New Erotic Renaissance
The birthing of a New Substack Series
“The erotic is a resource within each of us that lies in a deeply female and spiritual plane, firmly rooted in the power of our unexpressed or unrecognized feeling.”
— Audre Lorde, Uses of the Erotic
I am excited to announce that I am launching a new substack series: The New Erotic Renaissance!
Before I dive in, I want to share a few ways for you to support this work. First of all, you can become a paid subscriber. A majority of these essays will be partially behind a paywall due to the nature of some of the imagery that I will be sharing.
This series going to be a mix of long form essays, poetry, and visual storytelling on the role of the erotic with special attention to the eco-erotic. But my prayer for it is for it to become a movement where women and those who identify as women, can become fully expressed.
I also want to make clear, that the erotic is not to be confused with the sexual. So if that is why you are here, you can move right along.
This series is for those who are genuinely curious about the power and uses of the erotic (a framework I will be adopting thanks to the great Audre Lorde)—both in regards to you own healing but also (and perhaps more significantly) to your culture change work.
If you are not sure if you are engaged in culture change work, I invite you to consider the following:
Does your work help (re)connect people to their bodies?
Does your work help (re)connect people to the earth?
Does your work help (re)connect to their innate aliveness?
Does your work transform domination based stories into live affirming ones?
About The New Erotic Renaissances
Most people encounter the word "erotic" and contract — they think of sex, of danger, of something that must be earned or disclosed. This series seeks to somatically and visually unwind that conditioning. I work heavily with the conception of the erotic as life-force, as depth of feeling, as the antidote to the pornographic —as offered by Audre Lorde.
My own work exists at the intersection of somatic practice, eco-feminist theory, animist image-making, and embodied visibility — this publication makes that intersection legible and public. Over time, the archive of posts will become the intellectual foundation from which courses, immersions, and perhaps a book might grow.
An Origin Story
I recently created a series of images and sometime said they had a renaissance quality to them. I understand the meaning of renaissance to be “be born again” and it occurred to me that much of my photography work reflects a to the longing to have a renewed story of the erotic.
What I found interesting is how Renaissance art (14th-17th centuries) happened to coincide with the growth of the systems and culture that propagated the ideology of male supremacy. At the time of creating these image, I am studying the connection between the rise of male ideology, the terrorization of the feminine body through the witch trails, and the intersection of these realities with image culture.
So it was no surpsise to me that when I started looking into it deeper, that the majority of Renaissance art depicts the naked feminine body in a very pornographic (suggestive and explicit) frame and very few representations existed in that cultural moment of the erotic as experienced by women from the female gaze (there are exceptions and I will be seeking them out in this series).
So this led me to believe that we are in need of a new artistic renaissance as it relates to representation of the erotic in order to create cultural meaning that prioritizes the female gaze. What is new in this time is that we have access much greater access to the tools for artistic production and dissemination.
So what do we do with these tools? I say that we use them to reclaim the erotic and our body image there-within. That is where this Substack comes in.
Returning to Erotic Reverence
The new erotic renaissance cannot be disconnected from the world we are living in. The wounds of patriarchy run deep in the psyche and bodies of women (and men) and all those who do not live within the gender binary.
We are slowly repairing this wound but it’s important to acknowledge that while men were creating sexualized images of women’s bodies, women were being terrorized so that that they would become completely disconnected form the power and uses of the erotic.
The witch hunts solidified a new association of the feminine with the devil in order to subvert her erotic nature because this aspect of our nature would not submit to male supremacy. That is why we have culturally lost the plot on the erotic and why we need a campaign to return to what I describe as erotic reverence.
But because most women still gain their sense of power from the sexual energy they share with men, there is a need to education on the erotic. Returning to erotic reverence will be generational work. I hope you will join me.