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.

Page 53 of 299 · 20 per page

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

  It is of all the festivals the one most thoroughly interwoven with the popular and family life, and stands at the head of the great feasts in the Western church year. It continues to be, in the entire Catholic world and in the greater part of Protestant Christendom, the grand jubilee of children, on which innumerable gifts celebrate the infinite love of God in the gift of his only-begotten Son. It kindles in mid-winter a holy fire of love and gratitude, and preaches in the longest night the rising of the Sun of life and the glory of the Lord. It denotes the advent of the true golden age, of the freedom and equality of all the redeemed before God and in God. No one can measure the joy and blessing which from year to year flow forth upon all ages of life from the contemplation of the holy child Jesus in his heavenly innocence and divine humility. Notwithstanding this deep significance and wide popularity, the festival of the birth of the Lord is of comparatively late institution. This may doubtless be accounted for in the following manner: In the first place, no corresponding festival was presented by the Old Testament, as in the case of Easter and Pentecost. In the second place, the day and month of the birth of Christ are nowhere stated in the gospel history, and cannot be certainly determined. Again: the church lingered first of all about the death and resurrection of Christ, the completed fact of redemption, and made this the centre of the weekly worship

• From Pleasure Activism (2017)

  Sami. I don’t do research on BDSM, though I do enjoy reading some of the work that is coming out right now (like the book The Color of Kink),39 but it’s an important part of my life. I am a fat Black queer woman in the academy, a place where I have to fight for voice and power, where I am not recognized as an authority, where I have to project confidence at all times, where I cannot let go or be vulnerable. I enjoy BDSM play for how it allows me to turn off my brain in certain ways (hard to do as a person who is paid to think critically), to just be in my body, to experience pleasure in an uncomplicated way and give myself over to that, to my partner. BDSM also is a major reason why I claim queer rather than bisexual or other sexuality terms. For me, my sexuality has space for all gender identities and presentations, but my attraction to BDSM, my polyamory, and my political stance against marriage are just as central to my sexuality and relationships. amb. I am so excited to hear that you’re playing in all these realms, Sami! I feel like polyamory and nonmonogamy are finally getting more room to be explored outside patriarchal models (like sister wives). Are there any particular guidelines you have found that make polyamory a liberatory practice? Sami. Polyamory has been legitimately life-changing for me. It has allowed me to embrace truths about myself (like, I love kids but don’t want to have them. Or, I want local, committed partners, but I don’t want to cohabit) without feeling guilt or shame. Polyamory offers me new models of being in the world and being in relationships. I am not just a better partner because I talk about my desires and needs openly when establishing and growing a relationship, I am also a better friend, colleague, and person. I listen better, to others and to myself, and I am more honest too. For me, poly is a set of communication tools to build any kind of relationship at all, romantic, sexual, intimate, et cetera. None of my relationships follow a blueprint, they develop organically from the needs and the desires of the people in the relationship at that time—and they shift as needed.

• From Pleasure Activism (2017)

  Dallas. Yes. But their role is to take that but then also using the art of MCing to make light and make it accessible. Every funeral has some of the funniest jokes and laughter. That’s the transformative nature of humor and comedy. I think it really heals us and helps us let go. Anger is extremely powerful. And it can transform amazing things. But it also has its obstacles. It sets up walls. The counterbalance to that is laugher. And we have to not be afraid to use that. amb. I study somatics and what happens in the body. It’s like trauma gets stuck in the body, and it just stays there waiting for you until you release it. And I think we always think, oh, that release has to be weeping for days or whatever. But I’ve experienced some of the biggest releases of my life actually in laughter. There’s a collective aspect. Where with crying it’s something you often go off and do alone, laughter you do with others too. In the conversations we’re in about decolonization and taking Indigenous leadership … we have been in this conversation forever, since first contact. At a certain point, if Indigenous people can’t laugh at white folks in their learning process … that seems like one of the ways that y’all are able to stay in relationship. Dallas. I mean, the colonial experience is nothing unique to us as Native people. It’s worldwide. So there’s that connective tissue between all of us. So using that experience, transforming it into something funny and really exposing it for how dysfunctionally funny it is, it helps. It breaks down those barriers between our communities and brings us together. I see something that’s so dysfunctional, I’m like, that shit’s hilarious in its own way. There’s the construct of what a Native man is. What we as Indian people, how we’ve constructed what an Indian man is … is hilarious. And the comedy that we do, that’s probably our biggest target, ourselves. Because we do such hilarious, stupid shit that … let’s call it that, show the absurdity of dysfunction. amb. Yes. And there’s some unlearning that can happen there, right? We don’t have to take ourselves so seriously because so much of this is a construction. And we can reconstruct it.

• From Pleasure Activism (2017)

  Samhita. With the right person, it’s a sexual experience purely focused on pleasure. I know we’d like to say all sex should be focused on pleasure—it should be, but sometimes it’s not, and relationship dynamics are being worked out, or you are, like, mad about the dishes so it’s interrupting your flow. Casual sex is a space where you don’t confuse emotional intimacy with the desire to get off. Sometimes, it gives you the freedom to really get wild, maybe experiment with things you haven’t tried before. Gary. Exploring a new body and discovering how to please it and, in turn, having it please mine. Holiday. The best thing about casual sex is identifying a want or desire and it being finite. I want to do this with this person—and that being it. Or you can do it again. It’s nice to have a finite thing that you have the power to acknowledge and go for, and it doesn’t have to be tied to a larger connection, a larger dynamic. It can still be super-intimate, important, spiritual. Mai’a. Orgasms. Getting to play with another person. Getting to feel how your body fits against another. Something new and different. Getting to try on new personas, to be different types of lovers. Getting to be awkward and having to figure things out. More than once I have met someone who was at first shy and demure. And then in bed, they are a completely different kind of person. Sex for me is about getting to see that transformation. It’s about loving yourself enough to be willing to share that with another person. It’s about finding out who you are when you are wild and in pleasure. It’s about getting to celebrate that you have a body and that body can move and relate with another body. It’s a reminder of how good it is to be human. I like getting to experience new bodies and new types of people and new styles of sex and relating. amb. What’s the worst thing about casual sex?

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  The Empire, in particular, was always thick with sods: they strolled side-by-side with the gay girls of the promenade, or stood, in little knots, exchanging gossip, comparing fortunes, greeting one another with flapping hands and high, extravagant voices. They never looked at the stage, never cheered or applauded, only gazed at themselves in the mirror-glass or at each other’s powdered faces, or - more covertly - at the gentlemen who, rapidly or rather lingeringly, passed them by.I loved to walk with them, and watch them, and be watched by them in turn. I loved to stroll about the Empire - the handsomest hall in England, as Walter had described it, the hall to which Kitty had longed so ardently, so uselessly! for an invitation - I loved to stroll about it with my back to its glorious golden stage, my costume bright beneath the ungentle glare of its electric chandeliers, my hair gleaming, my trousers bulging, my lips pink, my figure and pose reeking, as the gay boys say, of lavender, their import bold and unmistakable - but false. The singers and comedians I never looked at once. I had finished with that world, entirely.All, as I have said, went smoothly; then, in the first few warm weeks of 1891 - that is, a year and more after my flight from Kitty - there came a bothersome interruption to my little routine.I returned to the knocking-shop after an evening of rather heavy renting to find the old proprietress missing, her chair overturned, and the door to my chamber splintered and flung wide. What had happened I never found out for sure; it seemed that the madam had been taken or chased away - though whether by a policeman or a rival bawd, no one professed to know. Anyway, thieves had taken advantage of her absence to steal into the house, to frighten and threaten the girls and their customers, and help themselves to anything that they could lift: the oozing mattresses and rugs, the broken looking-glasses, the few rickety bits of furniture — also my frocks, shoes, bonnet and purse. The loss was not a great one to me; but it meant that I must go home in my masculine attire - I was wearing the old Oxford bags, and a boater - and attempt to reach my room at Mrs Best’s without her catching me.It was quite late, and I walked very slowly to Smithfield, in the hope that all the Bests might be abed and sleeping by the time I got there - and, indeed, when I reached the house, the windows were dark and all seemed still.

• From Pleasure Activism (2017)

  While executive editor at Essence magazine, the most widely read and longest-lasting magazine for Black women on the planet, Cheryll Y. Greene did many impossible things. With her sister-comrade Alexis De Veaux she transformed a beauty shop magazine into a transnational portal for Black feminist possibility. And in 1988 she made it physical. In 1988, Cheryll organized a gathering called the Essence Women Writers retreat in Nassau, Bahamas, with the collaboration of Stephanie Stokes (now Stephanie Stokes-Oliver) and the full support of the then-editor-in-chief of Essence, Susan Taylor. All the writers you want to name were there, and the ones who didn’t come were invited. Toni Cade Bambara, Sonia Sanchez, Octavia Butler, Lucille Clifton, Barbara Smith, Ntozake Shange, Thulani Davis, I can’t even name them all. What did they do? They met with editors at Essence to discuss what they would like to write in the magazine. They met with each other over cocktails and body-watched. They experimented with water sports. They flew and dove. They wore very bright colors. They bought sheer bathing suit wraps. They laughed so much and luxuriated in the Atlantic and the Blackness of it all. They honored their ancestors and living relatives in the Caribbean. And the food. Maybe, when some of them tried to parasail, Barbara Smith remembered the Black Feminist Retreat where she first saw aerial performance, a Black woman in silken fabrics dancing down from the ceiling, unleashing everyone’s libido, relearning lust. Maybe Ntozake giggled too much for Thulani to know it wasn’t just the salt air. One day, I sat on Cheryll’s living room floor and watched the video of the last night of the gathering. A Bahamian brother videotaped it the best he could while his mind was being blown. It was a circle. An old form for ceremony. And gently facilitated. Each writer would share about their work. What they wanted the other writers and editors to know. And on the video, I watched the circle become spiral. I saw some of the most outspoken women in the world say things they had never said before. I saw Toni Cade Bambara stand and reach her hands into the air proposing the people gathered make an anthology of poems and stories, and recipes and star-maps, and legal proceedings, you know, gather everything. I saw Octavia Butler demand a world where she wasn’t the only Black woman science fiction author. I saw Sonia Sanchez stand and place the writing of Black women squarely against the death of the species. I saw those who wore makeup cry it off, nodding their heads, yes.

• From Pleasure Activism (2017)

  There is also pleasure in money itself. Women and femmes aren’t supposed to enjoy money, to luxuriate in it, to demand it. In some social justice circles, loving money is a sign of capitalist greed and selfishness. But feeling good about having enough money to put food on the table isn’t the same as hoarding wealth or supporting capitalism, and it isn’t “lean-in” feminism. Getting good wages is the harm reduction of capitalism, and poor/working-class women and femmes are entitled to demand money and take joy in their cash. We can learn from how sex workers revel in their money. Watch how they celebrate that night’s haul at the club (sometimes taking pics with their cats: a meme called “cats and stacks”), how bruja sex workers perform money-attracting rituals, get dollar signs tattooed on their wedding ring finger, organize their own workshops and online groups to troubleshoot business problems, concoct schemes for opening up men’s wallets in every avenue of life, celebrate financial successes, and commiserate with downturns. More than anyone else, sex workers teach us that our sexuality is our property (not his), that it is valuable (not priceless, the opposite of priceless actually), and that we have a right to unbridled joy about getting something for it. All of us doing undervalued feminized work (in the service industry, child care, personal support, teaching, counseling, secretaries, artists) can benefit from the gleeful sex worker mantra: “fuck you, pay me.” About 80 percent of sex workers are women. That’s about the same proportion of secretaries, nurses, and teachers. But when was the last time you saw a kindergarten teacher cracking jokes about being “a dope-ass cunt who loves money” or nurse hyping herself up by blasting “Bitch Betta Have My Money” as she prepares to go ask for a raise?50 Women and femmes who love money are free to be demanding. The world has tried to fool them into thinking that getting paid for care or sex “cheapens” it. Please. You know what’s “cheap”? When men think they’re entitled to free and unlimited care, attention, and sex. That’s cheap. But “money can’t buy you happiness,” right? Like fuck it can’t. Try telling that to the twenty-year-old single mother who, after six months of stripping, can stack presents under the Christmas tree for her three-year-old. Or to the forty-year-old escort who can send her son to university, the first one in their family to go to college. Or to the fifty-something grandmother missing a front tooth who gets to enjoy a yearly trip somewhere warm with her sugar daddy. Money buys protection. It buys time off and privacy. And it buys nice, pretty shit. Money also buys food, housing, and health care. Getting paid enough to meet our needs—and more—feels good. I’m not romanticizing the sex industry, I know it has risks; I’m just not going to romanticize economic deprivation in the name of being a “good girl,” either.

• From Pleasure Activism (2017)

  In a few weeks, you’re back in Ohio and have a crush on a boy you met at the roller skating rink. His name is Brian, and, although he’s white, he’s from California and just moved to Ohio last year because his parents got divorced. He is less … provincial than the kids you’ve met in Ohio. With Brian, you learn more about what you actually like. It feels good to put on cherry chapstick and softly kiss while sitting in his lap with your legs wrapped around his waist. It feels good to feel his hands against your skin, rubbing your nipples below your bra. It feels good to hold hands on a picnic blanket at a Cleveland Philharmonic concert. But you do not love Brian, and so you do not want to go much past second base with him. When he tells you he’d like to be your long-distance boyfriend when you go back to New Jersey for your senior year, you tell him that’s sweet and accept the charcoal drawing he’s made for you. You hang it on your bedroom wall and stare at it while you break up with him over the phone a week later, telling him that long-distance really isn’t your thing, you need to focus on your college applications. You look at it all year long, to remember. You feel like some seal has been broken. You go to eighteen-and-under dance clubs with your friends and sneak into Indian American college parties at Rutgers. Guys always ask you to dance, and you always say yes. You don’t quite like the feeling of them mashing their pelvis into yours and holding you there, swaying. But you like the attention. The summer between high school and college, your grandmother pays for you to travel to western Europe on a student delegation with People to People. It is an expensive trip, just a year after an expensive party. You know it is guilt money.

• From Pleasure Activism (2017)

  Another way I cultivate pleasure in my life is the ritual of getting ready. I love getting ready. I really enjoy the process. I really enjoy arriving in my body and my self and sculpting myself and choosing the various ways in which I’m gonna express myself through makeup, through clothes, [and] when I had hair, through hair. It’s an intentional, pleasurable act and ritual for me. Growing up, my mom and her sisters, my aunts, they loved getting ready. We lived in Atlanta, and my mother was young when she had me, so she was still a young woman doing her thing. So her and her sisters would get ready to go out to the club. It was a whole affair. First of all, we only had one bathroom, so they each had to take turns. The music was playing, they’re doing their hair, asking each other their opinions on, like, “what do you think about this outfit?” “Should I do this?” “Does this look right on me?” And, you know, complimenting each other. It was a whole sisterhood ritual of getting ready. The women in my family enjoy looking good. My apple didn’t fall too far from the tree in that sense. I enjoy sequins. I enjoy getting ready, the process of it, the arriving. I really appreciate that process. I cultivate part of that through Colored Girls Hustle. Colored Girls Hustle does many things, but the way it started was through creating adornment, handmade adornment. I arrived at the name because I was thinking about really aligning my work with my passion, my purpose, and my pleasure. For me, the hustle was about that alignment. It’s not about a scarcity framework, it’s about doing work that has meaning for you, and it’s about fulfilling your self-expression and your highest potential. I want people to also look good while doing it, you know? I think that expression is really an important part of our ability to manifest the things that we were gifted with. I made some pins. One of my little catchphrases is that “jewelry is a product, and adornment is a practice, and Colored Girls Hustle is in the business of adornment.” We’re in the practice of adorning our bodies. Things that, like, really reflect the intentions of who we are and what we stand for. Now, what that’s evolved into, the earrings I’ve produced recently, they each come with a name and an intention. Like Expansion. It’s about you in the universe. Elevation, we’re all on the come-up. Sunrise, it’s about your glow-up. Each earring carries an intention, and even the words that I put on buttons or T-shirts or stickers, it’s about affirming your life, your walk, and your hustle. And so that’s one of the ways in which I cultivate pleasure. I organize my life around pleasure, so it’s hard for me to stay in a space, an organization, a job if it doesn’t feel good. And I think that may sound flighty.

• From Pleasure Activism (2017)

  Mai’a. I have a natural and crafted talent for giving and receiving pleasure. I like having sex without having all the emotional labor involved. I like practicing my craft. It feels like writing a good poem or dancing to a song you know by heart. It feels good to be good at something. Holiday. I engage in it because I love pleasure and exploring different types and ways to please myself, be pleased, please others, and learn others. And having many different types of sexual partners and different situations that lead to those sexual partnerships is a huge learning opportunity for me as it relates to my identities, to my sense of safety, to being validated. Having casual sex is like a human experiment of desire. Leah. I grew up in a family with two parents who had an utterly miserable, abusive relationship that both of them felt they couldn’t leave. Part of my resistance was to be like, fuck that, I’m never doing that. Marriage is a prison of death. I wanted to have sex with lots of people and be in different kinds of loverships with some of them. I also am a neurodiverse hermit warrior queen who loves and needs lots of time to myself and “TOTAL SEXUAL AUTONOMY.” After a childhood and young adulthood filled with parental, sexual, physical, and emotional abuse, a ton of bullying, sexual assault at school, and very little permitted autonomy (I wasn’t allowed to shut the door to my room or take a shower by myself for years), having casual sex was incredibly healing because I needed some huge built-in boundaries after not being allowed any. It was a place to have intense, contained intimacy and magic. amb. What is the best thing about casual sex? Leah. The feeling of autonomy and control. The ability to explore and learn about myself. Being sexual and getting up and leaving afterward. How it was liberating to me as a brown femme survivor to be, like, I get to have wildly uncontained sexuality. Casual sex makes me feel connected to a lineage of queer sex radicalism, public sex and non-married/committed sex, which I feel is getting lost. It felt radical to articulate that sex can just be about pleasure, it doesn’t have to be about Commitment, Marriage, and the Family. I loved my rituals of getting ready, adornment, going out, and walking and feeling sensual in my body. Also, small talk bores me, and I think you can learn a lot about someone by fucking them!

• From Pleasure Activism (2017)

  If I were living purely from my mind, I might have become a nun. And I don’t mean a naughty nun with no panties under my habit—I really love routines and quiet. I can get a ton of pleasure from precision, rigor, and discipline (those who have experienced me as a teacher may have an inkling of this). I like being of service. And I feel a thrumming, full aliveness when in conversation with the divine. I think a lot about what god is, how god is, and where we are relating to and running from and surrendering to god. My answers are always shifting, but that conversation has been continuous in my life. But! If I were living purely from my body, I might have achieved some world record for sexual activity, or at least be the belle of some wild bordello. Perhaps a Black Moulin Rouge singer4—I love seduction, I love sex, I love an exposed shoulder, the curves of the hip, the moment of realizing that under the top layer of clothing there’s no bra or boxers containing the body I am observing. I love the unspeakable heat of romance. I love all the ways we are sensual. I like to smell good, taste everything yummy, feel how alive skin is, listen to sounds of breath and pleasure, see the beauty of flesh and bones. Laugh uncontrollably. Play. Feel alive. My body has the capacity to sense immense pleasure, and as I get older I keep intentionally expanding my sensual awareness and decolonizing it so that I can sense more pleasure than capitalism believes in. I am a hermit nudist at heart. It has taken me a while to learn this, but I feel most at home when I am alone and naked. Or with someone where we can be alone/together, naked. I know that my body could never be inappropriate. If I walk around naked all the time, or wear a muumuu slit to the moon to show my big dimpled thighs, or let my tummy hang soft and low, it’s right. I am of nature. I have cycles in my body that reflect the cycles of day and night, of the seasons, of the moon and the tides. My body is a gorgeous miracle. I know it is only conditioning and shame, particularly fat shame, that keeps me covered (especially when I am in places where it’s too hot to wear a top and men are running around shirtless).

• From Pleasure Activism (2017)

  The summer your mother finally has the police remove your father from your home and files for divorce is the summer he beats her and threatens her life on a daily basis, is the summer you are as usual away, is the summer you get your first kiss. His name is Derek, and he is a white boy from Parma Heights, Ohio, a west-side suburb of Cleveland where your grandmother lives. Your summertime best friend Marlena is dating Derek’s cousin—she’s been dating a string of boys since you were in middle school. She thinks you’re getting a bit old to have never been kissed, and you agree. You hate being left behind. Soon after, you can’t remember what Derek looked like, but you do know you weren’t attracted to him, and you remember how smug he was because he was a very experienced kisser. You clearly recall how satisfying it felt to give him honest feedback when he asked, “How was it?” and you answered, “I didn’t like it: too wet, and you shoved your tongue at me. I don’t think you know what you’re doing.” You are fifteen years old. The next summer, your grandmother helps your mother pay for an ostentatious sweet sixteen party. (When you think about it now, it seems modest, but at the time it was more than you’ve ever spent on a party, ever.) Your mother rents the local Lions Club hall with wood paneling and orders catered food and a two-tiered custom-made birthday cake. She even hires a DJ, some dude from the local Indian community who does weddings and birthdays and anniversary parties. There are table cloths and balloons and centerpieces and a disco ball and metallic streamers dangling from the ceiling. You get your hair cut into a bob, buy a short black dress from the post-prom discount rack, and dance all night in stockinged feet. You smell like rose oil from the Body Shop. While doing the Electric Slide in this room full of fifty people who have come to celebrate you, you feel a flash of what might be genuine happiness. It is fleeting. But it is there.

• 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)

  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 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.