Ricky Cooks

“When I wrote that “desire can cut against what politics has chosen for us, and choose for itself,” I was not imagining a desire regulated by the demands of justice, but a desire set free from the binds of injustice. I am asking what might happen if we were to look at bodies, our own and others’, and allow ourselves to feel admiration, appreciation, want, where politics tells us we should not. There is a kind of discipline here, in that it requires us to quiet the voices that have spoken to us since birth, the voices that tell us which bodies and ways of being in the world are worthy and which are unworthy. What is disciplined here isn’t desire itself, but the political forces that presume to instruct it.”
― Amia Srinivasan, The Right to Sex: Feminism in the Twenty-First Century