Dialogue Description:

What does it mean to be attracted to someone or to find someone desirable? How do we know a person is beautiful? How are our attractions, both sexual and otherwise, shaped and influenced?

What messages have white supremacy and patriarchy, alongside cisheterosexism, femme-phobia, fat-phobia, ageism and ableism directed at us about worth and belonging in our relationships?  How does desirability influence your own sense of worth, your relationship to your body and relationship to others? How are desirability politics playing out for us in this moment of increased violence directed at multiply marginalized communities, especially trans women of color and immigrants?

Join us in dialogue as we explore these questions, and others, in an exploration of how race, gender, and desirability impact and complicate our lives.

Some suggested readings:

Dialogue Notes:

These are rough, uncut, unfiltered, and anonymous notes taken at the dialogue. We get that these may not be very readable to those who were not in attendance at the dialogue, and, honestly, sometimes even to those of us who were. We still feel it is important to keep them available as part of our accountability process and for archiving and reference purposes.  Some of these notes have been digested/transformed into blogs.

Opening

  • Coming from the Nia Wilson rally at Macarthur BART. There should be no one in Oakland who is not thinking about Nia Wilson right now. Feeling grief and guilt for coming to the dialogue. Our topic and what is happening are not unrelated, also feeling hopelessness at our organizing strategies. The same things keep happening. It is not just about social activism or a political campaign.
  • Pass the hat for donation for Nia Wilson’s family.
  • Feeling emotion that didn’t know about Nia Wilson. Feel stagnant about desirability politics conversation.
  • Grateful to be in the space and held in confronting and talking about this. Feel fear around stabbing. What is it like to be in a gendered body and white body?
  • Disassociated all day. Thought about it for a year.
  • Waiting to talk for a long time. Born with a face that looks different from my current face. Had plastic surgery as a teenager. Interrogating my own attractions to people. Colonized ways I consider attraction.
  • In romantic relationship, partner is always navigating being in an interracial partnership along with patriarchy. Desirability playing out in professional life. How I play into dynamics that are oppressive to me.
  • Privilege of being able to not know about many aspects of Nia Wilson’s death. Struggling with who I desire. I’ve been single for a long time, feel inferiority about that. Feel like something is wrong with me.
  • Noticing how people are receiving me and responding as I move to the Bay Area and look for housing. Dressing nicely for interviews. I use my sexuality and the way I look because it opens doors, work and people. People are willing to trust me. I never want to get tattoos to have as many doors open as possible.
  • Want to support NIa Wilson and her family, recognizing it is also not my own. Recently got out of a relationship where a lot of insecurities came up about my own desirability. How my gender identity impacted it. Didn’t think about my whiteness, know that is a privilege.
  • How I relate to my body and how I have changed, how I want to present myself and how I am trying to look. Is it genuine or some norm I am taking on. Used to look a lot of makeup, try to embody an ideal not who I am. Cutting my hair people react to me differently. I feel less vulnerable to other’s judgement and aware of how that is different for everyone. In student coops, there is a lot of culture of free love and nudity. Who feels comfortable in that? Who feels othered in those spaces? How loving one’s body can show up differently in different bodies?
  • How we love and are repulsed and hide come from really problematic and hurtful ways that the world is organized. Hard to both feel comfortable with myself and how I define myself. How does this not go into supporting so much pain?
  • The more I’ve learned about US history and the indigenous people whose lands were stolen that have put the US where we are. I have been avoiding the topic. When I was 12 and 13 not liking to be male or female. Didn’t work for me and doesn’t now. I love being a woman socially. Confused by gender and sex presentation. I have been doing a lot of anti-racism and anti-oppression work and becoming more aware of the countless thousand ways that different group are oppressed that are hidden from me. Fat phobic things I have said without realizing it. Wanting to keep learning.  
  • Feels like science fiction in this white body and the protection it offers to be killed. Other communities this is a regular occurance. Desirability alongside grievability and disposability, all different sides of this. As a young person, I was very shaped by internalized ableism and sexism. Felt unlovable and undesirable. I was a witch and I am going to die alone. I am not a princess. Now, fuck yeah I’m a witch. Have facilitated critical media literacy discussing norms around beauty, self/other. Even so, as I grow into my 40s, the subtlety of ageism. Thinking I should look or function other than I do. They get us at every stages of the life cycle. Come alive listening to reading destroying relational hierarchies. Sexually desired others as most valuable. Lifting up friendship.
  • Hearing helicopters as a reminder of previous dialogues under the same circumstances
  • Hard to feel like there is no right way; always feel like there is a right way that i’m not doing, always feel shame — shame as a theme; opposite of shame as pride is also a theme
  • Learned to hate body for a long time, learned this from other people
  • Internalized profound fat phobia
  • Racism and transphobia that shows up on dating apps
  • How to unlearn in a practiced way desire — what does it mean that I move toward certain identities?  How to practice something else that is authentic? Have a lot of fear of my own desire, deep internalized heterosexism;
  • I’m becoming more of a freak, people are going to not want me and it is going to make my life harder
  • Getting a message from people that being on testosterone will make you fat; coded in a not so subtle way as very bad
  • Masculinity in queer community; the ways that femmes are left out
  • Readings are all femmes, majority femmes of color, fat femmes, disabled femmes; their labor is what is educating us, the work is falling on them; grateful to their powerful resistance and the ways they model interdependence
  • APTP: Anti Police Terror Project, first responders to police terror
  • Listened to lots of local radio today, heard a lot about Iran and other things, but nothing about Nia Wilson
  • Helicopters: how many war zones are there around their world where people are trying to engage in political work with helicopters flying over?
  • One of those topics that you can just keep digging deeper and deeper
  • What does it mean to come to terms with my own desirability
  • Everything I desire was shaped by patriarchal, capitalist systems
  • Framing of this beyond sexual desire to include questioning who we are friends with, who gets jobs, who is safe walking down the street, who gets housing, etc.
  • Longtime theme of WNC looking at constructions of white womanhood linked to purity, innocence, beauty, desirability, protectability & connections to demonization of women of color
  • Forms of cultural imperialism that say “liberation is looking more like us”
  • Looking at what shapes desires and never believing i could change it – is this or how is it changeable?
  • Looking at cross-racial desires, on a dating app can get “premium” notifications for certain selections, wondering what is going on with the industry of dating
  • Trying to challenge myself to not use who i date to hide behind them, being seen as a good person, etc.
  • This is one of more vulnerable topics at WNC
  • Shame related to how i should & shouldn’t feel – very hard to fight against. Been doing a lot of reading about how ableism and cissexism shape media
  • Trying out dating apps and horrified by myself, the superficiality, don’t know what to do about it – trying to train myself out of snap judgments, and here i am in a world of snap judgments
  • Who you want in intimate life
  • So much shaped by early childhood messages of love and safety, shaping desire
  • Pushing out of race & class enclaves i was in through work & relationships is different than the no/low interactivity of technology
  • How we relate to own bodies as personal practice, and interpersonal perceptions – society pushing us toward a greater superficiality
  • How do we open ourselves to possibility of uniqueness of interaction
  • There are boxes you can check off to make sure you are getting who you want: profile yourself, advertise yourself, not going to be a plain objective mirror, ways i am being boxed in by people who see me.
  • Trustworthiness as a theme: what is considered trustworthy and by who; in relationship to desire
  • Ableism and fatness
  • Legitimized preferences by claiming that lifestyles wouldn’t match: feel deeply uncomfortable recognizing that
  • How some of these themes relate to #metoo, the constant sexual violence that surrounds me
  • Not sure i know what it is to have my own sense of desire
  • Spent a lot of time with people who desired me, could not sense if i desired them or who i desired
  • I notice i’m interested in people who are hard to get, suspicious of people who like me – coming to early childhood messages about what feels safe
  • All kinds of pheromone reaction & direction happening
  • We do define ourselves by who we are with
  • In subculture of bay area, seems like every straight woman i meet ID’s as heteroflexible
  • Heteroflexibility as a way of proclaiming non-homophobia; sometimes feels like it is performative; trying to gain social status; sometimes feels like an appropriation of queerness
  • How much are we performing our desire for acceptance?  How do we know if it is performative?
  • Who brings up feelings of repulsion, repelling?  Who do we not want to be seen with?
  • Culturally ugly (from reading by Caleb Luna): really insightful term; beauty is culturally defined
  • Every little stab that someone close to us takes at their body is something held in our own bodies
  • “I don’t think we can reclaim beauty” – Mia Mingus
  • Villains almost always have faces that are disfigured — this is a trope of the evil other
  • Inundated with messages constantly
  • Prettiness about survival
  • Aware of patterns around desire that are shaped by structure that i don’t believe in
  • Confronted with my own biases
  • How do you know when genuine or performative – when directly impacts someone else, performing my desire for them
  • How much is wrapped up in desire, how to tease all apart – can be all of those things at the same time
  • Imaginal channels
  • Practice: Any time snap judgement voice in head comes up, try to fight against it by seeing other person more fully, how they see themselves
  • Following on social media a number of body positive POC, who are self-celebrating has been helpful for me, to expand my vision
  • Used to have passion for romantic/sexual socialism – where everyone would be cared for, not about the narrow romantic investment
  • Acceptance, belonging – intergenerational inheritances of concern, what do i need to accept in myself, how to care for myself?
  • The concept “embrace ugly” opens up so much space in myself
  • I am in relationships with a lot of people in prison, who gets pen-palled all the time, the self-framing of profiles, someone on the outside valuing you
  • Noticing how i am drawn to people’s stories, esp neuroatypical/divergent
  • Relationships have gotten me housing, literally
  • Really brutal ways people are chosen and not chosen
  • Whose vulnerability is something i understand that i can meet?
  • Extended check-out, any reflections or take-aways
  • Have never been in a group as the oldest person, over 50
  • Noting all the judgements i have, value-attached, noticing with a chance to contradict and bring in something else
  • Recently learned technique to engage with parts of myself i don’t like, at an anti-racism workshop i was working on desire to have more relationships with POC and confronted with feelings of why would anyone want to be in relationship with me, 5 year old voice saying you’re not worth it, other story voice saying i have a lot of love to give
  • Things that are recognizable in our language
  • Working on questioning some of my first impressions
  • Appreciating being held in this space, inspired to lead more with vulnerability
  • A lot of resonances
  • Thinking about desirability in community, confronting histories of mistrust
  • Who do hold in my community, prioritize, defaults to care and time to romantic relationship – zoom that out more
  • Relief to name what i’ve been struggling with
  • Love idea of treating friends as lovers
  • What are ways i’m showing up in relationships, how to create intimacy in ways that feel safe for me
  • Wish we could have had more and deeper conversations around so many themes
  • Marginalized identities, specifically black people when they are murdered, and how much more desirable they become as symbols and martyrs for this movement; thinking about Black trans women’s lives matter movement: “love us while we are still here”
  • Within this space, there was the level of discussion and then the meta-level of interrelationship in this space; thinking about the fear of what people think about us, what we do and don’t say
  • How differently i show up in different spaces; how some of the same things happen internally in different spaces
  • Hopefulness about shifting what desire is and moving toward it; this space is a place we can do that together
  • Gives me hope and helps me love myself better when I can resonate with other people even though I don’t have their experience
  • What is terrifying to me, and what feels so clear, is that we need each other; visibilization of the inevitability of our bodies dying; desire physically is also about fear of death — something I learned from disability community
  • Appreciate sharing of different practices to rehumanize; thinking about what practices i am needing to shake up the spaces that are getting stagnant or unkind within myself
  • Thinking about ways that desirability shows up in well meaning progressive causes like immigrant justice movement
  • Stories of African Americans dressing up to go to emergency room to be seen, to make sure that they get the care they deserve
  • Power of dialogue to open up a topic; feels hard to close; communal experience of each of us speaking from our own experience opening up other people to new understandings of their own experience
  • How to find our own authentic way, how to turn off judging mind and tap into bodily felt experience, what feels good for you?
  • The way we read each other affects real, tangible, material outcomes in life
  • Wishing there was more space to go into things
  • Didn’t want to feel the anger and grief in this topic, being in a narrow range of relationship as a single person with partnered friends – wishing it was easier