16 Workshop Thirteen: Embodiment and Education — Bringing our Whole Selves (Out of the Cave)
This workshop was designed by Afra Ahmed with Jody Valentine.
For this workshop, you will be organized in a Zoom Breakout Room with a group of approximately four students. If you have any questions or concerns, please send a message and Jody will join you as soon as possible.
Please begin right away – you’ll have a chance to check-in during Part I.
Please assign a timekeeper and note that the small-group work today is scheduled for only 35 minutes.
Part I – Present [15 min]
- Assess your senses (5 minutes)
- Zoom class means that we’ve been interacting with one another with only a fraction of our senses (sight and sound). Take a moment to assess your senses; what does this moment look like, sound like, smell like, taste like, and touch like? If you have had a tendency to prioritize sight and sound in our diasporic classroom, what other senses could you allow yourself to tap into right now?
- If turning off your camera feels right, you are invited to do so.
- Feel the weight of your body, sink into it. Notice what feels comfortable and uncomfortable in you. What could you do to make your body more at ease right now?
2. Spend some time checking in with one another (10 minutes)
If you’d like to, share how you’re feeling right now. Are there any worries making it hard to feel present in this moment? What can we as a group do make this moment more pleasurable? What do you need from this space right now?
Part II – Past informing Future informing Past [20 min]
- Read the following quotes from Adrienne Maree Brown’s Pleasure Activism aloud. Based on these quotes, what does pleasure activism look like to you? (10 minutes)
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“Pleasure activism is the work we do to reclaim our whole, happy, and satisfiable selves from the impacts, delusions, and limitations of oppression and/or supremacy. Pleasure activism asserts that we all need and deserve pleasure and that our social structures must reflect this. In this moment, we must prioritize the pleasure of those most impacted by oppression.”
- “Growing a healing abundance where we have been socialized to believe only scarcity exists.”
- “Pleasure activism is not about generating or indulging in excess. I want to say this early and often, to myself and to you. Sometimes when I bring up this work to people, I can see a bacchanalia unfold in their eyes, and it makes me feel tender. I think because most of us are so repressed, our fantasies go to extremes to counterbalance all that contained longing. Pleasure activism is about learning what it means to be satisfiable, to generate, from within and from between us, an abundance from which we can all have enough.”
- “Part of the reason so few of us have a healthy relationship with pleasure is because a small minority of our species hoards the excess of resources, creating a false scarcity and then trying to sell us joy, sell us back to ourselves.”
- “Ultimately, pleasure activism is us learning to make justice and liberation the most pleasurable experiences we can have on this planet.”
2. Take some time to reflect on your own ideas about pleasure. Who are your pleasure ancestors? Who and what has shaped your relationship to pleasure, have been your sources of pleasure? Spend some time in your own body and your own head and express your pleasure-lineage-in-the-works in whatever medium feels best (ex: free-writing, drawing, lyricisms, movements, etc!) (5 minutes)
3. Come back to your small group. If you feel comfortable, share out what you made with your group. (5 minutes)
We will now reconvene in the main group and take a break (15 min).
Part 3: Letter to Our Future Selves (30 minutes)
We will work together on the last part of this workshop.
In a recent (5/7/21) interview on her podcast “Lady Don’t Take No,” Alicia Garza makes a statement, which, she says, she often articulates: “Our muscles around being able to clearly envision the future that we want are totally atrophied and it leads us to be planted in place, but we tell ourselves that we are moving forward.” She’s inspired to come to this topic by Tarana Burke’s essay “Where the Truth Rests” in You Are Your Best Thing: Vulnerability, Shame Resilience, and the Black Experience.* In this essay Burke writes:
“It has become increasingly popular to pen letters to our younger selves as a means of healing old wounds and prompting empathy and forgiveness for ourselves that we perhaps couldn’t muster at the onset of our trauma. I’ve employed this practice myself in my work over the years, but I am going to take a chance and go in a different direction this time by writing to us in the future” (315-316).
Imagine we are writing a letter to our future selves about the future that we want for education — you may be as specific or broad as you want — and what we see as our involvement in that future. What might you add to this letter? Take a few minutes to reflect. Try to come up with one or two sentences to share out with the class.
You are also invited to add your ideas to this shared Google Doc: “Letter to Our Future Selves OTC 210510”
*Note: Tarana Burke is founder of #MeToo and co-editor with Brene Brown of this collection, which was mentioned in class by Katia.