Transcript: BRONTË VELEZ on the Necessity of Beauty, Part2 [ENCORE] /274
Ayana Young Now on to part two of my conversation with brontë velez. brontë velez (they/them) is guided by the call that “Black wellness is the antithesis of state violence,” Marc Anthony Johnson. A Black Latinx transdisciplinary artist and designer, they are currently moved and paused by the questions, “how can we allow as much room for God to flow through and between us as possible? What affirms the God of and between us? What is the way? How can we decompose what interrupts our proximity to divinity? What ways can Black feminist placemaking rooted in commemorative justice promote the memory of God, which is to say love and freedom between us?”
We previously discussed talking about the idea of pleasure in the apocalypse, which I so often come up against, the idea that we can't find joy because the world is burning. And I know a lot of people feel that way. And that we can't be in our bodies, because we need to be in the struggle. And of course, I'm drawing upon so much of adrienne maree brown and Audre Lorde's work, who negates this and claims that actually, when we're in our pleasure our capacity is stronger because we can't be powerful if we are denying ourselves our full existence. So I'd love to hear you introduce your thoughts around this. And if you have any thoughts on moving beyond the binary of pleasure versus suffering (and you kind of started touching on that or like around the proximity of suffering)?
brontë velez Yeah, well, I've been really grateful for Pinar from Queer Nature's reflections on causes of pleasure, often only sexualized, so what I'm about to speak to is the dynamic ways we might encounter pleasure that could not be sexual or the expansion of the erotic into something that is maybe not just encountered sexually though I encounter pleasure, often, sexually (I didn't know it was going to be so hot - the sun's really beaming down right now). I feel like it makes a lot of sense to me and I have a lot of compassion for the immense suffering that is happening, has happened, is happening, and is going to continue to happen to those most vulnerable to climate apocalypse and collapse. And just the ways that people are already not getting their basic needs met, the ways that that will intensify. And it's scary. And it's hard to imagine what you're saying is a capacity for still being in joy when it really feels so unknown. It feels so mysterious. It feels so scary. I feel like for me, pleasure is a daily meditation of embodiment, listening into a pulse of does this feel right to me and does this bring me joy? Does this make me come alive? And I think then we are more oriented towards what is ours to offer when we're listening into what makes us come alive.
I can't think of who it is that says this but Esperanza Spalding was bringing this up. It's in Farming While Black, and I've heard it multiple times. But it's someone who says, we don't need people doing what they think folks need. We need people doing what makes them come most alive because that's what we need right now. And I feel like that's at the center of us being in our pleasure, which might be our ecological niche. I think it's important to interrogate if our relationship to what brings us pleasure is from a socialization of continuing injustice. I think we should interrogate what brings me pleasure and why? Because some people right now are down for stuff that brings them pleasure that is harmful to the land, that is harmful to other people. I don't think that's an accountable form of pleasure.
But I feel like this idea that we're going to be liberated through continuing feeling suffering, or feeling grief, or being wrapped up by isolating ourselves, or letting you all fall on top of us. If you're going through that I can see how people may not be resourced to not go through their own collapse. Yeah, I've been in this submission role with collapse and with the Earth of just like, “take me. I'm on my knees and I want you to tell me, what position do you want me to be in? Because I'm in a place of like, what do you need from me? What are you asking of me? I'm devoted for you. I'm fully devoted to you.” I'm on my knees to the Earth right now. And to Black people, Black people's liberation. I'm like, what is needed for me? And the voice that I keep hearing is be in your gifts, be in your power, be in your love, be in your pleasure because we need that vibration right now. We need a vibration right now collectively that is centered around us being able to have the capacity to dream something else into being. And I think that that comes from a place where we are in orgasmic, ecstatic states.
I think that will come from creating cultures of healthy ecstasy that bring us into trance, into listening, that jolt us into letting our bodies be channels and conduits for liberation. And that can be really exciting to be in that place where like, I can't even access what the earth is asking of me, and my role and responsibility right now, especially if my shape, for example, folks who can't see I'm like turned inward and shrinking. How is the energy of love and freedom able to enter me when I'm like, literally, my shape is like this. And I know people experience chronic pain, chronic suffering. And there are so many ways that - I was talking with a former professor Greg Childs about, he was talking about the ways the Academy of white supremacy deforms us and limits our capacity for pleasure physically because some of us, especially focusing countering environmental racism, depression from this sixth mass extinction, all of these things, it's hard to feel your capacity for pleasure.
And I think that can be elevated when we're in community with folks. Who are you calling in to help you out? Who is your support network? Who can you call together to shift? Maybe just isolation is going to create more suffering, so. And maybe it's not humans, maybe you call upon the land or ancestors or benevolent spirits to allow you to open up just the prayer of opening up - “may my capacity for pleasure be opened, may my capacity joy be opened.” I've been praying recently, “may I have so much space, Creation, for psychic freedom, please, I need as much space for psychic freedom as possible, please move any barriers out of the way that are preventing me from having psychic freedom so that I may facilitate that pleasure for others.” If I'm feeling good, other people are definitely gonna feel good. Yeah, that's liberatory.
Ayana Young I absolutely agree with you that when one is in that orgasmic state of being alive, and in their bodies, in their pleasure, in their erotic Eros senses, people are drawn to that. People are hungry to feel alive and embodied in something that can shock us out of our autopilot mode of being in modernity. Being in modernity with technology and industrial civilization, I'll just speak for myself, it cuts me off from my orgasmic state because it takes my attention away from my body, away from most of my senses, other than just the sense that the screen is trying to capture that moment. And we're talking about regenerative power, we're not talking about destructive power here. But when one is in their power, in this connection to the divine, to Eros, to the erotic, which I think is all the divine, I think they're all synonymous with one another. I think it also sparks in people that, “wow, could I feel like that? Could I possibly tap into that energy?” And then it's like this curiosity of well, “what do I have to release about myself, about my identity, about my conditioning, about my consumer addictions in order to begin to feel this alive with the Earth.” Because it's always with the Earth.
I don't think it can be apart from the Earth body when we begin to feel our own bodies awaken with the pleasure of what it is to be alive, even in this time. And I think there's something subversive about being able to hold that amount of pleasure, while we're also holding the hospice thing and the grief, and to be able to feel the intensity of all of the spectrum of emotion. Like what Joanna Macy talks about the beauty and the terror together. It's such a delicious way to be in this time; I would much rather be in this empowered place of feeling it all than feeling like it's toppling on top of me and I can't possibly get out from underneath the bricks.
Similarly, you mentioned thinking about the process of seducing people into liberation and questioning what is the capacity and limitation of sensuality in this paradigmatic shift? Like how does making movements essential space open opportunity for different kinds of engagement to emerge? What is the role of playing with erotic energies and muses? That being said, it also feels incredibly important to me to name that this conversation takes on different meanings and interpretations for those who have experienced different forms of trauma and shame around sensuality. So what does it take to hold a container of safety for folks to engage with movements as essential space?
brontë velez I love it. I want to be in my senses. It’s when I feel most wild and I feel most in my calling. If I'm just able to feel myself as a part of the body of the Earth, we all deserve that: that memory, that knowing, that wisdom that we should all be able to access. And I think I feel sad that in our ways that we play with resistance work, and encounter our activism, especially, I think, in relationship to neoliberalism, there's just these ways that they're disembodied. The ways we're organizing are not accountable to people's bodies, or people's rest, or like what's actually the capacity of a human body and life to do a thing. I don't agree with still taking us into these same sorts of industrialized ways of getting towards liberation in that we are like industrial machines that have no need to rest, or to feel, or to deserve especially pleasure.
So I think sensuality is so important, and I think for folks who have had experience with trauma and sensuality and where that sadly, for so many of us has been cut off. For so many of us that cord has been cut for what that means, and just flattened for what that means. Being in our senses can can come in such a multitude of ways. And when I just finished Jenny Odell's text around resisting the attention economy, for me, it feels like when we live in a culture that's so predicated on taking away our senses, literally everything about the culture is in design, the experience of our technology right now is all about anesthesia, what are the ways that we can make connections that reorient and redirect our attention back towards the Earth and back into the vibration of our senses, of our listening, of listening to our ancestors… and for me, the project of folks who so sadly are socialized, who have learned to utilize sense connection in ways that are unjust, in ways that are harmful.
And when I think about advertising, I'm like, it's so sad that the culture of advertising is rooted in actually really understanding what our eyes move towards, how our hearts are open, how we connect to things, what colors might we use, what sounds might people like and tune up to, or are redirected to focus their attention. And I feel like sometimes in culture and politics of activism, we're not appropriating this way that this whole culture of capitalism is moved both by our shame and also by drawing us into our senses, into our pleasures, into our desire. And so I think it's both about this whole thing about making the revolution sexy. And also like, what would it be like to support people in reorienting what we think we desire, what we think we want and to make being in the Earth actually something that's very sexy.
I think a lot about this as someone who grew up in young Black Atlanta, and I'm blessed to have grown up around support as a young artist and support with Black artists around me, raising me. And a lot of the people that I grew up with, a lot of people are just showing up and showing out. They're really you know, “making it” - they're doing their thing. And also, I've asked myself a lot, “how do you ask dispossessed people to renounce possession? How do you support the reorientation of desiring perhaps something that is life-affirming and not material-oriented?” And for me, I'm like, how do we gather in public space to reorient and redirect our senses? How do we appropriate propaganda? How do we think about the practice of mimetics in our work?
I think about that a lot with the work of Lead to Life, in which one of the parts of our practice is transforming weapons into shovels. And for me, that's just about knowing really, it's so powerful when people hear it. They're like, “whoa,” they're drawn in, they feel the power of it. But that's not really the work. We don't need to make more stuff. We don't need to make more things, that practice is wasteful. We try to limit how many shovels we make because what the real part is is that we know that spectacle is what people are drawn to. People came to our ceremony in Oakland in January because I'm imagining they wanted to see a gun turned into a show - not everybody but like, that it’s kind of fun to go watch. People are moved by these Colosseum, these weird things, these kinds of Roman traditions and paradigms of like going to see spectacle; and that has been used for terror for so long. Lynching spectacle, right now, the new technologies of racial terror, lynching with watching Black people be harmed by police, that spectacle. And how do we reorient people towards encountering something that makes them pause? That makes them feel their body, that makes them feel their breath? Or invites them to feel their breath, invites them to remember their senses, invites them to rest. I think art especially does that and I think one of the main ways oppression continues is by taking away our senses.
Ayana Young I'd like to read a poem by Rainer Maria Rilke translated by Joanna Macy, who has been a dear teacher to brontë and I. It’s entitled “Go to the Limits of Your Longing.”
God speaks to each of us as he makes us,
then walks with us silently out of the night.
These are the words we dimly hear:
You, sent out beyond your recall,
go to the limits of your longing.
Embody me.
Flare up like a flame
and make big shadows I can move in.
Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror.
Just keep going. No feeling is final.
Don’t let yourself lose me.
Nearby is the country they call life.
You will know it by its seriousness.
Give me your hand.
Ayana Young I feel like we've had this conversation around what it would be like if the movement was sexier for so many years. And the seduction of feeling good and seeing what advertising uses: what does the dominant culture use to seduce us? And why are we not using those tools to seduce people in another direction? It's that same type of feeling of “you can't look like this. You can't use those tools. You can't be powerful. You have to maintain proximity to suffering in order to qualify as an activist, in order to qualify as somebody who can be respected in certain movement spaces.” And I'm really in a place where I just want to toss all out the window and say, hey, whatever we've been doing isn't really working.
So can we Look at what does work and actually utilize those tools with integrity, with love, with devotion for a greater good, and also be creative, make art, and have a fun time while doing it. And I'm not blaming anybody for this, I think it's a product of oppression. Now it's time in my mind to shift this way of relating to being an activist, and not letting these cultural, oppressive tactics bleed in, and then stop us from being our fully erotic, creative selves. But I do want to talk a bit more about the value of aesthetics. And more specifically, perhaps we could talk about when aesthetics are developed as a strong ideological alternative to dominant notions, for example, the creation and nourishment of Black aesthetics. So how is this an example of the importance of looking good, and being empowered in the self through style and identity? What is beauty's role in liberation?
brontë velez We definitely, with Lead to Life, are thinking a lot about beauty and decentering Eurocentric concepts of how we understand beauty that looks like heteronormative concepts of beauty. Yeah, thinking about the root of ‘aesthetic’ just meaning senses, that's what it means. So thinking about like, for me, Black aesthetics is about Black senses and Black cultural traditions that made sure people were down to still look good, through and through. I'm so moved by a culture of what feels like protection, reverence, and camouflage, just the ways that stepping out maybe brings attention to people. When you're out there and looking good, or when you're creating something, that looking good draws people's attention toward you. But I think in another way, also, it serves as an intervention.
Especially for Black people, Blackness has… there's been so many projects, a part of white supremacy, to eradicate the idea that Black is beautiful. So I think, in a way to reclaim that, I'm going to still practice the kind of care it takes to adorn my body, which is a sacred vessel, I'm going to honor this vessel that has been unloved, that has been devalued, that they want to harm; and it makes me think of Baby Suggs, a character and Toni Morrison's Beloved, this section called “The Clearing,” where Baby Suggs is like, “they're never going to love your body, so you need to love it.” She brings all of these people in the community into this clearing, and she has them touch upon their neck, touch up on all your organs in your body or flesh because they want to do away with your body. And so it's so important to me when I see people who want to just dress themselves, and they're just their own body. That is such an important thing.
Then beyond that, I think we're all kind of… there's something from this documentary, The Cruise, where he's talking about rising to the occasion, and just wanting people to rise to the occasion of the day, rise to the occasion of being alive. And I feel like we're not rising to the occasion of being alive on the Earth. And that doesn't need to require money or, or makeup, or any of these things to look good. It's not about looking good again for Eurocentric notions of beauty but what makes you feel good? And what do you see as beautiful, and how can adorning yourself in that way be a way of protecting your liberation and facilitating for others that trust that something else is possible?
I know for some people, it endangers them to embody what they feel is beautiful. For some people, they've had to neglect that because heteronormative and Eurocentric understandings of beauty have not been safe for people to fully move into what they feel is beautiful. But yeah, what a courageous thing I think for queer Black community to be like, “I'm going to fully embody and dance into what I see as beautiful for femmes, for women, for everybody.” For everyone to come into like, “Yo, I want to be in my beauty,” I think is so important. Especially when we have so much shame and insecurity around ourselves. I know I still do all the time. And like, it's so sad. It's so so so so so so sad.
And I'm afraid sometimes, not only in myself but just in what I offer, to my relationships, to the Earth. I feel like I offer half of myself because we haven't been taught that it's safe to be in our beauty. Especially when the ways I've heard you talk about this Ayana, when oftentimes the ways we encounter beauty, and the ways we relate to beauty is to extract, is to take from, is to is to think I want some of that. So there's something that you spoke to about, so a version and beauty, I think there's something that we've been thinking about with Lead to Life around how do we keep these kinds of boundaries and containers around beauty where people are drawn into something very beautiful, very liberating, but where you can't take from it. It's protected. Yeah, it's fortified. I think there's a lot of liberation wrapped up there.
Ayana Young To be able to just experience beauty and see a wild being and just have pleasure in just the experience of knowing that that exists is beautiful. We can see a rose and that doesn't mean we have to cut it and then bring it in to our house for us to experience the beauty of seeing a rose blossom. I mean, I'm using a rose because it's so metaphorical for beauty in our culture. But I do think that there is something about the safety of beauty, and that's something I've had to work through a lot around, “oh, well, if I show up in my full regalia, will I be hurt in some way, shape, or form.” And I want to speak to those people who do feel scared, and for true reason. People have gotten hurt in their bodies and I really think that this experiment in our minds of how we can work through, even in our own lives experiencing beauty without extracting it.
And then you spoke to adornment. And I remember speaking with Martín Prechtel years ago, and he talked about the people in Guatemala and how they would adorn themselves to farm, they would weave these incredible tapestries over their body for the divine. This wasn't just for them to look good (I mean, of course, yes, I'm sure they would probably feel beautiful when they put on these incredible outfits), it's about courting the mystery, courting the divine, showing up every day in this erotic, beautiful way to say, “Hey, Earth, you are beautiful. And I am going to show up to be beautiful for you.” I want to show up to be beautiful for my relationship to the divine. There's a lot of depth to beauty that gets completely erased because of capitalism. Our relationship to it gets tarnished, it becomes something pornographic rather than something spiritual. I've definitely been feeling the connection to the erotic spirituality and it's so much beyond sex. It's not about, oh, you have this erotic energy, you just need to have sex and then it will go away. I don't ever want it to go away. I'm not trying to satisfy. It's not about satisfying the erotic energy. It's about tending erotic energy, it's about taking care of the erotic energy of worshipping the erotic energy. I feel it so much.
And I know patriarchy is very threatened. Patriarchy is very scared, especially for feminine or female-identified folks, and honestly queer folks too. Patriarchy is very scared for anything other than them to be able to hold the erotic energy, it's okay for them to be wanting sex all the time, or be erotic, that's okay. But somehow, when it's the Others, the other than them, it's threatening, it's scary. It's too much, it's too intense. And I really want to put resistance to that and tell all the people out there that are listening, to feel a type of gratitude and honor to be able to feel so alive.
And there was something I wanted to speak to with my last response, I was talking about the pressure of the movement spaces. It's by design that these wounds are put into movement spaces. I really respect people in movement spaces. It's not even that I blame them for those things because I know it's not even them who have put these restraints on others. It's a way of just living through the trauma that is, honestly, I think coming from the outside within. So I just wanted to clarify my thought because it wasn't thought out as clearly when I said that.
My own journey with the awakening to the Anthropocene, to climate change, to global suffering, the age of loneliness, and capitalism, and colonialism, and all the isms that are just horrifying, so much of my journey was a lot about shame, and guilt, and feeling so heavy, and feeling like I can't possibly be happy, erotic, pleasured, I can't possibly have those things because that means that then I am not fully aware of what's happening. For me to be fully in my awareness meant that I had to be suffering alongside, and a lot of self-inflicted suffering, a lot of self-inflicted guilt all the time. And that to me felt like, “okay, well, now I'm being more authentic because I feel like crap all the time. And everything is crappy out there, that this must be a way that I am a better human, I'm really seeing the realities. And I'm really embodying the realities.” And it's taken me a long time to get into this place where I feel that pleasure and feeling joy is actually beneficial to the movement. And I don't think that shame and guilt don't have a place.
I was speaking with Pádraig Ó Tuama, who's an Irish poet, a couple of months ago. And we talked about shame and guilt. And I don't think that those need to be eradicated from our messaging about what's happening. I think it's kind of hard not to make decisions that are negatively impacting other beings at this point, just the way our system is set up. Everywhere we turn, we're hurting somebody. And it's horrible to be in that type of relationship that's forced upon us, we're forced to be perpetrators. And it's a horrible, horrible feeling. And so I think the shame and guilt are important for us to really acknowledge and to know that yes, many of us are complicit in this. I don't think that staying and that is going to get us out of it. I think it's an important place to acknowledge, to work through, to come to something like gratitude for what is still living and ourselves included. But yeah, the balancing of the shame, and the guilt, and the pleasure kind of goes back to this idea of just feeling the full spectrum. I think it's completely possible and something I'm really noticing in myself, I can feel completely somatically turned on and pleasured and at the same time, feel the grief of what we're losing, and feel the grief of my role and my complicity in the suffering of other beings.
It goes back to the thing like we can be all of ourselves, we can be the self that is getting it and looking good. And we can be the self that goes home and cries, we can be the self that then needs to rest, and we can be the self who just wants to power through. And I know for myself, being able to come to a place where none of those pieces of me need to be shut down, the release that can come and then the power that can come to be on our knees to the Earth and saying “I am all here, all of me is here. All of my beauty, all of my shame, all of my guilt, all of my pleasure is here for you to direct, is here for you to tell me what I should do with this emotional capacity.” It's deep, it's very liminal.
brontë velez You could have a safe word with the Earth. I think people who really care right now, who care so much, who have their compassionate hearts, and love, and want to show up, similar to what I was saying about like, “Creation, I'm on my knees for you, and do with me as you please.” I would like to just with that prayer add on some more specifics of like, “and please be gentle on me. And please let there still be capacity for me to find the imagination for pleasure in my approach toward liberating my complicity of systems of oppression. May I have the capacity to imagine that there are pleasurable pathways, there're hilarious pathways.” There are joyful, clowning, trickster pathways to do this. And it doesn't have to be through these modes of suffering that have gotten us here. That doesn't make sense for us to continue to embody that suffering, and to just notice and touch in to the ways we've internalized that, and to ask for support where we can and how we can and to be mirrored in that I think it's really important.
I just feel excited for liberation movements that touch into that capacity. I've done things where recently, I am completely embodying a refusal to be desensitized, or to normalize, what is going on right now: to normalize suffering, to be desensitized to suffering, to be able to scroll through suffering. I'm at a point where I'm willing to allow myself to encounter the indigestibility of it, to encounter the shock - though I'm not shocked to allow my body that space, to touch in to the suffering, and then to be also willing to know that it's not accountable to the Earth to then isolate myself in that grief - that is not going to help anybody. And I've done that so many times where I feel like I'm the only one feeling how I'm feeling. And I'm feeling like this is just, you know, I feel mad, I feel sad, I feel mad, like, I'm crazy, I'm going crazy. I know a lot of people feel that sensation.
And sometimes, for me, I'm somebody who is very hard for me to reach out for help. I feel like I've been socialized to be able to show that I can do things on my own and that made me successful or powerful, is that I'm a powerful Black woman because I can do everything. I'm bad all by myself kind of thing. And it's been hard for me to say I need help. It's been hard for me to say, “can you help me revive pleasure? Can you touch me like this? Can you hold me like this? Would you be willing to affirm me before you say something like that? Can you validate the grief that I'm feeling? And then sometimes if you see your friends or people in your community who are isolating themselves, especially folks who are on the frontlines, or folks who are in movement work, reach out to them.
Ask folks how they're doing, like, especially I think people who people idolize, or pedestalize, and see them as figures. And that's happening a lot right now with social media and kind of these movement leaders who are helping us imagine another way possible. That shit’s got to go in terms of seeing people as these all-knowing figures who don't experience pain. I think both for those who are empowered to be transparent that we need support and then for people also to not hold people to that. I feel so sad about Greta Thunburg and Xiutezcatl, these kids right now who are doing this work. And I'm just like, how are these children doing? Are people protecting and supporting these children's health and wellness, and pleasure? Are they getting to be children? Are these kids going to get to be kids? If I have a kid will they get to be a kid? You know, the scariness of that.
So I definitely you know, it takes some squat, it takes a circle, it feels already really good and expansive to be calling in a pleasurable way of moving towards liberation. And it's just something recently that I'm able to not just preach about but to actually feel. I just want to shout out Tricia Hersey who I named as my minister, the Nap Bishop of the Nap Ministry. Tricia when we first met, I just felt like it was more worthy to be activists that could talk about how tired I was, how exhausted I was, how much suffering I've experienced, and that that made me more relatable and more what you're saying more authentic. And I feel so much joy around adrienne maree brown and Tricia Hersey’s politic of pleasure, of rest, of building up capacity, and I know that that’s sometimes a privilege, and oftentimes a privilege to be able to feel that. So I'm feeling that gratitude, and for those of us who have the capacity to rest, and to have access to the psychic freedom to practice non-violence, etc., how are we making sure we're facilitating more spaces for people to be in their bodies and their senses with the Land.
Ayana Young Wow, this whole conversation is so potent for me. I love you so much. And it's so expansive to explore this with you and feel safe to just say these things that I feel like I didn't even have capacity or access to before maybe even this year. And I agree like when you were saying you may have preached these things, but you didn't feel them embodied? Yeah, I remember reading adrienne maree brown’s work. And I was like, “Okay, I like this concept. But it's not me.” I always think that like, “Okay, this, the Earth body is my body.” And I'd hear these things. I'm like, “Yeah, but that's not me.” And for the first time to be able to embody these concepts is so beautiful. So I want to say, too, for the people out there that feel that they couldn't possibly embody what we've been talking about or things they've been reading, I'd say stick with it: stick with it and keep listening, keep slowing down enough to transition.
So I think that's what it took for me. It took a lot of time to be in the questions, to be in my own frustrations with it, and to be a cynic. It didn't come quick. And it didn't come when I wanted it to. I feel like it was like a lightning bolt strike where all of a sudden it was just like, here it is. And I'm very grateful. And yeah, the privilege of being able to choose pleasure is, I would say, one of my most incredible privileges of this life. I feel so lucky to be able to acknowledge and choose to feel all the feelings, honestly. But I do want to give you a clean slate to say anything that hasn't been said, any projects you're working on, any ways people can support you.
brontë velez Thanks, Ayana. Yeah. Well, if there's anyone that feels discouraged, or maybe like the concepts of pleasure can… I've seen things around like this kind of spa or capitalist cultures of self-care and pleasure-making that don't have to be wrapped up in that. A friend who's a doctoral candidate at UC Berkeley in Black Studies, and also one of the co-founders and co-conveners of something called The Church of Black Feminist Thought, Ra Malika Imhotep, my friend Ra talks about how she does this work that is the intersection between burlesque and Black women literary figures, or Black women archetypes, just kind of encountering the possibility of an erotic life when women were enslaved, or Black women who have experienced suffering, that there were possibilities for an erotic life. And that people were, even our ancestors who were navigating extreme horrors, still located pleasure. People fought to find their own kinds of paths of still finding pleasure, even if it was in small and quiet ways. So I just want to honor that.
I just feel like there's a lot of fugitivity available through the act of being in pleasure, embodied pleasure, at this time. That's a way that we can actually protect ourselves from the internalized oppressions that are trying to keep us down, keep us from continuing to support life, trying to keep us burnt out - is whack. And, yeah, please continue to support our work with Lead to Life that is all about pleasure. And we're moving more into us as a queer collective that is committed to beauty and pleasure in the world. So you can visit us at LeadToLife.org or follow us on Instagram at Lead2Life. And, yeah, me and my partner Jiordi are beginning a practice called kinesthetics, which feels akin to everything we've been speaking to about how do we still continue to practice beauty? With our artistry, with our scholarship? What would it mean to rewild our practices and our work, and to devote ourselves to the Earth, and to still show up to the gravity of beauty but when it's not occupied by capitalism? What happens to our imaginations? And yeah, more on that if you follow me at LittleNows on Instagram,
Ayana Young And how can people financially support your work?
brontë velez You can donate at LeadToLife.org/donate, or my Venmo is (@)bronte-velez. Thank you so much.
Ayana Young Thank you for listening to another episode of For the Wild Podcast. I'm Ayana young. And the music you heard today was from Jennifer Johns, the members of the Thrive Choir, and Jiordi Rosales on cello. Both songs were recorded at the Lead to Life Oakland Ceremony. The opening music under our manifesto is Jeremy Harris. I'd like to thank our fabulous team, Aiden McCray, Andrew Storrs, Carter Lou McElroy, Erica Ekrem, Aaron Wise, Francesca Glaspell, Hannah Wilton, Melanie Younger, and Suzanne Dhaliwal.