feeling erotic

Well it’s June. So that means bus, club, another club, plane—NO SLEEP! While pride month is a time of joy shared amongst friends and lovers, it’s also a time to vent.

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This is my first pride being more open about my identity and sharing parts of it with people. I’m figuring out how my identity fits (or doesn’t fit) within the various communities I find myself in. The older I get, the more I realize how labels have a dichotomy that can empower and limit. But it depends on the intention of your label and where its origins lie. 

I’ve been reading Body Work by a lesbian author and educator, Melissa Febos (It eats y’all I’m telling you). She discusses her relationship to her sexuality and identity as pro Domme—the after (post twenties right after experiencing it) and the after after (when she wrote about it in her first memoir). Febos mentions Audre Lorde’s version of eroticism in “Uses of the Erotic,” from Sister Outsider. “We tend to think of the erotic as an easy, tantalizing sexual arousal,” Lorde writes. “I speak of the erotic as the deepest life force, a force which moves us toward living in a fundamental way.” So while Febos was relating it to being a Domme, Lorde’s concept ties to Febos’ identity and labels, not just the sex and kink of it all. Febos shares how she was rethinking her relationship to her label of being a domme. It empowered her, but how far did that empowerment stretch? And where did it come from? 

So in the spirit of pride and reading good ass lesbian literature, I’ve thought quite a lot about the concept of “living erotically” and how it applies to labeling my queerness. From my experience as a queer person that was socialized as a straight Christian girl in the south, I have a lot of animosity towards labels. But I’m learning to love the parts of myself that are labeled while loving the parts that are not. Making sense of my queerness as a 20-something is the most challenging work I’ve faced thus far. There’s more facets as a queer person—sexuality, gender identity, gender expression, and relationship with the queer community—and even more as a person of color or indigenous ethnicity. And these facets can limit and empower us.

Even with the accepting nature of the queer community, I face confusion and pushback about how I personify my labels. I like to wear colorful makeup and do my nails long with rhinestones sometimes, but I stopped shaving my armpits. Sometimes I wear bras as shirts and sometimes I wear binders under my shirts. These behaviors/ reflections of myself don’t align with the common understanding of my labels. I am both masc and femme, sometimes more than the other. Or even sometimes I don’t want to be perceived as anything. So how do I reckon with that? How does one tell the difference between shame and true acceptance? 

Lorde expands on her concept, “The erotic is a measure between the beginnings of our sense of self and the chaos of our strongest feelings.” Labels are how people make sense of chaos. Gender labels help people make sense of fluidity and keep society neat and hierarchal. *eye roll* But I won’t go into how binaries are a white western concept that has been pioneered throughout the world under colonialism, and that we should abolish gender.  Because—well—this is a society riddled with labels and norms that’s not going to change for a hot (to go) minute. 

If you create your labels based on others’ perceptions of you or your perception of others, you are missing that link between your sense of self and your emotions. I’ve had to learn that my identity labels must grow from me not from others onto me. It’s not about perception or societal pressures, it’s about what I’m feeling inside, and who I am to the truest form in my head. With my sexuality I’m pressured to have labels and then live inside of their barbed wire.  Same with my gender identity. While I prefer they/them pronouns, I don’t reject she/her. I still feel a deep connection to womanhood because of my experiences growing up as a girl. From the positive experiences of sisterhood (blood and not) to the negatives like the constant sexual harassment.

But from the inside I feel like I am not a woman and a woman all at the same time, so I don’t label myself “girl” anymore but something else entirely. Practicing living erotically has taught me to be more cognizant of my relationship between my feelings and the chaos I bind with labels. Not for the understanding of the cis-het guy on the street or the lesbians at the club. But by me, through me, and for me. What do I want? And why do I want it? Is it because I was socialized to want it? Or because I want it from my core to the tips of my press ons? It’s scary to deconstruct labels—where they come from, and why you take them on.

But it’s so freeing and it feels erotic.