Architecture of Desire

Solangel Maldonado is the Eleanor Bontecou Professor of Law at Seton Hall University School of Law. She is the co-editor of Family Law: Cases and Materials and Family Law in the World Community: Cases, Materials, and Problems in Comparative and International Family Law.

A probing, insightful analysis of how systematic racism in American culture continues to impact intimate life and family structures. - 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)