Tuesday Barnes

Participant: PROMISE AGEP Research Symposium

barnes

Tuesday Barnes

Department: Sociology

Institution: University of Maryland College Park (UMD)

ABSTRACT

The Racialization of Love

Love is, has been, and will always be political. As individuals with multiple politics that collide in our respective bodies, we carry our intersections into the courtship process. Who we love is as important as how we come to define love and how we come to learn the politics of desirability. Contrary to popular film and TV depictions of finding romantic love as being an act of destiny, sociologists have found that romantic love is a far more complex and nuanced process. Scholars have conceptualized romantic love as social sentiments with cultural meanings that then serve as guidelines for feeling norms (Gordon 1981; Hochschild 1983b). These feeling norms enable individuals to navigate appropriate feeling displays. Cancian (1985) found that these feeling displays are consistent with gender stereotypes and that subsequently, expressions of love are negatively impacted by these gender stereotypes. Building on this scholarship, The Racialization of Love examines two fundamental question around who we choose to love and how displays of love are racialized. Using an intersectional framework for assessing identity, this study emphasizes the centrality of race, class and gender as interlocking systems that impact individual’s conceptions and choices in love.

BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH

Tuesday Barnes is a third year PhD student in the department of sociology at the University of Maryland, College Park (UMDCP). Tuesday is originally from Baltimore, MD and completed her undergraduate degree in Sociology at UMDCP. After completing her bachelor’s in sociology she went was admitted into the PhD program and was the recipient of the McNair Fellowship. Tuesday’s work explores the social psychological effects of tokenism on African American girls that attend private, elite high schools. As a black critical feminist that uses an intersectional approach, Tuesday’s work speaks to the importance of assessing race, gender, and class as interlocking matrices of systematic oppression for people of color in professional and academic spaces. Tuesday’s master thesis entitled The Cost of a Token: An Analysis of African American Girls in a Private High School explores the social psychological costs that African American girls that attended a private, elite high school incurred and why these costs are important for schools, parents, and students. Her most recent work in progress is entitled The Racialization of Love that expands on Cancian’s seminal work The Feminization of Love. In this paper, Tuesday argues that blacks are often perceived as less loving in their behavior than whites because black’s behavior is measured with a white-centered ruler that deems black’s performance of love as less loving than white’s performance of love.

GENERAL SUMMARY OF GRADUATE RESEARCH

Tuesday’s work explores the social psychological effects of tokenism on African American girls that attend private, elite high schools. As a black critical feminist that uses an intersectional approach, Tuesday’s work speaks to the importance of assessing race, gender, and class as interlocking matrices of systematic oppression for people of color in professional and academic spaces. Tuesday’s master thesis entitled The Cost of a Token: An Analysis of African American Girls in a Private High School explores the social psychological costs that African American girls that attended a private, elite high school incurred and why these costs are important for schools, parents, and students. Her most recent work in progress is entitled The Racialization of Love that expands on Cancian’s seminal work The Feminization of Love. In this paper, Tuesday argues that blacks are often perceived as less loving in their behavior than whites because black’s behavior is measured with a white-centered ruler that deems black’s performance of love as less loving than white’s performance of love. Above all, Tuesday’s work challenges us to reimagine a world that is more livable and just for all.