Some error occured while loading the Quick View. Please close the Quick View and try reloading the page.
Explores the reach of the law into our most personal and private romantic lives
The Architecture of Desire examines how the law influences our most personal and private choices—who we desire and choose as intimate partners—and explores the psychological, economic, and social effects of these choices. Romantic preferences, as shaped by law, perpetuate segregation and subordination by limiting, on the basis of race, individuals’ prospects for marriage and marriage-like commitments, as well as economic and social mobility.
The book begins by tracing the legacy of slavery, anti-miscegenation, segregation, and racially discriminatory immigration laws to show how this legal landscape facilitated the residential, economic, and social distance between racial and ethnic groups, which in turn continue to shape romantic preferences today. Solangel Maldonado argues that the law further influences intimate choices by structuring the spaces within which individuals meet and interact via practices such as redlining, gentrification, and zoning.
Maldonado includes studies of online and offline dating preferences to demonstrate that romantic predilections follow a gendered racial hierarchy in which Whites are at the top, African-Americans at the bottom, and—depending on skin tone—Asian-Americans and Latinos in the middle. These preferences may be explicit, implicit, or both, but they are usually the result of stereotypes reflected in social and cultural norms. Furthermore, since marriage confers substantial legal, economic, and social advantages, sexual racism further limits an individual’s opportunity to find a partner and reap these benefits. Finally, the book proposes ways to minimize the law’s influence over who we desire, love, and bring into our families, such as changes to dating platforms as well as to housing, education, and transportation policies.
— Angela Onwuachi-Willig, Boston University School of Law
In this important new book, Professor Solangel Maldonado traces the history of sex and marriage across the color line and links the legacy of the past to contemporary patterns of interracial intimacy. While acknowledging the importance of a collective belief in romantic choice, she carefully explores structural barriers, rooted in ongoing segregation and inequality, that can render this choice illusory. Her perceptive analysis of online dating reveals that technology is as likely to perpetuate racialized romantic preferences as to interrupt them.
— Rachel F. Moran, Author of Interracial Intimacy: The Regulation of Race and Romance
The Architecture of Desire is an insightful analysis that is very much needed in the midst of our societal colorblind rhetoric that idealizes interracial romance as the solution to racism without considering the systemic barriers to racial equality.
— Tanya Hernandez, author of Multiracials and Civil Rights: Mixed-Race Stories of Discrimination
Thoroughly researched and thoughtfully written, The Architecture of Desire underscores compellingly how law’s historical role in racially discriminating against people of color in housing, education, and family, among other areas of society, continues to limit who one marries today on the basis of race. This book is a call to action for those who are committed to undoing racial hierarchies and seeking to achieve racial justice today.
— Rose Cuison-Villazor, Professor of Law and Chancellor's Social Justice Scholar, Rutgers Law School
Through a wide-ranging analysis of online dating platforms, legal histories of interracial intimacy, and current structural barriers to interracial intimacy, the book offers a challenging account of the insidious ways that the state perpetuates anti-Black racism, even in the most intimate corners of contemporary American life. Beyond diagnosing the problem, Maldonado also offers concrete reforms that could address these inequalities without authorizing the state to manage Americans’ intimate relationships.
— CHOICE
Maldonado traces the legacy of slavery, anti-miscegenation, segregation, and racially discriminatory immigration laws and finds that this legal landscape facilitated the residential, economic, and social distance between racial and ethnic groups, which in turn continue to shape romantic preferences today. She concludes that the law further influences intimate choices by structuring the spaces within which individuals meet and interact, via practices such as redlining, gentrification, and zoning.
— Law and Social Inquiry
There is much in Architecture of Desire to interest readers interested in exploring the many different sites in which the most enduring forms of harm are brought about when race and gender discrimination collide.
— Feminist Legal Studies