Materiality and Embodied Existence Beyond Colonial Binaries, Video Vixens, Gospel Drag, Sexual Economies, Unequal Desires & The South Is A Portal

Wising Up.

I figured it was time to give yall an update about the project that is 400 Degrees of Erotic Funk. So here it is.

I’m currently reading through a slew of literature to wade through and arrive at questions, resolves and mysteries about what it is I’m exactly doing with this information. What started as an inquiry into Visual Eroticism has melded into and collaged itself to Erotic Economies, Graphic arts and Marketing, the Lore of Exotic/Erotic Pole Dance, theology and the changing relationship between feminism, femininity, pop culture, gender, nationalism, race and class¹. (word to Moe/Mariah)

I shared a bit of my research processing here on Substack :

and on Instagram:

How this collage of inquiry is manifesting itself has yet to come into a material form (aside from my dancing between reads and annotations) but I feel like this Substack is going to be the place where I excavate and expose that as I process this information. Yes, I’ve been using tricking as a way to process information bodily— it’s wild be because I was hugely trying to avoid touching the pole because I thought that it was a distraction. Until I realized after spending a morning annotating my anxieties away that the tricks were helping me to metabolize the information into a more bodily experience of what the fuck I had just read— even if it wasn’t a direct experience. I can’t really explain this part but I will.

I think now is a good time to decide if that (what I’ve mentioned above) is something you want to continue subscribe to and contribute towards. The nominal fee that you pay to either work with me in class or read my processings, is a small token toward funding this. Why I think it’s important? I’m a maker. I make worlds.

My thing right now is initiating a new way to process and approach tricks and the body with or without a pole. What do tricks and trick’in allow for in the tearing down the affection of what’s seen and unseen, body and spirit, will and execution. How does the study of and processing of teaching your body to trick dismantle narrative, systems and structures that have labeled your body as untrustworthy, unworthy of aesthetic consideration or only worthy of sexualization and labor? My work is following this track and one other: the economy of erotics. A term I’m coming to define and also pan out what that means visually, what it implies for the future and how it could possibly be a way to reconcile the body back from the exploitation of racism and classism. My hopes is to explore a new approach to living in the capitalistic economic system that is neither extreme, moderate or docile— but radical. One that comes together to slowly erode what’s no longer serving (me)(us)(we) and negotiate a lived reality without splitting the difference.

These are all the inquiries that have come up as I’ve resigned myself to a bit of silence in the frustration of what I perceived to be resistance and rejection.

By the title, here’s what I’ve been reading and annotating so far and what is on my list to do, which I will share those annotations and analysis here in the paid section of 400 Degrees of Erotic Funk either tomorrow or at the top of next week: