Julia Misno Ambivalence

You ever had both positive and negative feelings about something? If so, then no, you aren’t odd. We may hate our jobs, but love the paycheck we get at the end of the month. We may love indulging on junk food, but hate the dreadful feeling afterwards. We may desire an attribute about someone, such as their empathy, but dislike their bad temper, and this is how the term “ambivalence” emerges.
Julia Serrano introduces us to the term “ambivalence” in her book” Excluded: Making Feminist and Queer Movements More Inclusive”. Per Serrano, ambivalence is when we simultaneously hold both positive and negative feelings about something. Ambivalence often gets confused with apathy which is incorrect as apathy lacks care while ambivalence embraces the
Serrano asks “If we are attracted to someone or something that is atypical or maligned in our culture, are we simply more open minded than other people? Or are we partly turned on by the taboo nature of the encounter” (Serrano 259). I believe once the person is turned into an object and de-humanized then that’s fetishism. Fetishism focuses on the “idea” of the person, rather than who they are as a person. As an Arab woman, I’m always fetishized either as the sexy belly dancer or the hijab wearing woman. These fetishes are always followed by stereotypical questions that further proves the “idea” of the person rather than the person as a human. Asian woman are also heavily fetishized, the fetishizing of Asian women even has a distasteful name “yellow fever”. Rachel Kuo of Everyday Feminism discloses why said fetishism is problematic “This is different from an interracial partnership where all partners are equally respected. Fetishizing someone’s race and gender means not caring about someone as an individual.” Kuo also mentions media as the reasons behind the fetishism of Asian women” Asian women are often stereotyped as either the dangerously cunning “Dragon Lady” that seduces White men, leading to their inevitable downfall, or as the submissive “Lotus Blossom.” Since I’m currently seeing a black man, I ask myself “do I like the idea of him?” or “do I like him as a person?” and I find the latter to be