#btw both shola and marci said many great things -- im just noting as the sort of

[variousqueerthings]

Question: … how do we understand and acknowledge a historical trajectory of black women being subject to sexual commodification and exoticization, but also create a liberatory sex positive framework for black women in ways that honor our sexual agency?

bell hooks: I mean, I think that’s a critical question. What does that liberatory sexuality look like? Let me theorize that it may very well be that celibacy is the face of that liberatory sexuality. That I would rather not be sexual, than to be sexua-

[murmuring and laughing in the audience]

Shola Lynch: now that’s making me uncomfortable

[more laughing]

Marci Blackman: [jokingly referencing a previous speech about not fitting into white men’s structures] I can’t fit in that box, bell.

bell hooks: [over the laughter] I’m trying to be futuristic here!

But what does it mean to be able to say I’d rather not be sexual, than to be sexual in any context where I am being mistreated, where I have doubt, where my feelings are not- where I am triggered as an abuse survivor or what have you. I mean, I’m just posing, “what are our choices as we think about our journey to sexual freedom? What choices to do we have?”

[...] I often identify myself as queer past gay. And I came up with this with one of my white colleagues, lesbian colleagues, where we were saying all of our lives we’d experienced ourselves as “queer as not belonging,” as the essence of being queer.

I think of Tim Dean’s work on being queer, queer not about as who you’re having sex with, that can be a dimension of it – but queer as being about the self that is at odds with everything around it and has to invent and create and find a place to speak and to thrive and to live.

And I think that that is what – where we are going towards in trying to find that sexuality and I think that it is crucial that trans people are so at the forefront of that, because that is where among trans people, that the imagination is called forth, in the reconstructing the re-envisioning of self and possibility. So that to me is one of the positives of the focus – because we know the New York Times does their piece on trans or whatever – that we all know that in some ways this too shall pass as all our progressive things – remember when women writers were hot?

[murmuring]

And how that passes. 

But while that’s happening I think we can garner strength from the diversity of peoples stories, the diversity of peoples imagination.