The Body Has No District Lines

"In order to perpetuate itself, every oppression must corrupt or distort those various sources of power within the culture of the oppressed that can provide energy for change."
— Audre Lorde, Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power

On April 29th, six Supreme Court justices decided that Louisiana's second majority-Black congressional district was an unconstitutional racial gerrymander — a map drawn to give Black people political representation, ruled unconstitutional. The Trump DOJ moved within days to target Black and Latino-majority voting districts nationwide. They are redrawing the lines again.

The ruling itself is one thing, but the logic underneath it is another, and that logic is worth naming clearly: the idea that Black political power must be contained, managed, redistributed into shapes that are more comfortable for the people who've always held the pen, that the presence of Black people in concentrated political power is itself a problem to be solved. This logic is not new — it's the same logic that has always tried to determine what Black bodies are for, who gets to experience pleasure, who gets to take up space, who gets to feel fully, without apology, without surveillance. Voting rights and erotic sovereignty are the same argument at different scales, both about who controls the conditions of Black life, both threatening the same people, both suppressed by the same systems.

Audre Lorde understood this decades before the current court. She wrote that every oppression must corrupt the sources of power that could fuel liberation — and that the erotic is one of those sources, which is why we've been taught to be ashamed of it, afraid of it, dismissive of it — told it's frivolous, selfish, secondary to the "real" work.

The suppression of Black pleasure isn't incidental to white supremacy. It's a feature.

The erotic — that deep, felt knowledge of aliveness — is dangerous to systems that require Black people to be legible only as labor, as threat, as problem. To feel fully, to experience joy without apology, to inhabit one's own body as a site of power rather than a site of management: this is not a retreat from political life. It is political life. When you are taught that your pleasure is shameful, you lose access to one of the primary sources of your own knowledge, discernment, and power . That's not an accident, that's architecture.

Here's what six justices cannot do: they cannot control what Black bodies feel. While they can dilute Black votes across carefully constructed lines & hand the pen to Republican-controlled legislatures and call it constitutionality, they cannot do is reach into the body — your body — and remap what you're capable of feeling. They cannot redistrict your capacity for joy or hold a hearing on your breath. The erotic has always been where Black people go when every other territory gets occupied, not as escapism but as a form of refusal that cannot be fully tracked, regulated, or undone. Black life is not only about surviving what they do to us; it is also about living fully, sensually, defiantly in ways they cannot legislate. And Black people have always known this — have always found ways to practice it, even in the worst of conditions, even when every external territory was occupied or stolen or denied.

Which brings us to Juneteenth.

The first Juneteenth was a gathering. People sang, feasted, held each other. White people wrote the Emancipation Proclamation; Black people wrote Juneteenth with their bodies. The legal document was authored in the language of power, while the celebration was authored in the language of the body — pleasure, presence, collective joy. One was an instrument of the state, the other an act of erotic sovereignty, and only one has been passed down through living flesh. Flesh has always been the more honest archive.

On June 20th — Juneteenth weekend — I'm hosting Breaking Our Erotic Chains, an online ritual exclusively for Black people. We'll use breath and self-pleasure to deepen joy and ground ourselves in erotic sovereignty, not as metaphor but as medicine, as the kind of power they keep trying to take and keep failing to find because they've been looking in the wrong territory all along.

This is the place they cannot reach. Come inhabit it.