Organizing creatively, facing an increasing threat
Young feminist activists play a critical role in women’s rights organizations and movements worldwide by bringing up new issues that feminists face today. Their strength, creativity and adaptability are vital to the sustainability of feminist organizing.
At the same time, they face specific impediments to their activism such as limited access to funding and support, lack of capacity-building opportunities, and a significant increase of attacks on young women human rights defenders. This creates a lack of visibility that makes more difficult their inclusion and effective participation within women’s rights movements.
A multigenerational approach
AWID’s young feminist activism program was created to make sure the voices of young women are heard and reflected in feminist discourse. We want to ensure that young feminists have better access to funding, capacity-building opportunities and international processes. In addition to supporting young feminists directly, we are also working with women’s rights activists of all ages on practical models and strategies for effective multigenerational organizing.
Our Actions
We want young feminist activists to play a role in decision-making affecting their rights by:
Fostering community and sharing information through the Young Feminist Wire. Recognizing the importance of online media for the work of young feminists, our team launched the Young Feminist Wire in May 2010 to share information, build capacity through online webinars and e-discussions, and encourage community building.
Researching and building knowledge on young feminist activism, to increase the visibility and impact of young feminist activism within and across women’s rights movements and other key actors such as donors.
Promoting more effective multigenerational organizing, exploring better ways to work together.
Supporting young feminists to engage in global development processes such as those within the United Nations
Collaboration across all of AWID’s priority areas, including the Forum, to ensure young feminists’ key contributions, perspectives, needs and activism are reflected in debates, policies and programs affecting them.
Related Content
2014: Intergovernmental preparatory process for the 3rd FfD Conference is launched
Launch of the Intergovernmental preparatory process for the 3rd Financing for Development Conference, October 2014
A preparatory process, co-facilitated by Ambassador George Wilfred Talbot of Guyana and Ambassador Geir O. Pedersen of Norway, was put in place to lead discussions ahead of the 3rd FfD conference to be held in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia in July 2015.
As part of the preparations, two rounds of substantive informal sessions were held at the UN headquarters in New York to provide input to the drafting sessions of the outcome document.
The WWG on FfD was re-activated with the aim of bringing feminist and women’s rights perspectives to the discussions and deliberations ahead of and during the 3rd International FfD Conference. AWID, Development Alternatives with Women for a New Era (DAWN) and the Feminist Task Force (FTF) are currently acting as co-facilitators of the group.
The WWG on FfD’s submitted two oral statements during the first round, and written input to the second round of substantive informal sessions, which highlighted that gender inequality was not visible, nor was the inclusion of other types of discrimination and inequalities. The WWG’s submission highlights gender power relations and the intersections with other categories such as race, disability, ethnicity, age, wealth and sexual identity, which underpin the unequal distribution of opportunities and resources in societies around the world.
Civil society organizations raised concerns about the space for their engagement in the two substantive informal sessions, including the risk that civil society space to engage in negotiations on the outcome document in January 2015 might be constricted.
Tshegofatso Senne is a Black, chronically-ill, genderqueer feminist who does the most. Much of their work is rooted in pleasure, community, and dreaming, while being informed by somatic abolitionism and disability, healing, and transformative justices. Writing, researching, and speaking on issues concerning feminism, community, sexual and reproductive justice, consent, rape culture, and justice, Tshegofatso has 8 years of experience theorising on the ways in which these topics intersect with pleasure. They run their own business, Thembekile Stationery, and their community platform Hedone brings people together to explore and understand the power of trauma-awareness and pleasure in their daily lives. Tshegofatso believes deeply in the individual and collective potential of regenerative and sustainable change, pleasure, and care work.
The body. The most permanent home we have.
The body, not the thinking brain, is where we experience most of our pain, pleasure, and joy, and where we process most of what happens to us. It is also where we do most of our healing, including our emotional and psychological healing. And it is where we experience resilience and a sense of flow.
These words, said by Resmaa Menakem in his book My Grandmother’s Hands, have stayed with me.
The body; it holds our experiences. Our memories. Our resilience. And as Menakem has written, the body also holds our traumas. It responds with spontaneous protective mechanisms to stop or prevent more damage. That is the power of the body. Trauma is not the event; it is how our bodies respond to events that feel dangerous to us. It is often left stuck in the body, until we address it. There’s no talking our body out of this response – it just is.
Using Ling Tan’s Digital Superpower app, I tracked how my body felt as I travelled around different parts of my city, Johannesburg, South Africa. The app is a gesture-driven online platform that allows you to trace your perceptions as you move through locations by logging and recording the data. I used it to track my psychosomatic symptoms – physical reactions connected to a mental cause. Whether that be flashbacks. Panic attacks. Tightness in the chest. A fast heartbeat. Tension headaches. Muscle pain. Insomnia. Struggling to breathe. I tracked these symptoms as I walked and travelled to different areas in Johannesburg. And I asked myself.
Where can we be safe? Can we be safe?
Psychosomatic responses can be caused by a number of things, and some are not as severe as others. After experiencing any kind of trauma you may feel intense distress in similar events or situations. I tracked my sensations, ranked on a scale of 1-5, where 1 were the instances I barely felt any of these symptoms – I felt at ease rather than on-guard and jumpy, my breath and heart rate were stable, I was not looking over my shoulder – and number 5 being the opposite – symptoms that had me close to a panic attack.
As a Black person. As a queer person. As a genderqueer person who could be perceived as a woman, depending on what my gender expression is that day.
I asked myself.
Where can we be safe?
Even in neighbourhoods one might consider “safe,” I felt constantly panicked. Looking around me to make sure I wasn’t being followed, adjusting the way my T-shirt sat so my breasts wouldn’t show up as much, looking around to make sure I knew multiple routes to get out of the place I was should I sense danger. An empty road brings anxiety. A packed one does too. Being in an Uber does. Walking on a public road does. Being in my apartment does. So does picking up a delivery from the front of the building.
Can we be safe?
Pumla Dineo Gqola speaks of the Female Fear Factory. It may or may not be familiar, but if you’re someone socialised as a woman, you’ll know this feeling well. The feeling that has you planning every step you take, whether you’re going to work, school, or just running an errand. The feeling that you have to watch how you dress, act, speak in public and private spaces. The feeling in the pit of your stomach if you have to travel at night, get a delivery, or deal with any person who continues to socialise as a cis man. Harassed on the street, always with the threat of violence. Us existing in any space comes with an innate fear.
Fear is both an individual and a socio-political phenomenon. At an individual level, fear can be present as part of a healthy well developing warning system […] When we think about fear, it is important to hold both notions of individual emotional experience and the political ways in which fear has been used in different epochs for control. - Pumla Dineo Gqola, in her book Rape: A South African Nightmare
South African women, femmes, and queers know that every step we take outside – steps to do ordinary things: a walk to the shops, a taxi to work, an Uber from a party – all of these acts are a negotiation with violence. This fear, is part of the trauma. To cope with the trauma we carry in our bodies, we develop responses to detect danger – watching the emotional responses of those around us, reading for “friendliness.” We’re constantly on guard.
Day after day. Year after year. Life after life. Generation after generation.
On the additional challenge of this learned defence system, author of The Body Keeps Score, Bessel Van Der Kolk, has said
It disrupts this ability to accurately read others, rendering the trauma survivor either less able to detect danger or more likely to misperceive danger where there is none. It takes tremendous energy to keep functioning while carrying the memory of terror, and the shame of utter weakness and vulnerability.
As Resmaa Menakem has said, trauma is in everything; it infiltrates the air we breathe, the water we drink, the foods we eat. It is in the systems that govern us, the institutions that teach and also traumatise us, and within the social contracts we enter into with each other. Most importantly, we take it with us everywhere we go, in our bodies, exhausting us and eroding our health and happiness. We carry that truth in our bodies. Generations of us have.
So, as I walk around my city, whether an area is considered “safe” or not, I carry the traumas of generations whose responses are embedded in my body. My heart palpitates, it becomes difficult to breathe, my chest tightens – because my body feels as though the trauma is happening in that very moment. I live hyper vigilant. To the point where one is either too on-guard to mindfully enjoy their life, or too numb to absorb new experiences.
For us to begin to heal, we need to acknowledge these truths.
These truths that live in our bodies.
This trauma is what keeps many of us from living the lives we want. Ask any femme or queer person what safety looks like to them and they’ll mostly share examples that are simple tasks – being able to simply live joyful lives, without the constant threat of violence.
Feelings of safety, of comfort and ease, are spatial. When we embody our trauma, it affects the ways we perceive our own safety, affects the ways we interact with the world, and alters the ways we are able to experience and embody anything pleasurable and joyful.
We have to refuse this burdensome responsibility and fight for a safe world for all of us. Walking wounded as many of us are, we are fighters. Patriarchy may terrorise and brutalise us, but we will not give up the fight. As we repeatedly take to the streets, defying the fear in spectacular and seemingly insignificant ways, we defend ourselves and speak in our own name. - Pumla Dineo Gqola, in her book Rape: A South African Nightmare
Where can we be safe? How do we begin to defend ourselves, not just in the physical sense, but in the emotional, psychological, and spiritual senses?
“Trauma makes weapons out of us all,” adrienne maree brown has said in an interview conducted by Justin Scott Campbell. And her work, Pleasure Activism, offers us multiple methodologies to heal that trauma and ground ourselves in the understanding that healing, justice, and liberation can also be pleasurable experiences. Especially those of us who are the most marginalised, who may have been raised to equate suffering with “The Work.” The Work that so many of us have gone into as activists, community builders and workers, those serving the most marginalised, The Work that we struggle in order to do, burning ourselves out and rarely caring for our minds and bodies. The alternative is becoming more informed about our trauma, able to identify our own needs, and becoming deeply embodied. That embodiment means we are simply more able to experience the world through the senses and sensations in our bodies, acknowledging what they tell us rather than suppressing and ignoring the information it is communicating with us.
Being constantly in conversation with our living body and intentionally practising those conversations connects us to embodiment more deeply; it allows us to make tangible the emotions we feel as we interact with the world, befriend our bodies, and understand all that they try to teach us. When understanding trauma and embodiment paired, we can begin to start the healing and access pleasure more holistically, healthily, and in our daily lives without shame and guilt. We can begin to access pleasure as a tool for individual and social change, tapping into the power of the erotic as Audre Lorde described it. A power that allows us to share the joy we access and experience, expanding our capacity for happiness and understanding that we are deserving of it, even with our trauma.
Tapping into pleasure and embodying the erotic gives us the expansion of being deliberately alive, feeling grounded and stable and understanding our nervous systems. It allows us to understand and shed the generational baggage we’ve been carrying without realising; we can be empowered with the knowledge that even as traumatised as we are, as traumatised as we potentially could be in the future, we are still deserving of pleasurable and joyful lives, that we can share that power with our people. It is the community aspect that is missing from the ways we care for ourselves; self-care cannot exist without community care. We are able to feel a deeper internal trust, safety, and power of ourselves, especially in the face of future traumas that will trigger us, knowing how to soothe and stabilise ourselves. All this understanding leads us to a deep internal power that is resourced to meet any challenges that come your way.
As those living with deep generational traumas, we have come to distrust and perhaps think we are incapable of containing and accessing the power we have. In “Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power,” Lorde teaches us that the erotic offers a source of replenishment, a way to demand better for ourselves and our lives.
For the erotic is not a question only of what we do; it is a question of how acutely and fully we can feel in the doing. Once we know the extent to which we are capable of feeling that sense of satisfaction and completion, we can then observe which of our various life endeavours brings us closest to that fullness.
I don’t say any of this lightly – I know that this is easier said than done. I know that many of us are prevented from understanding these truths, from internalising or even healing them. Resistance comes with acts of feeling unsafe, but is not impossible. Resisting power structures that keep the most powerful safe will always endanger those of us shoved to the margins. Acknowledging the traumas you’ve faced is a reclamation of your lived experiences, those that have passed and those that will follow; it is resistance that embodies that knowledge that we are deserving of more than the breadcrumbs these systems have forced us to lap up. It is a resistance that understands that pleasure is complicated by trauma, but it can be accessed in arbitrary and powerful ways. It is a resistance that acknowledges that our trauma is a resource that connects us to each other, and can allow us to keep each other safe. It is a resistance that understands that even with pleasure and joy, this is not a utopia; we will still harm and be harmed, but we will be better equipped for survival and thrive in a community of diverse care and kindness. A resistance that makes way for healing and connecting to our full human selves.
Healing will never be an easy and rosy journey, but it begins with the acknowledgment of the possibility. When oppression makes us believe that pleasure is not something that we all have equal access to, one of the ways that we start doing the work of reclaiming our full selves — our whole liberated, free selves — is by reclaiming our access to pleasure.
Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha has said in her article in Pleasure Activism (to which she contributed),
I know that for most people, the words “care” and “pleasure” can’t even be in the same sentence. We’re all soaking in ableism’s hatred of bodies that have needs, and we’re given a really shitty choice: either have no needs and get to have autonomy, dignity, and control over your life or admit you need care and lose all of the above.
The power that this has? We understand our traumas, so we understand those of others; we embody the sensations we experience and tend to them rather than distract and avoid. We access pleasure in ways that make us want to share that joy with those in our communities. When we are trauma-informed, we give ourselves more room to experience all this and give ourselves, and others, permission to heal. Imagine, a community in which everyone has access, resources, and time to live pleasurable lives, in whichever way they want and deserve. In which spatial traumas are lessened because the people that occupy them are trauma-aware, are filled with a tender care. Isn’t that healing? Is that not working through generational traumas? Does that not build and sustain healthier futures for us all?
It is time we reconnected with the ancestral knowledge that we deserve to live full lives. We need to get back in touch with our natural right to joy and existing for ourselves. To feel pleasure simply for the sake of it. To not live lives of terror. It sounds radical; it feels radical. In a world where we have been socialised and traumatised to numb, to fear, to feel and remain powerless, to be greedy and live with structural issues that lead to mental illness, what a gift and wonder it is to begin to feel, to be in community with those who feel, to be healthily interdependent in, to love each other boldly. Feeling is radical. Pleasure is radical. Healing is radical.
You have permission to feel pleasure. You have permission to dance, create, make love to yourself and others, celebrate and cultivate joy. You are encouraged to do so. You have permission to heal. Don’t bottle it up inside, don’t try to move through this time alone. You have permission to grieve. And you have permission to live. - adrienne maree brown, “You Have Permission”
Somatic embodiment allows us to explore our trauma, work through it and make meaningful connections to ourselves and the collective. Doing this over time sustains our healing; just like trauma, healing is not a one-time only event. This healing helps move us toward individual and collective liberation.
In “A Queer Politics of Pleasure,” Andy Johnson speaks about the ways in which the queering of pleasure offers us sources of healing, acceptance, release, playfulness, wholeness, defiance, subversion, and freedom. How expansive! When we embody pleasure in ways that are this holistic, this queer, we are able to acknowledge the limitation.
Queering pleasure also asks us the questions that intersect our dreaming with our lived realities.
Who is free or deemed worthy enough to feel pleasure? When is one allowed to feel pleasure or pleased? With whom can one experience pleasure? What kind of pleasure is accessible? What limits one from accessing their full erotic and pleased potential? - Andy Johnson, “A Queer Politics
of Pleasure”
When our trauma-informed pleasure practices are grounded in community care, we begin to answer some of these questions. We begin to understand the liberating potential. As pleasure activists, this is the reality we ground ourselves within. The reality that says, my pleasure may be fractal, but it has the potential to heal not only me and my community, but future bloodlines.
I am a whole system; we are whole systems. We are not just our pains, not just our fears, and not just our thoughts. We are entire systems wired for pleasure, and we can learn how to say yes from the inside out. - Prentis Hemphill, interviewed by Shar Jossell
There’s a world of pleasure that allows us to begin to understand ourselves holistically, in ways that give us room to rebuild the realities that affirm that we are capable and deserving of daily pleasure. BDSM, one of my deepest pleasures, allows me a glimpse into these realities where I can both feel and heal my trauma, as well as feel immeasurable opportunities to say yes from the inside out. While trauma keeps me stuck in a cycle of fight or flight, bondage, kneeling, impact, and breath play encourage me to stay grounded and connected, reconnecting to restoration. Pleasure that is playful allows me to heal, to identify where traumatic energy is stored in my body and focus my energy there. It allows me to express the sensations my body feels through screams of pain and delight, to express my no with no fear and revel in the fuck yes. With a safety plan, aftercare, and a deeper understanding of trauma, kink offers a place of pleasure and healing that is invaluable.
So whether your pleasure looks like cooking a meal at your leisure, engaging in sex, having bed days with your people, participating in disability care collectives, having someone spit in your mouth, going on accessible outings, having cuddle dates, attending an online dance party, spending time in your garden, being choked out in a dungeon,
I hope you take pleasure with you wherever you go. I hope it heals you and your people.
Recognising the power of the erotic within our lives can give us the energy to pursue genuine change within our world. - Audre Lorde, “Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power”
ExploreTransnational Embodiments
This journal edition in partnership with Kohl: a Journal for Body and Gender Research, will explore feminist solutions, proposals and realities for transforming our current world, our bodies and our sexualities.
نصدر النسخة هذه من المجلة بالشراكة مع «كحل: مجلة لأبحاث الجسد والجندر»، وسنستكشف عبرها الحلول والاقتراحات وأنواع الواقع النسوية لتغيير عالمنا الحالي وكذلك أجسادنا وجنسانياتنا.
Aïssata Kane, también conocida afectuosamente como «Yaye Kadia»” [«Madre Kadia»], fue una feminista comprometida, durante toda su vida, con la defensa de los derechos de las mujeres africanas y, en especial, mauritanas.
En 1975 fue la primera mujer en ocupar el cargo de Ministra de Protección Familiar y Asuntos Sociales, puesto desde el cual Aïssata trabajó fervientemente para mejorar el estatus de las mujeres de su país.
Este trabajo incluyó el fomento de la educación de niñas y mujeres, la lucha contra la práctica de alimentación forzada de mujeres jóvenes, la incidencia para la inclusión de una legislación sobre derechos maritales, y la promoción de la creación de un cupo de representación femenino en el Parlamento.
«[Aïssata] materializaba todas sus pasiones con humildad, valentía y determinación. No quería molestar a nadie con su lucha en todos estos frentes simultáneos.» - Ball Halimata Dem, sobrina de Aïssata
Fundó la Unión Nacional de Mujeres de Mauritania (UNFM), creando y publicando con otras activistas Marienou, una revista dedicada a la emancipación de las mujeres mauritanas. Aïssata también dirigió varias organizaciones subregionales y locales, por ejemplo, como Presidenta de la Asociación Internacional de Mujeres Francófonas (AIFF) y, como firme ecologista, fue Presidenta de la Asociación para la Protección del Medio Ambiente de Mauritania (APEM).
En 2018, recibió el Premio a la Mujer Pionera, en honor a su trabajo para la promoción del estatus de las mujeres de Mauritania y como reconocimiento de su fuerte liderazgo y su sentido de la innovación.
Sesiones adicionales para redactar el Documento Final de Adís Abeba
Del 1 al 5 de junio de 2015 se realizaron sesiones adicionales para continuar avanzando en la redacción del Documento Final.
Del 15 al 19 de junio, en la sede de la ONU tuvo lugar la ya planificada Tercera Sesión Redactora del Documento Final de la Conferencia.
Para saber más sobre este proceso, puedes consultar la CSO Hitchhiker’s Guide (en inglés).
متى وأين سيكون المنتدى؟
2-5 ديسمبر 2024، بانكوك، تايلاند! سنجتمع في مركز الملكة سيريكيت الوطني للمؤتمرات (QSNCC) وكذلك افتراضيا عبر
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40 Years of AWID: The Scrapbook
Gather, Seed, and Disrupt.
In 2022, AWID celebrates 40 years since our founding. We’re using this moment to reflect on our past and learn from the road traveled as we prepare to look forward, and to forge the journey ahead. As we move through cycles of progress and pushback, we know that struggles for women’s rights and gender justice are iterative and non-linear. In collaboration with artist Naadira Patel, we created a scrapbook that highlights a handful of snapshots from AWID’s last four decades of feminist movement support.
We have not done all this on our own. We share this with deep appreciation for the constellation of feminist activists and groups that have made this work possible. In this context of so many converging crises, we embrace the opportunity to celebrate the power and resilience of feminist movements around the world.
"Ashawo Work na Work": Cómo lxs jóvenes feministas de Ghana están haciendo realidad los futuros feministas
por Fatima B. Derby
En 2017, la campaña de AWID #PracticaSolidaridad destacó cómo lxs jóvenes feministas podían construir un futuro feminista apoyándose mutuamente, participando en conversaciones interregionales entre ellxs, marchando en solidaridad con otrxs activistas y abriendo canales de colaboración entre los movimientos. (...)
Rosane Santiago Silveira, que l’on appelait affectueusement Rô Conceição, était une activiste brésilienne pour l’environnement et les droits humains qui se battait inlassablement pour protéger l’environnement, là où il était le plus menacé.
Il pouvait entre autres s’agir de le défendre sur l’île de Barra Valha, mise en danger par une exploitation pétrolière, ou de le protéger avec des campagnes contre l’accaparement des terres et l’expansion de plantations d’eucalyptus dans l’État de Bahia, où Rosane était membre du conseil de la réserve d’extractivistes de Cassurubá.
« La réserve d’extractivistes est une zone protégée où les familles résidentes vivent des produits naturels extraits de la forêt. Ces activités contribuent à protéger l’intégrité de la forêt. » - Global Justice Ecology Project (source initiale : Rede Brasil Atual)
Elle participait à des activités syndicales et des mouvements culturels et de défense des droits humains. Rosane consacrait une grande partie de sa vie à des causes qui lui étaient chères, mais qui concernaient également la terre, les forêts, les rivières et les communautés dont les droits et vies sont constamment en danger.
Elle a été torturée et assassinée le 29 janvier 2019 à Nova Viçosa, une ville du sud de Bahia.
« Malheureusement, un sentiment d’insécurité totale règne désormais, parce que l’État ne juge pas ces crimes. Nous étions avec elle à Noël, et tout le monde s’est rendu compte qu’elle était inquiète. Nous savons maintenant qu’elle avait reçu trois menaces de mort », Tuian, le fils de Rosane dans un entretien avec Rádio Brasil Atual. (source initiale : Rede Brasil Atual)
ويخطط عدد من الأشخاص من منظمتي لحضور المنتدى. هل يوجد خصم جماعي للمنتدى؟
لا تقدم جمعية حقوق المرأة في التنمية خصومات جماعية، ولكننا نقدم خصومات التسجيل للأعضاء/ العضوات. (انقر هنا لمعرفة المزيد عن كيفية الانضمام)
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Los placeres como clave para la libertad personal
Por Nkhensani Manabe
El título de la conversación «¿Pansexual, ginosexual o abrosexual? Una exploración de lo queer, el placer y la positividad sexual» da mucho para pensar. Tiffany Kagure Mugo (escritora, educadora y curadora de HOLAAfrica) comienza la sesión con una lectura de Touch [Tocar/Tacto], una compilación recientemente publicada de ensayos de ficción y no ficción sobre sexo, sexualidad y placer. En este fragmento, la autora propone la idea de que el placer es constante y continuo, que está presente en las actividades cotidianas, y que no se circunscribe a las relaciones sexuales.
Esta idea de que el placer es parte de la vida diaria (al igual que tantas otras cosas) atraviesa la conversación, que también abarca temas sobre el deseo, la atracción y la orientación sexual.
Desde el comienzo, existe una sensación de esperanza y posibilidad. Tiffany presenta opciones y explica alternativas, dándonos un nuevo lenguaje para hablar sobre quiénes somos, qué nos gusta, y cómo lo queremos. Esto se refiere al deseo y al sexo, pero se trata primordialmente de autoconocimiento y empoderamiento. Tiffany habla apasionadamente sobre tomar decisiones desde un lugar de poder: aprender sobre la propia identidad para poder elegir lo mejor para unx mismx.
En una conversación abierta y libre, que representa la actitud que Tiffany propone que todxs adoptemos, aprendemos que el conocimiento sobre sexo y sexualidad está en permanente cambio, que los límites se están desplazando. Lo que podemos haber aprendido o, más fundamentalmente, aquello que se nos ocultó durante la infancia o la adultez es exactamente el lugar desde donde deberíamos comenzar a desaprender y reprogramarnos. Tiffany señala que, actualmente, las personas jóvenes necesitan herramientas para comprender las experiencias que ya están teniendo, un recordatorio para no subestimar jamás lo que lxs niñxs y adolescentes saben sobre la clase de placer/es que quieren procurarse en la vida.
La conversación abrió mi mente a esto: conocerme a mí misma me ayudará a desarrollar mi confianza; podré encarar relaciones con cuidado no solo de mí misma sino de otras personas también. Aprender el lenguaje de orientación, atracción, deseo y placer contribuirá a profundizar mis futuras conexiones. Valoré el espacio para pensar sobre este aspecto de mi vida: las partes privadas e íntimas a las que no accedo habitualmente. El entusiasmo de Tiffany sobre el placer y la identidad desplazó mis propias barreras, permitiéndome considerar nuevas posibilidades personales.
La idea de aprender a establecer conexiones holísticas no es algo común todavía. En general, vivimos en una cultura de conexiones instantáneas y pasajeras. Casi no hay tiempo para reflexionar verdaderamente sobre cómo y por qué buscamos relaciones o parejas... al menos, no hasta que llega un momento de crisis.
Por supuesto, existen espacios privilegiados que están abiertos a preguntas y conversaciones, tales como el festival «Crear Résister Transform» de AWID y otras plataformas o publicaciones en línea que promueven la libertad de pensamiento. Pero el acceso a la información de fuentes útiles y sin prejuicios es algo que todavía debe ser descifrado. Esto puede deberse en parte al hecho de que la gente no se siente segura en el lenguaje de la sexualidad y el placer.
La idea del lenguaje y las herramientas se repite durante toda la presentación de Tiffany. Ella y sus colegas están haciendo el trabajo de hablar, enseñar y nutrir, viendo qué es lo que cada persona necesita, dónde están esas personas, qué quieren para sí mismxs, y caminando junto con ellxs mientras construyen sus mundos ideales, brindándoles nuevas palabras y definiciones para ayudarlxs a configurar sus identidades en las diferentes etapas de sus vidas.
Esta es la clase de conversaciones que se necesita, incluso en una sociedad que permanentemente difunde un sinfín de mensajes sobre el cuidado de la salud, con diferentes grados de detalle. A veces la gente debe retrotraerse de las instancias de perspectiva global, y sentirse alentada a aprender sobre sus opiniones y deseos individuales. Esto es lo que hace la ponencia de Tiffany: genera un espacio para cada persona, dentro del rompecabezas general.
Un punto culminante de la ponencia de Tiffany fue la sección sobre los diferentes tipos de atracción:
Sexual: el deseo expreso de tener relaciones sexuales con una o varias personas Sensual: el deseo de tocar a una o varias personas, de estar físicamente cerca, sin necesariamente incluir una relación sexual Romántica: el deseo de salir con una o varias personas, o de estar en una relación con una o varias personas Platónica: el deseo de construir amistades profundas Estética: el deseo de mirar a una o varias personas, sintiendo placer por su apariencia
Estos cinco tipos o niveles de atracción ofrecen una forma abreviada para definir el deseo y el placer, y ayudan a contextualizar las distintas clases de placer que pueden experimentar las personas.
Pensar la atracción más allá de lo físico o sexual ofrece una nueva perspectiva sobre la conexión. Es una oportunidad para restar presión a las relaciones, abriendo oportunidades para asociaciones diferentes, más esclarecidas y satisfactorias.
Esta libertad y este conocimiento que propone Tiffany configuran una hoja de ruta hacia el futuro. La presentación ofreció una nueva perspectiva sobre aquello que es posible.
Tal como lo expresa el fragmento de apertura, el placer es continuo. A la luz de la ponencia de Tiffany, también resulta claro que el placer es dinámico y apasionante. Siempre hay más para aprender.
Esto puede parecer abrumador al comienzo, pero del otro lado del titubeo se encuentran la esperanza, el potencial y la libertad.
