inspired by Pleasure Activism: The Politics of Feeling Good by adrienne maree brown
My lineage of pleasure starts with Audre Lorde. I talk about her a lot. I get tired of always talking and writing about her. The spirit of her words somehow exist in almost everything I’ve written for someone else in the past four years. Why am I still talking about this one essay? When I read “Uses of the Erotic,” I thought, here is someone telling me that I should feel good, when I was quickly approaching one of the lowest points of my life. I went back to my room and cried. It was all very dramatic really—I was already preparing for a semester abroad in France, I made up my mind to change my major to English that night, and I said Lorde is now my kin.
I don’t leave my South Carolina home without Sister Outsider, just as I always carry a picture of my mom. With it, I carry the marginalia that I scribbled into my used edition, generally noting how awesome her prescience was, ever so lightly penning, is it? next to “...pornography is sensation without feeling.” There I was, 25 minutes away from home in a city I could trace on the back of your hand surrounded by both familiar faces and faces of people who looked all too familiar. And I was incredibly alone. I found a new academic home in the English department but I was still alone.
It’s our moms who nag us the most, isn’t it. The ones who drives us to therapy, making such a sweeping impact on our lives that it’s hard to imagine who we are without them. I forged this fictive kinship tie with Lorde, and to black feminism, that could not (yet) be reciprocated because I knew something was missing. This project is my attempt to figure that out.
Where does your lineage of pleasure begin?