Em-URGE-ing Voices

Jacora

Posts By: Jacora J

Who Taught You, You Weren’t Worthy of Joy? Who Taught You, You Weren’t Deserving of Pleasure?

I’d like to begin this essay with a couple questions. Who is deserving of pleasure, and who has the right to joy? How can we begin to obtain this pleasure and joy? And what happens when we center our actions, activism, and resistance around this pleasure and joy? Community Organizers and the activists who center our lives around this work realize that our efforts typically stem from moments of witnessing injustices and finding an outlet to let us combat our pain for the sake of our communities and ourselves. So, what does this have to do with Joy and Pleasure and more importantly what does this have to do with Reproductive Justice? This semester I had the privilege of taking two courses, Reproductive Justice: No Single-Issue Struggle and Foundations in… Read more »

Femininity Left Across the Atlantic

There is a special kind of irony that lies among the intentional misgendering, masculinization, clocking, and ultimately TERF-like thinking out of the mouths and minds of cisgendered Black women towards their trans Black sisters. So after finding out that Alice Walker, the Alice Walker author of the very Black and very Queer “the Color Purple” and foundational thinker and writer on Black feminisms and Black literary works was a TERF, having publicly defended author JK Rowling for her transphobic comments and beliefs, it left a lingering bitterness in my mouth, due to the irony that lies within the history of Black gender formation and misogynoir. Femininity Left Across the Atlantic The complicated relationship between Black folks and understandings of gender lie within the origins of slavery and white supremacy. When… Read more »