Olympia by Edouard Manet (1865)
Dalia Gebrial examines the colonial scripts that encode people in and out of the possibility of love. Embedded within the constituent discourses of love – of desirability, emotional labour, support and commitment – are codes of social value assigned to certain bodies; of who is worthy of love’s work. The labour of decolonising these representative paradigms is structural, and involves addressing their material histories.
What does it mean to be lovable? Who is and is not deserving of particular kinds of love? How is love coded and reproduced? What, and who, is absent when love is represented?
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