In an earlier column, I briefly mentioned Audre Lorde’s “Uses of the Erotic,” an essay that explores how we derive joy from the deepest part of ourselves. That eroticism comes from many avenues of our life: community, activism, identity and so forth. For me, it has become the basis for how I go about my relationship-making, writing and creative pursuits.
I want to dive deeper into that intention, as the idea of joy takes root in the realm of pleasure.
My idea of joy at least. Much like the erotic, dialogue surrounding pleasure is too often linked with societal shame. This causes internalization that further removes ourselves from the needed powers of pleasure, the kind not linked to sex but to what we are able to experience in our bodies.
Writer and activist Adrienne Maree Brown focuses on this idea that pleasure comes from within our own bodies. In a recent episode of the podcast “For The Wild,” she talks about pleasure in the most earnest way, similar to how Lorde connects the erotic to community. On the podcast, Brown said, “I think one of the major ways we collaborate in our own oppression and suffering is by buying into the lie that we don't all deserve access to pleasure.”
The podcast also explores a type of pleasure I currently find myself in: decolonizing standards of body expectations. People of color, especially those who are nonbinary or trans, find ourselves having to navigate the body from cisnormative pretenses we learn to deconstruct the closer we get toward our inner truths. Within these unique experiences, we may find discomfort stemming from ideologies that never imagined our identities to live full existences.
In deconstructing colonizer body standards, instead of seeing how we shape our bodies to fit in, we are allowed to step back, examine ourselves and remember that, at the end of the day, our body is our own. Sometimes, we may become distracted by society’s expectation that we supply our body for others, but in the throes of meeting others’ expectations we must fully engulf ourselves in self-prioritization.
There’s nothing more pleasurable than realizing how much ownership we have over how unique our bodies are. Like identity, there is no right way to be. We become so tied up in the act of serving for others that we forget to serve our own selves.
Pleasure comes from within. Deep from the chambers of these vessels we occupy. Once this idea takes root, we bloom into existences beyond our wildest imaginations.
Read more of the March 20-26, 2024 issue.