Category: body trauma

Feelin’ Good: The Pleasure Practices of Black Folk   

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The American project necessarily dehumanizes Black people by reducing them to capital and capital-producers. This paper examines their pleasure practices including their romantic and familial relationships, their foodways, and children’s play as assertions of humanity and subversions of the identities constructed for them. DuBois says Black folks have a “double consciousness”—how they perceive themselves and how Whiteness constructs and interprets them. DuBois attends to the difficulties of progress; specifically the challenge of asserting selfhood under “the problem of the color line;” that is, the weight of Jim Crow. Yet even he admits “the rough world was softened by laughter and song”—pleasure practices. Riffing off of his interpretation of Black life in the The Souls of Black Folk this paper contends that pleasure practices necessarily mirror the “double consciousness” with liberatory affect. And that this softening is where progress and liberation happen.

Bigger Than A Marathon

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So, yes, I want(ed) to race again. But this is bigger than running a marathon. One of the things that truly sucks about living with a so-called rare disease like sarcoidosis is you're invisible even in the spaces that are designed to help you. In clinical environments, you are a question mark. There are so many presentations, you could be suffering from anything...or nothing. In the world, you don't "look sick." In research environments you do not take precedence.

New Work in Persephone’s Daughters

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The aim of this lit magazine is to empower women, but it also aims to be completely inclusive in regards to applicants/contributors.

We love you. We’re not here to tell you to stay strong, because you’re already doing exactly that.

It’s Better Out Than In

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Talking to myself--especially when it becomes a lot of talk all of a sudden, always tells me there is something I'm trying to work out of my brain and especially out of my body. It's interesting that I haven't been able to run lately, one of my choice ways of working stuff out of my mind and body.

Stranger in a Strange Land

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I'm only recently accepting the extent to which my physical body has been intrinsic to how I self-identify.  The realization has come on the heels of a bunch more that are the result of the heart failure (cardiomyopathy if you like big words) diagnosis in September. My body has changed significantly in the way I use it for self-identification purposes.   [...]

Without Rock or Shore

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I've been trying to ignore the tug in my gut that has persisted since I first read about this story yesterday. It was the stark inhumanity of it for sure; the sheer violence; the unchecked toxic masculinity; the questions about how is it that the ability to find a jersey is easier than locating a publicly; pinging-off-cell-phone-towers [...]

Tune In!

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Remember those posts: I am a miracle (that's my story and I'm sticking to it). and Didn't Yesterday say you couldn't yet you did? Mrs. Burke read them and thought they were worth sharing. So I'll be sharing them. On November 16th at 6 on the radio (in my Donna Summer voice). Tune in!

Body Talk

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The training, racing, and creative process...is a triumph over the physical and psychic conditions just outside the parameters of control which would censor and stilt performance.

Black Death and the What Ifs (is not a singing group)

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So what if the mission of those profiting from Black Death porn is to accomplish their stated mission: to remind The State (of mind) that Black and Brown lives should be recognized and treated as actual lives? What if The State (of mind) changed as a result of their activism? The Black Death porn market would be diminished, right? No demand so no need for a supply. No supply no profit.

So another what if--what if Black Death porn proliferates in order to keep this market going?

Black Lives Matter: Death By Assimilation

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There are few, if any, choices a black body can make that do not speak its history, including the requisite traumas and proud triumphs over them. Under the gaze of the status quo, this body, with its history written all over it, is an indictment of the status quo. Erasing that physical body becomes critical to sustaining not just the aesthetic of the status quo but more importantly its structure.

Erasure is not necessarily the literal murder of it, though that is one way to erase it, but more typically, the suppression of it. Suppression often comes in the form of assimilating the black body into the status quo.