Joy

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

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• From Pleasure Activism (2017)

  amb. I am selfishly glad you didn’t, because you are bringing such glamour and style into the realms I live in, which need it. 104 Marie Kondo is the author of The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up: The Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organizing (Ten Speed Press, 2014).Adornment and BurlesqueA Conversation with Taja Lindley Taja Lindley is a multimedia performer—she first caught my eye as half of the comedy rap duo Colored Girls Hustle. I bought all their swag because it was aesthetically perfect. The next time I came across her work, it was burlesque and theater. I get very excited by Black women living as radical pleasure artists and was excited to learn more. amb. Taja, tell me about all the pleasures that you cultivate and generate in your life. Taja. I made a commitment about six years ago that I was gonna allow joy to be my compass, that I was literally going to allow it to direct me where I should go and wanted to go. In 2011, I was working a movement job, and it just wasn’t satisfying for me any longer. Now I have an articulation around healing justice and what tools we probably could’ve used to support that internal infrastructure and interpersonal relationship work, but at the time I didn’t. And I was simultaneously discovering my creativity. When I look back on my life, I realize that I’ve been an artist my whole life, but I didn’t really claim that for myself until around 2011, when I started being more intentional about my creativity. So carving out time for it, committing to it, putting it in a calendar, like really holding boundary and space for it in my schedule and in my life. And actually, my creativity was the thing that burst my life wide open, that just did that thing that Audre Lorde talks about regarding the erotic. I just wasn’t satisfied with mediocre experiences in my life. I wasn’t satisfied with being places and doing things that I didn’t like to do, and while a part of me felt a little selfish, because a lot of our movement work can be based on this idea of sacrifice, I just kind of resolved for myself that I would find the intersections that worked well for me between my creativity and my commitment to my people. I quit my job and had some resources to be creative with all my time. And I spent a lot of time healing myself, engaging in practices that felt good to me: meditating, doing The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron, journaling, going on artist dates.105 Around this time, Colored Girls Hustle, which is my small business, was just a baby. She still feels like a baby, but she was literally still being birthed, and I really committed myself to leveling up with her. So I came out with a collection of jewelry and began to articulate the ways in which adornment means something to me.

• From Pleasure Activism (2017)

  It will take years, two decades, for you to become sober, to learn to meditate, to be able to just be. Alone. With yourself. To cross the threshold from loneliness to solitude. To learn that love is abundant but compatibility is rare. To learn there is a difference between hedonism that enables dissociation and disconnection versus joy and pleasure that enable presence and intimacy. You are here: college. The finish line of your childhood. But it is only the beginning of the rest of your life. 82 V. C. Andrews, Flowers in the Attic (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1979); V. C. Andrews, Heaven (New York: Pocket Books, 1990).Fuck CancerA Conversation with Alana Devich Cyril [image file=image_rsrc3KW.jpg] I met Alana Devich Cyril through her beloved Malkia Devich Cyril, who I have been comrades with for years. I fell in love with Alana as Malkia did, as the couple shared pictures from Hawaii vacations and Kendrick Lamar rap-offs. When Alana was diagnosed with late-stage cancer, I became part of the larger community in the world that is holding the couple as they grab life and love one day at a time. Alana is clever, hilarious, honest, and incredibly brave. She directed a documentary called My Life, Interrupted, about her dance with cancer. amb. What was your relationship to pleasure before your cancer diagnosis? Alana. There’s a Kurt Vonnegut quote that captures it for me: “We’re here on earth to fart around and don’t let anyone tell you different.”83 Before my cancer diagnosis, I always liked to describe myself as a bon vivant. I really took great pleasure in delighting in things—food, drinks, art, sex, people, places, all of it. If I was pressed to identify my purpose in life, I thought maybe it was to enjoy things. amb. It seems like as soon as you learned you had cancer, you also began strategizing and practicing pleasure in so many ways. But I know that might just be perception. How soon after your diagnosis did you get conscious of needing/cultivating pleasure? Alana. When I was first diagnosed, I was also really sick. I was sleeping most of the day and couldn’t swallow anything that wasn’t puréed. So there was an element of just doing what I needed to do to get through each day. After the first couple rounds of chemo I started to feel a lot better, and I remember trying desperately to do things that I would enjoy, despite still being pretty sick. I remember stubbornly making Mac invite a group of friends to the Exploratorium After Dark night while I was on chemo.84 My friends kept checking in to make sure I’d be up for it and then I couldn’t leave the apartment because of some unfortunate chemo-related pooping. My friends were good sports about it—they all came over, and we had an impromptu party at home. Then I pooped so much I broke the toilet, and we had to call a plumber. Poop party extravaganza!

• From Pleasure Activism (2017)

  Me and my partner hanging out in bed during a “bed day,” constantly communicating about what hurts and what positions our bodies need to be in, offering to make each other tea or bringing over the chips. Spooning, reading, telling stories, making out and napping, in the middle of a massive pillow pile. We aren’t trying to cram ourselves into an able-bodied vision of what sexy or a relationship is; it’s totally okay for us to rest, chill, care for ourselves and each other. Our care needs are not some gross secret walled off from date night. Or my friend whose multi-decade-old disability care collective helps her get on the toilet, shower, and dress every day, and people laugh, gossip, hang out, and have a great time—it’s the place to be! When I show a video that she made about her collective to the care webs workshop I teach, there’s usually awed silence. Afterward, someone always says, “I’ve never seen someone be so joyful and unashamed while getting help getting on the toilet.” Or last weekend, when two disabled femme BIPOC friends and I went on an accessible hike and had a blast.86 The care that allowed this joyful-ass space to happen included everything from one friend getting a guidebook of accessible hikes and researching routes, to the ways we strategized together when all of a sudden the trail had no curb cuts, to our stopping every five minutes to take a breath (because one of us has lung tumors and one of us was using a manual wheelchair that day and I have asthma), to how my friends were chill when I got hit with sudden food poisoning and had to squat behind a not-so-private tree and have a really bad shit as bikes whizzed by. “This is where access intimacy gets real!” I yelled, and we all laughed.

• From Pleasure Activism (2017)

  Michi, aka sister selva, the 2015 Queen of the Texas Burlesque Festival and winner of the Thursday Audience Choice Award, has spread her seedlings all over the stages of New York City—from Joe’s Pub, to CIUSA, (Le) Poisson Rouge, the Joyce Theater, Lincoln Center Out of Doors, Sesame Street, and all over the blocks, avenues, and impassioned dance floors. A student of acupuncture and Chinese herbal medicine, she loves exploring the many branches of healing that are rooted in self-love, community love, and justice for all people, creatures, and Mother Nature herself. The sisters were asked to write about radical burlesque as a tool for liberation and working together as sisters. But they weren’t at all sure how to functionally write together (sisters!), so instead they just sat down and had a conversation about these topics. Sister/Sister on Burlesque Una. Why do we do burlesque/how is it liberatory? Okay, I want to start off our convo by answering the question I just asked. Both. Haha. Una. We know the road to liberation for all peoples is a long one and something we might not see in our lifetimes. I feel like burlesque creates moments of liberation, moments of experience. Burlesque gives us space to feel all emotions and to recharge together, in our bodies together, not just online but viscerally together. It’s about finding freedom onstage, in my own body, while others watch and experience. It’s not just about rehearsing the revolution, it’s about creating cracks that show our bodies that we can experience freedom, we do. Sometimes that happens while we’re onstage, sometimes it happens while we’re dancing on the dance floor, no one else looking but us. These moments and experiences can be public or private, or private in a public setting, but more important is that they happen. For us to be fully present in our bodies, where we want nothing else but to be right there letting the divine speak through and of us. Where we want nothing of the audience but to witness and hope/know that their own freedom is wrapped in ours and the freer we each are, the more present and fully embodied we are to work for our collective liberation, toppling down borders, prisons, and all other systems that cause violence and keep our people from being free. All while we take off our clothes, showing some titties, ass, and armpit hair. Michi. Yeah! I feel like, in general, what we are doing when we are creating is envisioning or practicing for the world we want. So to have those moments on stage where we and the audience are living in, inhabiting a different world, where that is our reality, gives us a physical memory of it to be able to have the strength to keep working for it, for the world we want to live in.

• From Pleasure Activism (2017)

  41 Trans women of color in the US have an unemployment rate of four times the average, and about half of TWOC in the US have worked in the sex industry. See Human Rights Campaign and Trans People of Color Coalition, “Addressing Anti-Transgender Violence: Exploring Realities, Challenges and Solutions for Policymakers and Community Advocates,” November 2015, https://assets2.hrc.org/files/assets/resources/HRC-AntiTransgenderViolence-0519.pdf?_ga=2.37418594.399382019.1536798503-1304962530.1536798503.42 Roxane Gay, Hunger (New York: Harper Collins, 2017), 188–89.43 Kristen Wiig and Annie Mumolo, Bridesmaids, directed by Paul Feig (Universal City, CA: Universal Films, 2011).44 Based on British legal tradition, marital rape was explicitly exempted from sexual assault legislation in the US until the 1980s. Some laws remained on the books until the 1990s. Data drawn from Kathleen Basile, “Prevalence of Wife Rape and Other Intimate Partner Sexual Coercion in a Nationally Representative Sample of Women,” Violence Victims 17, no. 5 (2002): 511–24; Elaine K. Martin, Casey T. Taft, and Patricia A. Resick, “A Review of Marital Rape,” Aggression and Violent Behavior 12, no. 3 (2007): 329–47; Patricia Mahoney and Linda M. Williams, “Sexual Assault in Marriage: Prevalence, Consequences and Treatment of Wife Rape,” in Partner Violence: A Comprehensive Review of 20 Years of Research, ed. J. L. Jasinski and L. M. Williams (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 1998), 113–62; and Kathleen Basile, “Rape by Acquiescence: The Ways in Which Women ‘Give in’ to Unwanted Sex with Their Husbands,” Violence against Women 5, no. 9 (1999): 1036–58.45 That is, all labor is “embodied” labor. Or as Marx put it, labor power is the collection of “mental and physical capabilities existing in the physical form, the living personality, of a human being.” Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 1 (Toronto: Penguin Books, 1990), 270.46 Anne Elizabeth Moore, Threadbare: Clothes, Sex and Trafficking (Portland: Microcosm Publishing, 2015).47 Ritu Mahajan, “The Naked Truth: Appearance Discrimination, Employment, and the Law,” Asian American Law Journal 14 (2007): 165–203.48 Sexual harassment of women retail workers ranges from 25 percent to nearly 70 percent. See Laura Good and Rae Cooper, “‘But It’s Your Job to Be Friendly’: Employees Coping with and Contesting Sexual Harassment from Customers in the Service Sector,” Gender, Work and Organization 23 no. 5 (2016): 447–69.49 Pulma Sumac, “A Disgrace Reserved for Prostitutes: Complicity and the Beloved Community,” Lies: A Journal of Materialist Feminism 2 (2015): 13.50 Jacqueline Frances, Striptastic! A Celebration of Dope-ass Cunts Who Love Money (self-published, 2017).A Timeline/Tutorial on SquirtingThis is another piece that my feminist heart says should be a common conversation. I am tired of old narratives that don’t acknowledge that the majority of the human species, regardless of gender, ejaculate. The first time was an accident, being fucked from behind I suddenly felt I would come apart and then something was loose in me, something was on my thighs, something covered the bed beneath me, tears with the intensity of grief or joy on my cheeks. I hoped he wouldn’t notice, but he did, and he seemed confused and pleased. No one had told us this could happen.

• From The Great Believers (2018)

  Nicolette looked back and forth between them as if a great joke were being played, as if they’d told her one was the Easter Bunny and the other was the Tooth Fairy. “Your mama came out of my tummy, and your daddy came out of Cecily’s tummy.” “Show me,” Nicolette said, and Fiona lifted up her sweater and pointed at the pale line of scar. “Right there,” she said, and Nicolette nodded. “But it didn’t ouch?” Nicolette asked. “Not a bit.” Nicolette chewed her cracker, and Cecily said to Fiona, “I don’t know if this is helpful, but whenever I felt guilty about something when I was young, my mother would say, “How do you make up for it? What’s a thing you could do that would make you feel better?” It sounds like Mr. Rogers, I know, but it’s always grounded me when I’m upset.” “I could move to Paris,” Fiona said, and she was joking until she heard it and realized she wasn’t. Nicolette wanted her books now. Cecily pulled her onto her lap and read to her about Pénélope, about the game she and her animal friends played with their trunk of colored clothes. F 1991 iona was waiting for them right inside the Brigg’s front door. She said, “Rescue me from my family!” “Help us first,” Cecily said. There was a ramp, but the rubber strip right in the doorway was catching Yale’s wheels, and so Cecily had to rock him back while Fiona grabbed the armrests and pulled forward, and Yale held tight and tried to lean back so he wouldn’t fall forward when they put him down again. The landing jarred him, knocked the oxygen tank into his spine. But they were in. Fiona helped him pull his coat off. Cecily said, “We have exactly one hour.” “I actually have two hours of oxygen,” Yale said. “She’s being conservative.” “Well she’s right!” Fiona said. “What if there’s a traffic jam on the way back? I can’t believe they let you out.” “For the record,” Yale said as they wheeled him down the hall toward the gallery, “if you’re ever questioned in a court of law, they did not let me out, and Dr. Cheng definitely did not help us steal the oxygen or the chair.” “Of course not.” “He says hi.” — The gallery was already full. Yale was vastly underdressed—every other man wore a tie, and he wore an old sweater that used to fit snugly and now hung like a tent—but his clothes weren’t what anyone would be looking at, anyway. There was Warner Bates from ARTnews, waving, pointing him out to someone else.

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  The book of Psalms is the oldest Christian hymn-book, inherited by the church from the ancient covenant. The appearance of the Messiah upon earth was the beginning of Christian poetry, and was greeted by the immortal songs of Mary, of Elizabeth, of Simeon, and of the heavenly host. Religion and poetry are married, therefore, in the gospel. In the Epistles traces also appear of primitive Christian songs, in rhythmical quotations which are not demonstrably taken from the Old Testament.1230 We know from the letter of the elder Pliny to Trajan, that the Christians, in the beginning of the second century, praised Christ as their God in songs; and from a later source, that there was a multitude of such songs.1231 Notwithstanding this, we have no complete religious song remaining from the period of persecution, except the song of Clement of Alexandria to the divine Logos—which, however, cannot be called a hymn, and was probably never intended for public use—the Morning Song1232 and the Evening Song1233 in the Apostolic Constitutions, especially the former, the so-called Gloria in Excelsis, which, as an expansion of the doxology of the heavenly hosts, still rings in all parts of the Christian world. Next in order comes the Te Deum, in its original Eastern form, or the kaq j eJkavsthn hJmevran, which is older than Ambrose. The Ter Sanctus, and several ancient liturgical prayers, also may be regarded as poems. For the hymn is, in fact, nothing else than a prayer in the festive garb of poetical inspiration, and the best liturgical prayers are poetical creations. Measure and rhyme are by no means essential. Upon these fruitful biblical and primitive Christian models arose the hymnology of the ancient catholic church, which forms the first stage in the history of hymnology, and upon which the mediaeval, and then the evangelical Protestant stage, with their several epochs, follow. § 114. The Poetry of the Oriental Church. Comp. the third volume of Daniel’s Thesaurus hymnologicus (the Greek section prepared by B. Vormbaum); the works of J. M. Neale, quoted sub § 113; an article on Greek Hymnology in the Christian Remembrancer, for April, 1859, London; also the liturgical works quoted § 98.

• From Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance (1995)

  Abongo’s new lifestyle has left him lean and clear-eyed, and at the wedding, he looked so dignified in his black African gown with white trim and matching cap that some of our guests mistook him for my father. He was certainly the older brother that day, talking me through prenuptial jitters, patiently telling me for the fifth and sixth time that yes, he still had the ring, nudging me out the door with the observation that if I spent any more time in front of the mirror it wouldn’t matter how I looked because we were sure to be late. Not that the changes in him are without tension. He’s prone to make lengthy pronouncements on the need for the black man to liberate himself from the poisoning influences of European culture, and scolds Auma for what he calls her European ways. The words he speaks are not fully his own, and in his transition he can sometimes sound stilted and dogmatic. But the magic of his laughter remains, and we can disagree without rancor. His conversion has given him solid ground to stand on, a pride in his place in the world. From that base I see his confidence building; he begins to venture out and ask harder questions; he starts to slough off the formulas and slogans and decides what works best for him. He can’t help himself in this process, for his heart is too generous and full of good humor, his attitude toward people too gentle and forgiving, to find simple solutions to the puzzle of being a black man. Toward the end of the wedding, I watched him grinning widely for the video camera, his long arms draped over the shoulders of my mother and Toot, whose heads barely reached the height of his chest. “Eh, brother,” he said to me as I walked up to the three of them. “It looks like I have two new mothers now.” Toot patted him on the back. “And we have a new son,” she said, although when she tried to say “Abongo” her Kansas tongue mangled it hopelessly. My mother’s chin started to tremble again, and Abongo lifted up his glass of fruit punch for a toast. “To those who are not here with us,” he said. “And to a happy ending,” I said. We dribbled our drinks onto the checkered-tile floor. And for that moment, at least, I felt like the luckiest man alive. Also by Barack Obama The Audacity of Hope A Promised Land ABOUT THE AUTHOR

• From Bestiary (2020)

  Whenever Dayi fell asleep, my brother and I played our game: Whoever could fit the largest thing in her nostril without waking her was the winner. The first time, we shimmied a bobby pin into her nose before she snorted awake, oinking. After that, my brother called her Pig Aunty. The biggest thing we could ever fit inside her was the metal rape whistle my mother kept under her mattress. When Dayi breathed out of her nostril, the whistle wailed her awake and my mother came running into the living room with her cleaver raised, asking where the rapist was. Another time, I fit three of my fattest fingers into one nostril and told my brother I had reached her brain and was feeling it for ripeness. What’s it made of? he said, and I said, Birds, a battalion of beaks pecking away my fingertips. Rescinding my finger from her nostril, I pulled out a nosebleed by accident, kept unreeling the red ribbon of her memory. _ Ben and I nursed the yard-holes, feeding our fingers into them, searching for another letter, one that would explain what to do with the first. From inside the house, we heard Dayi call for us, and when we ran into the kitchen she was leaning on the counter. Dayi held her belly, but it looked no larger than when she first arrived to our house. We led Dayi to the sofa and propped her with pillows, patting the sweat from her neck and forehead and waiting for our mother to come home. Dayi moaned and bit a pillow until its seams split. Water puddled in the kitchen where Dayi had been standing at the counter. I wiped the water from the tiles, but the stain seemed to straddle the whole floor. I asked Ben if it was possible to have a phantom pregnancy, and Ben said phantoms don’t produce water. By the time my mother came home, Dayi was an hour into labor and we’d taken off her pants. Ben said we should have taken off all her clothes just to be sure, but I asked her: What kind of baby is born above the waist? My mother squatted between Dayi’s legs, tugging something out of her: a dark scarf of blood unknotting into a neck. It was a goose, born beak-first, gowned in slime and blood. I pet its back, licked the fudge of blood off my fingers. When Dayi asked to see the baby, we walked her to the backyard. My mother set the goose down between the holes, let it walk in circles around itself, wings glued down with mucus. Dayi said nothing, crouching. Then she took off her gloves and pet her goose once, head to tail, until it was red, a species no one had named yet. _

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  The Friday of the Holy Week is distinguished from all others as Good Friday,740 the day of the Saviour’s death; the day of the deepest penance and fasting of the year, stripped of all Sunday splendor and liturgical pomp, veiled in the deepest silence and holy sorrow; the communion omitted (which had taken place the evening before), altars unclothed, crucifixes veiled, lights extinguished, the story of the passion read, and, instead of the church hymns, nothing sung but penitential psalms. Finally the Great Sabbath,741 the day of the Lord’s repose in the grave and descent into Hades; the favorite day in all the year for the administration of baptism, which symbolizes participation in the death of Christ.742 The Great Sabbath was generally spent as a fast day, even in the Greek church, which usually did not fast on Saturday. In the evening of the Great Sabbath began the Easter Vigils,743 which continued, with Scripture reading, singing, and prayer, to the dawn of Easter morning, and formed the solemn transition from the pavsca staurwvsimon to the pavsca ajnastavsimon, and from the deep sorrow of penitence over the death of Jesus to the joy of faith in the resurrection of the Prince of life. All Christians, and even many pagans, poured into the church with lights, to watch there for the morning of the resurrection. On this night the cities were splendidly illuminated, and transfigured in a sea of fire; about midnight a solemn procession surrounded the church, and then triumphally entered again into the "holy gates," to celebrate Easter. According to an ancient tradition, it was expected that on Easter night Christ would come again to judge the world.744 The Easter festival itself745 began with the jubilant salutation, still practized in the Russian church: "The Lord is risen !" and the response: "He is truly risen!746 Then the holy kiss of brotherhood scaled the newly fastened bond of love in Christ. It was the grandest and most joyful of the feasts. It lasted a whole week, and closed with the following Sunday, called the Easter Octave,747 or White Sunday,748 when the baptized appeared in white garments, and were solemnly incorporated into the church. § 79. The Time of the Easter Festival. Comp. the Literature in vol. i. at § 99; also L. Ideler: Handbuch der Chronologie. Berlin, 1826. Vol. ii. F. Piper: Geschichte des Osterfestes. Berlin, 1845. Hefele: Conciliengeschichte. Freiburg, 1855. Vol. i. p. 286 ff. The time of the Easter festival became, after the second century, the subject of long and violent controversies and practical confusions, which remind us of the later Eucharistic disputes, and give evidence that human passion and folly have sought to pervert the great facts and institutions of the New Testament from holy bonds of unity into torches of discord, and to turn the sweetest honey into poison, but, with all their efforts, have not been able to destroy the beneficent power of those gifts of God.

• From Pleasure Activism (2017)

  I think part of sexiness is the exploration of it in relationship to ourselves and other people. Part of what burlesque has done for me is help me discover what my unique sexiness is to me, on my terms. It’s been super profound to see and learn that sexiness is different for each person. When you’re like, “Damn, that person is sexy!,” I think it’s because they’ve tapped into what sexy is for them, and it continues to evolve and change, but they have a deep connection/understanding with themselves. It’s connected to organizing too. There’s something about the honesty and knowledge of the self required when you have to have a relationship with the audience. There are other kinds of performance, where you can hide behind the “fourth wall.” There’s art that people can just view, they don’t have to see you. But there’s something about the relationship built between the audience and the performer that requires you, or us, to be rooted in yourself and what your sexy is and what your funny is, and also not get stuck in that. You have to be able to laugh and cry and experience the whole range of emotions together. Any relationship requires that too. It’s a constant evolution because no healthy relationship ever gets stuck in one thing; it continues to grow as we all do. Michi. That’s interesting, to think about the way you have to connect to an audience in terms of organizing. Like, there’s a difference between dictating how people are supposed to feel and react as opposed to actually listening and having to adapt. It’s an interesting thing as performers, what we choose to put our bodies through. I feel like we intentionally bring joy into the work we do, but it’s not an ignorant joy, it’s because we believe in joy. We also don’t shy away from bringing anger and sadness and confusion, but I think the idea is that to be whole, free people, we need to be able to access and experience all of our emotions, to allow all of them to move through us and not be stuck or stagnant or forced into only one. So many of us are forcibly separated from a range of our emotional experiences, because of systemic inequality, because of the ways our ancestors learned to experience the world and the way their ancestors learned. Sometimes it feels like so many fucked up realities are imposed upon us, that there is so much pain and anger and sadness and injustice, so of course what feels urgent and relevant to express is that. But that is part of the robbery, stealing from us our ability to live joyously and with peace. So creating space where we’re actually bringing that to ourselves and to the room is really important.

• From Bestiary (2020)

  Whenever we ditched, Ben and I compared our breasts in the restroom. There were three tin-walled stalls and a faucet that never stopped drooling. The tile floor had potholes of piss. We stood on the toilets like they were islands we were native to, each of us balanced on one side of the seat rim, steering each other’s arms. We lifted our shirts. We believed our nipples would someday open into eyes. Bras were blindfolds that our mothers wore to protect their eye-nipples from constant light. My nipples were darker and hers were hairier: hairs I wanted to make a career out of counting. I thought I could blink my nipples like eyes, squinting or dilating them depending on her distance from me. My tail turned copper with sweat and knotted against my lower back whenever she came near. I was afraid to show her its length, in case she pulled on it like a lever by accident, transforming me into Hu Gu Po. I’d bite off her breasts, scoop them clean like grapefruits and flush away the skins. One day in the restroom, I asked her if she knew the story of Hu Gu Po. We stood on the toilet seat, holding the hooks of each other’s arms. I wanted to ask if she saw a resemblance between the story and me, but Ben said no, she’d never heard it. It’s about a tiger spirit, I said, who wants to be a woman. But to keep her body, she eats only what she can kill. She shells toes and calls them peanuts. My mother said it was the only story she wanted me to own. My inheritance was hurt. Sounds like your ancestors had a foot fetish, Ben said. I laughed and called her a birdshit, shouldering her off the toilet seat until she stumbled in, displacing water in arcs. She climbed out of the toilet bowl, walking out of the stall and shimmying her legs to dry them. When I called her back into the stall, hopping down from the toilet seat to say sorry, she smiled and said, Watch me, dipping both her hands into the toilet bowl and flinging fistfuls of gem-hard drops at me. Turning my face away, I gripped the wall and laughed, wiping my cheeks with my sleeve. Surrender, she said, as the toilet bowl boiled over with our laughter. _

• From Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance (1995)

  In a few minutes the cameras were rolling, and Sadie, her voice quavering slightly, held her first press conference. As she started to field questions, a woman in a red suit and heavy mascara rushed into the reception area. She smiled tightly at Sadie, introducing herself as the director’s assistant, Ms. Broadnax. “I’m so sorry that the director isn’t here,” Ms. Broadnax said. “If you’ll just come this way, I’m sure we can clear up this whole matter.” “Is there asbestos in all CHA units?” a reporter shouted. “Will the director meet with the parents?” “We’re interested in the best possible outcome for the residents,” Ms. Broadnax shouted over her shoulder. We followed her into a large room where several gloomy officials were already seated around a conference table. Ms. Broadnax remarked on how cute the children were and offered everyone coffee and doughnuts. “We don’t need doughnuts,” Linda said. “We need answers.” And that was it. Without a word from me, the parents found out that no tests had been done and obtained a promise that testing would start by the end of the day. They negotiated a meeting with the director, collected a handful of business cards, and thanked Ms. Broadnax for her time. The date of the meeting was announced to the press before we crammed back into the elevator to meet our bus. Out on the street, Linda insisted that I treat everybody, including the bus driver, to caramel popcorn. As the bus pulled away, I tried to conduct an evaluation, pointing out the importance of preparation, how everyone had worked as a team. “Did you see that woman’s face when she saw the cameras?” “What about her acting all nice to the kids? Just trying to cozy up to us so we wouldn’t ask no questions.” “Wasn’t Sadie terrific? You did us proud, Sadie.” “I got to call my cousin to make sure she gets her VCR set up. We gonna be on TV.” I tried to stop everybody from talking at once, but Mona tugged on my shirt. “Give it up, Barack. Here.” She handed me a bag of popcorn. “Eat.” I took a seat beside her. Mr. Lucas hoisted the children up onto his lap for the view of Buckingham Fountain. As I chewed on the gooey popcorn, looking out at the lake, calm and turquoise now, I tried to recall a more contented moment. I changed as a result of that bus trip, in a fundamental way. It was the sort of change that’s important not because it alters your concrete circumstances in some way (wealth, security, fame) but because it hints at what might be possible and therefore spurs you on, beyond the immediate exhilaration, beyond any subsequent disappointments, to retrieve that thing that you once, ever so briefly, held in your hand. That bus ride kept me going, I think. Maybe it still does.

• From Pleasure Activism (2017)

  It gives me permission like nothing else to accept myself in all of my own wildness and growth. Nature puts the struggle in perspective, and I am filled with my own power. Whether I am sitting coochie directly to the earth or am looking at a waterfall pour from its source, abundant, orgasmic, and confident of its origins or am floating in the ocean letting the rage and grief in my ovaries be rocked out of me with each wave. Nature loves on me and helps me realign. Being in my wildness has allowed me to know divine consciousness in a real way. I pray to be like nature, to unfurl without permission or fear. A Prayer for Pussies, by Junauda Petrus Grown women know that feeling. You a little girl under all that skin. All of that life and holding back. All of that gray coochie hair And planted placentas under the tree the kids climb, when hiding from spankings. Under piles of unpaid bills and expired lottery tickets. In your shadow sits that girl within. Wise and wild. Quiet and unforgiving. Indignant and quick. Clitoris driven. An emotional wreck with soulful perfection. Plotting on wildness You start thinking: Remember when I was all one hot heat? One red ferocious flash? One smooth sweet licorice? One free flying unknown? About Prayers for Pussies In 2016, I was commissioned with three other poets to write poetry to be made into sculptured steel lanterns for a downtown Minneapolis public art project. These would be around for thirty-plus years to reflect the moment and place in time. Prince had passed away that year, a bigot and misogynist had been elected as forty-five, and, as writers, we were observers and alchemists to transformation. When I submitted the poem “Prayers for Pussies” to the City of Minneapolis, it was refused due to them feeling the language was inappropriate. The piece had an intention beyond instigation. The practice of prayer is witness and devotion. The term “pussy” for me was no longer just a juicy and provocative euphemism for a vulva or a perceived derogatory term for people who live in the power of femmeness and queerness. It became symbolic of all things that our society has gotten sweetness and limitlessness from and figured out ways to grab and use with no reverence for the sacred. Beyond Trans Desiremicha cárdenas Micha Cardenas is often blowing my mind, taking the stage in bright red lipstick, a gorgeous dress, and stomping boots, talking about art and technology in ways that reshape the future. Author’s note: Transformative justice, as I understand it, is rooted in an understanding that we have all been harmed and all caused harm. It requires a process of rigorous self-examination, honesty, and accountability. To those ends, I offer this reflection on my previous writing about pleasure in activism.

• From Pleasure Activism (2017)

  With Two Old Bitches, Joanne Sandler and I get to hear and share older women’s stories about how they are living and have lived their lives, often reinventing themselves along the way. There’s a surprise in every conversation we share, some unexpected bit that challenges preconceived notions about older women or reveals another unfair obstacle they face as they age. Storytelling is so powerful, and asking questions is such a pleasure! The women we interview are so game—they answer our questions, no matter how unexpected, serious, or frivolous. Like Alta telling us about Mona Lisa Touch! We laugh a lot. And one of the surprises of the podcast has been the number of younger women who listen. It inspires them, they say, and their listening inspires us. amb. Yes, it is such a gift, there is so much in there that I, as someone about to turn forty, find really useful and aspirational. So Alta, you were a guest on that show, and you spoke about how you have been reclaiming your pleasure. It felt inspiring and clarifying, like a conversation that isn’t had in public often enough. So, first, can you each tell me a bit about how that conversation came to be—did you plan to go where you went with it? Alta. I absolutely did not plan! What came out was the result of feeling so comfy and kitchen-table-like with Ide and Joanne. I was an early interview, I think, and Ide and I had been in conversation about the unfolding of the project for a while. Of course, I was up for the interview and thought I had many things I wanted to celebrate and share. amb. And how does it feel to have that interview out in the world? Alta. A bit weird. It was fun, and I don’t mind that there’s a somewhat permanent record of my delight in life, including sex. On the other hand, there are moments when I think about all the things that I didn’t say, perhaps more serious, and wish I had. Then again, the side of me that showed up in the interview hasn’t had nearly as much airspace in recent years as my more sober serious-biz personality. amb. What do both of y’all wish people knew about pleasure over sixty? Ide. Our sense of “aliveness”—know what I mean?—doesn’t dim with age. Passion, in all its guises, doesn’t disappear. Death is the end, not being old. Older women can take their pleasure where they find it. A “why the fuck not!” mind-set helps, and most of the older women I know have that attitude. Think it was Alice Walker who wrote, “Resistance is the secret of joy.”112

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  Instead, I gazed again about the park, at the crush of gay-faced people, at the tents and stalls, the ribbons and flags and banners : it seemed to me then that it was Florence’s passion, and hers alone, that had set the whole park fluttering. I turned back to her, took her hand in mind, crushed the daisy between our fingers and - careless of whether anybody watched or not - I leaned and kissed her. Cyril still squatted with his frills in the lake. The afternoon sun cast long shadows over the bruised and trampled grass. From the speakers’ tent there came a muffled cheer, and a rising ripple of applause.

• From The Liars' Club: A Memoir (1995)

  The fact of them being actually alive makes Wilbur feel better, the way—it occurs to me in that shaft of afternoon sun—people talking about the cycles of nature get to feeling better; the way Baptists talking about the Lord’s Mysterious Plan feel better. But no sooner have those spiders said hey to Wilbur to cheer him up than they begin flying away from him on silky little parachutes. They scatter across the sky over the barnyard like so many seeds. They’re going to make their webs somewheres else, so you think for a minute that Wilbur’s gonna sink back into his porcine misery all over again. Then three of the baby spiders pipe up from the high corner of the open doorway over the pen that they’ve decided to stay with Wilbur. They want to make their webs right over him, just like their mother did. The story more or less ends there, though the writer—Mr. E. B. White—lets you know that when those three spiders grow up, they’re gonna lay some eggs too. And you know that this sad-eyed pig will have a steady stream of spider pals, each with the vocabulary of a college professor, to edify himself. Sure, they’ll die after they lay their eggs, too, the girl spiders, just like Charlotte did. But the point at the end of the book is that Wilbur will never have to be lonely. I can spend the better part of a day moving between the sad part of this book, where Charlotte dies, then paging ahead to read about the three baby spiders wanting to stay with Wilbur. I cry a little, then cheer myself up. (Later, I’ll learn that’s the structure of an elegy: lament, consolation; bad news, followed by good news.) The sun feels so warm on my bangs all straight and shiny across my forehead, and the thought of those three baby spiders spinning out the first silk threads to make new webs over the grinning Wilbur laying supine in his muddy wallow fills me with such light that I want to tell somebody about it. I shout downstairs through the open door for my sitter to come up a minute and get a load of this. When he stands next to me in that circle of sun, I tell him about it with my whole heart. About Charlotte and the babies and Wilbur. I remember so much that I think Daddy would be proud of my telling. My sitter nods all slow and serious. At the end, he says how being special friends with somebody keeps you ever from being lonesome. And do I want to be his special friend? That sets me scampering around the room in search of my Big Chief tablet, the one with the vampire club rituals in it. My bare legs are prickly cold under my gown, but somebody willing to be a vampire club member is a rare thing.

• From The Liars' Club: A Memoir (1995)

  It had a lining of pale beige silk that felt on my bare shoulders like the menthol lotion you get smoothed on for sunburn. Around the heavy swirling hem of that coat ran a wide strip of black lace. The parkas Lecia and I picked out had rabbit fur around the hoods and pockets deep enough to squirrel extra dinner rolls in. That afternoon, we flounced into a grand hotel’s great marble lobby hung with chandeliers. The guy running the elevator had on the brass-buttoned uniform of a naval officer. He drew a steady paycheck for nothing more than pressing buttons all day, he said. That caused me to speculate on how the union in those parts must play hell with the hotel companies. He and Mother laughed at that like old pals. He was still laughing when she pressed five dollars into his white-gloved hand. That night in the dining room, our table had a whole starting lineup of spoons. Still our waiter brought eensy baby forks with our shrimp cocktails. He wore a tuxedo and claimed the potato soup was cold on purpose. There was another guy with a gold cup tied around his neck who tasted Mother’s wine before she got to. At the end of the meal, the chef himself came out of the kitchen in his puffy hat with a skillet of chopped-up bananas he set fire to right at the table, then ladled over our gold-plated dishes of ice cream. Mother ordered a bottle of Dom Pérignon and crystal glasses for us to share. We ratholed the cocktail forks in our skirt pockets to steal as souvenirs. Mine looked like a devil’s trident belonging to a tiny little devil, I told Lecia, and she nearly wet her pants laughing. We clinked our glasses to staying in that hotel like princesses forever. Meanwhile, the waiters in their black clothes took our plates away and scrubbed crumbs off the table with silver-backed brushes they maneuvered using wrist movements too strict to seem natural. All this time, Daddy had fallen out of my head completely, which must have been Mother’s plan, of course, But when the fact of his absence came rushing back through me like a train, it brought a whole coal car of evil feeling. I was lying under emerald satin covers with a leather-bound breakfast menu tilted on my middle. Lecia was still a lump on the bed’s far side, but the drapes held a line of light at their bottom that made it morning. Hunger wasn’t bothering me, but I was wondering intensely what a Belgian waffle was when out of nowhere, my last sight of Daddy came sliding fast through my head. Mr. McBride’s gray truck vanished behind a stand of evergreens. The menu dropped from my hands. How could Daddy’s going have slipped my mind? I’d always measured my loyalty in unshakable terms. My head brimmed with tortures I could endure for noble causes, comrades, family honor.

• From Pleasure Activism (2017)

  Me and my partner hanging out in bed during a “bed day,” constantly communicating about what hurts and what positions our bodies need to be in, offering to make each other tea or bringing over the chips. Spooning, reading, telling stories, making out and napping, in the middle of a massive pillow pile. We aren’t trying to cram ourselves into an able-bodied vision of what sexy or a relationship is; it’s totally okay for us to rest, chill, care for ourselves and each other. Our care needs are not some gross secret walled off from date night. Or my friend whose multi-decade-old disability care collective helps her get on the toilet, shower, and dress every day, and people laugh, gossip, hang out, and have a great time—it’s the place to be! When I show a video that she made about her collective to the care webs workshop I teach, there’s usually awed silence. Afterward, someone always says, “I’ve never seen someone be so joyful and unashamed while getting help getting on the toilet.” Or last weekend, when two disabled femme BIPOC friends and I went on an accessible hike and had a blast.86 The care that allowed this joyful-ass space to happen included everything from one friend getting a guidebook of accessible hikes and researching routes, to the ways we strategized together when all of a sudden the trail had no curb cuts, to our stopping every five minutes to take a breath (because one of us has lung tumors and one of us was using a manual wheelchair that day and I have asthma), to how my friends were chill when I got hit with sudden food poisoning and had to squat behind a not-so-private tree and have a really bad shit as bikes whizzed by. “This is where access intimacy gets real!” I yelled, and we all laughed.

• From Pleasure Activism (2017)

  Lemonade Screening We offered blessings to young people, received blessings from our elders, laid on hands and called in ancestors, offered love for those struggling through this pain, called in fat and disabled bodies for the next evolution, generated compassion and sisterhood for all of us who have been Beckys, and scream-leapt through a ton of testimonial and ecstatic praise for our own strength, transformation, resilience, and vision as Black women.93 We spoke of orishas and transformative justice and forgiveness and shame and loving ourselves and open relationships and queer love and Black excellence and Prince and complexity and solidarity and intergenerational healing and so much more. 87 If Beyoncé worship is offensive to your system in any way, I just want to remind you that you can skip ahead. Because it’s gonna be a praiseful few pages.88 The Carters, Everything Is Love (Parkwood Entertainment, 2018).89 After Beyoncé dropped her self-titled album, I hosted a conference call to discuss the work. The call was full of other writers, artists, burlesque dancers, mamas, organizers, academics, women, and trans participants. Not everyone spoke up, but those who did were honest and nuanced.90 This essay first appeared as adrienne maree brown, “Beyonce’s Grammy Performance Was a Gilded Afrofuturist Dream,” Motherboard, February 15, 2017, https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/d758bq/beyonces-grammy-performance-was-a-gilded-afrofuturist-dream.91 Beyoncé, Lemonade (Parkwood Entertainment, 2016) compact disc and DVD.92 Beyoncé, Lemonade. This poem first appeared as adrienne maree brown, “Lemonade. Masterpiece,” April 24, 2016, http://adriennemareebrown.net/2016/04/23/lemonade-masterpiece/.93 Two days after the album dropped, Celeste Faison and I hosted a screening and conversation at Solespace Community Shoe Store in Oakland. These are some excerpts from the reflection.on Fear, Shame, Death, and HumorA Conversation Between the Rocca Family and Zizi [image file=image_rsrc3KX.jpg] The Rocca Family is the name for the top-secret collaborative art-practice work of Ola El-Khaldi and Diala Khasawnih with Rocca the cat as their pussy power. They perform the Zizi Show under the names Taita O and Zizi. Seven years ago, they traveled through space and time from the faraway (some refer to it as Jordan for highly politicized quasi-practical reasons) and landed with their cat Rocca in San Francisco. On November 30, 2016, they locked their San Francisco home for the last time and embarked on their RF USA 2017 Road Trip. Through its practice, in search of home perhaps, the Family uses all its folkloric know-how and food powers, trusting in humor, to make friendships and talk about immigration, family, freedom, and the meaning of life. Along their life journey, the Rocca Family found Zizi, a philosopher without concrete definitions and inclined to mood swings, who is not afraid of discomfort or anger. While she might make references to ideal worlds and imagined realities, she also makes up truths and brings forward lies. Zizi is a playground, a space for the Rocca Family to be silly, a platform to challenge their own fears. Zizi is their uninhibited character, their act of resistance, their voice of anger.