The Erotic as a Site of Survival

As a senior in high school, I wrote an English paper that filled me with pride. It was a moment of finding my voice, free of artifice and self-consciousness. The piece was inspired by a classmate who had come forward to say she’d been raped by three older players on the football team. I had heard about it through friends – half gossip, half warning. I wrote the narrative from her perspective but the knowledge was from my bones. I recognized a part of myself for the first time on those pages. Maybe it’s no coincidence that I had recently read Audre Lorde’s paper on the erotic (Lorde, 1978) – to her, the erotic is the space of “our unexpressed or unrecognized feeling. In order to perpetuate itself, every oppression must corrupt or distort those various sources of power within the culture of the oppressed that can provide energy for change.” Finding language to describe the shadow of this sexual violence as it was cast across my classmate’s body led me back to my own body’s complicated, violent and tragically normal relationship to heteropatriarchy. The process was both grief-ridden and revealing. In Lorde’s sense, the experience of writing that paper was itself deeply erotic; an awakening, an enlivenment of my own capacity to find language to describe an unrecognized feeling.

My teacher gave me an F. He said the assignment was to write about something that had actually happened to someone, and since I couldn’t be sure she had been raped, I’d not completed the assignment correctly. This teacher’s reaction was gendered, but his violence wasn’t uniquely about gender. This was not what a good white girl was supposed to write. He was quick to remind me of white womanhood’s loyalty to patriarchy; that my social currency at 17, to be desirable to white men, depended upon prioritizing his reality and erasing my own.

We are living in a time of rampant and desperate erasure. Lorde sees the erotic as a space where the self can survive these attempts of erasure. The aliveness within the erotic playspace reveals the impact racism is having on our felt sense of our genders/subjectivities as well as the reality of how threatening that “knowing” is in a world that seeks to kill it. The space of gendered creativity, the queering of known and performative tropes, has the potential to loosen the bondage of the cultural repetition of objectification. This makes it a threat to the intersecting tapestry of oppressive power systems. Similar to what was sparked in me by my classmate’s articulation of her rape, the existence of queerness and the playful deconstruction of the gender binary is an erotic offering to hidden parts of ourselves.

With many of my white, genderqueer and Jewish clients, a shared experience of intergenerational trauma has been awakened by escalating transphobic violence. My clients describe a mounting rage and panic that I recognize in myself. The throughline between American racism, the Nazi genocide, and the genocide currently unfolding (Wilkerson, 2020) vibrates through the landscape of our sessions. My cisness creates stark differences in how this throughline lands in and on our bodies. I find myself translating our work through the stories in my own body, the scars that whiteness and heteropatriarchy have left on my subjectivity. In session, this feels like a dance with my capacity to hold coloniality as something done to me as well as perpetuated by me. And yet, there is also a quality to these moments that transcends identity, where the shared feeling expresses something beyond our own personal stories. Beyond knowing. This dance has fed a process of letting go of my own gender as fixed and unchangeable, challenging a constant (but stagnant) safe/privileged version of myself. The erotic gives me language to describe the experience of being changed, and also a queering of my cisness – as something co-constructed between myself and a transphobic and patriarchal culture.

But the erotic is not preoccupied with identity as much as feeling. Lorde says, “There is, for me, no difference between writing a good poem and moving into sunlight against the body of a woman I love.” This enigmatic quality makes it profoundly frustrating to write about. The flow I accessed at 17 now has layers of other “teachers” voices telling me not to touch myself, not to touch you. When I was asked to write this piece, I told my therapist it would be simpler to just hold up two middle fingers. Fuck you, world. My teenage self burst onto the scene. I want to hide her behind theory, behind identity, but she’s always in the consulting room with me, reminding me of how I cherish my clients’ words and feelings, a truth I’ve been hungry for. I love the ways they change me, propel my body into action, trusting that as we touch these wounds, our survival becomes laced together. It can be terrifying but it can’t be erased.