression, but instead helping ourselves and others discover their power and heal. If love is going to be the transformative intervention we need in this moment, then love must be operationalized in ways that ensure our individual and collective healing and wholeness.