Dr. Julinna Oxley

Professor of Philosophy at Coastal Carolina University

Love and Radical Resistance:

Traversing Boundaries in Life and in the Academy

The idea of love is not much invoked in political discourse. And it seems incapable of teaching us anything about the causes or remedies of injustice. And yet, activists such as Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. viewed love as critical to social change; Audre Lorde, Octavia Butler, and bell hooks have argued that love is central to resisting many types of oppression, and to developing the emotional stamina needed for long-term, effective resistance.

This is not to say that citizens should merely be “civil.” Far from it—moral outrage is critical to combatting the ideologies of hate and dehumanization. Love is both radical and resistant, and critical to both ideological and practical resistance—resisting gender norms, artificial and unnecessary borders, or institutional policies. Since we cannot love alone, we cannot resist alone, and should develop loving resistant communities to prevent anti-oppression work from deteriorating into self-destructive resentment.