going on Tinder as a queer, dark-skinned black woman
Really not sure what queer means in this context. Aggressively lesbian? Politically and loudly lesbian? Dunno. But at a guess it means not hetero.
OK. It’s going to be a fairly small dating pool. Lesbians are some 1 to 2% of the population.
I am reminded with every swipe that my body is an irregularity in the world. I have somehow managed to be not just black, but darker than most people here in the Bay Area.
Could be. Would never say that race isn’t a factor in human relationships.
I have managed to ignore the trending master cleanses, the Atkins diets and all other manifestations of the thin-crazed California culture which paints my 300lb body into an oddity.
Ah. 21 stone is going to be, umm, a fairly specialised taste, isn’t it?
But as I got older it became exhausting to navigate relationships in my dark black body. It has become my job to remind the people in my life that the burden of their anti-black conditioning falls on me. If anti-blackness denies a black person their humanity, then the primary function of colorism is to normalize a world in which people are offered less dignity, empathy and, yes, desirability, the deeper their complexion is.
We sure it’s all about skin colour?
Our practice of a “queered monogamy” – my girlfriend and I welcome and encourage sexual and intimate exploration, both together and separately – allows me to witness all types of interactions between my body and the world.
Umm.
OK, 21 stone woman with nose ring looking for extra relationship quickie presumably with fellow lesbian. And the reason she can’t get a date is her skin colour?
Although I will give her one thing. California is markedly more racist than some other parts of the US. Yeah, I know, not how we normally think of it but…