My Queer Relations
If exploitation is taking away our innermost desires, longings & dreams, then reclaiming them is the purpose of liberation work
Relationships and the promise of love and care have always been yielded against bodies to extract the most amount of free labor possible.
Companies do that so well, claiming: “we’re family!!”, and promise young folks to finally belong. The military does the same, and so does the police. In those last two spaces, because it is often a matter of life and death, “defending” our brothers to belong excuses anything, and that includes killing (not just others, but engaging in soul loss for ourselves too).
This strategy is not just a good marketing strategy y’all. Deep in our tissues lie 3 inherent needs: safety, dignity and belonging. Without them, this is what constitutes trauma. In other words, we can not live without those.
Racial capitalism’s whole marketing strategy is to make those needs inaccessible outside of labor. To create real, 3d, material conditions to make those inaccessible. To make us practice conditional safety, belonging and dignity long enough that we believe this is totally normal. That safety, dignity and belonging should be earned. So we go out and police others. We come back “home” (the apartment we’re renting to a white man landLORD), and convince ourselves that our biggest purpose is to work. Most of the lying we do is in front of the mirror.
Over generations, this practice becomes embodied. We breathe, live, fuck, play, cry, yell from this place: that our safety, dignity, belonging are all conditional. That we have to prove we’re worth it. Worth becomes our lifeline.
The second marketing strategy of the machine is to completely subvert, degrade, weaken, corrupt, destroy the meaning of those needs.
Safety was always about us being together. We survived until now because we stayed together. We have no feathers, no fur, we are born kind of blind, we can’t fly, we can’t even jump that high. We needed others to stay alive.
“Safety” under capitalism is material and at the expense of others. The West exports death to the global south. Others become the threat. Their subjugation is the only way for us to survive. You need more to defend yourself more ! Racial capitalism loves self-nourishing systems and loops it doesn’t need to police too much.
Dignity is about truly feeling your impact. Dignity encompasses accountability. I matter, so I understand that my words, non words, actions, non actions have an impact on my surroundings and myselves. In other words, dignity is about care.
Dignity under capitalism is not about what you are and what your impact is in your communities. It is about how little impact they can have on you. FEARLESS ! UNAPOLOGETIC ! HOW TO NOT GIVE A FUCK! LESS CARE: CARE FREE. I DONT NEED NO BODY.
Belonging … hm this one was hard. Belonging kind of presupposes other folks… how do we subvert that???!
Break relationships, lineages, so far and so deep people will not re-member. Promise belonging in places where they have to… WORK! or even better: kill and steal and destroy for us. The military and the police.
Our relationships are where all our liberation work lies. It is the genesis and the end. Relationships are landscapes where we negociate power, agency and sovereignty. It’s where we share power, co-create it, make it so big we become ungovernable.
Power is at the intersection of everything I teach, learn and practice: whether it is somatics, Transformative Justice or BDSM. This is all about power, the negotiation of it, the coming to terms with it, the surrendering of it, the feeling, the longing, the crafting, the deep caring for it.
If the liberation work we’re doing is not being practiced first and foremost in our closest relationships… why are we doing this?
Our work is to reduce the discrepancy between the worlds of belonging we’re dreaming of and the ways in which we relate to ourselves and each other now.
On Thursday July 23rd, I will be giving a workshop based on a zine I wrote years ago and a series a workshop I created for the Trans Liberation network in Berlin. I will be soon republishing this zine and now opening the teachings I have on those matters with all of you. Soon, I will be announcing this on my instagram, but wanted to reserve spots for you all. This workshop is for all folks who want to queer their relationships, like for real, for real. You don’t have to be queer as in same gender relationship. But you do have to be exhausted and done with heteronormativity, white supremacy and binaries.
Here is the agenda
Introducing Somatics
How trauma affects us and our relational bodies
The Somatics of Attachment theory
Somatic practices to uncover your shape around love & care, conflict and make more room for what you long for
Here are the logistics
Thursday, July 23rd, 6-9 pm CET (3 hours with breaks!)
live workshop with somatic practice + Q&A
Replay available forever + slides with reflection questions, somatic exercises & integration
Price*
Tier 1: White folks: 120 euros
Tier 2: non Black poc: 90 euros
Tier 3: Black people: 60 euros
»*Click on those tiers to sign up!*
If you’re a Black person and can’t access this, please reach out ! I want you in my orbit.
Sending care to all of you dear ones,
Care