Finding Pleasure in the Pandemic: Or, Confronting COVID-19 Anxiety through Queer Feminist Pleasure Politics

When I was invited to contribute "something about finding pleasure in the pandemic," I had just finished weeping on the floor for an hour. I had found myself on the floor several times during the COVID-19 stay-at-home order—my new therapist called it a "grounding technique." Through new iterations of anxiety, I stared out over construction noises that beep beep beep beeped all day, every day, from my "at-home-office"—a desk I dumpster-picked fifteen years ago that is now wedged between the window and the living room couch. I wasn't coping with the stay-at-home order well. And finding pleasure in the pandemic—while, again, witnessing violence against Black people, relearning our bodies through my partner's gender transition, and overcoming an inability to finish writing projects—honestly felt like a hilarious cosmic joke. I wasn't practicing pleasure and, at the time of the invitation, I was struggling to even name it.

What I did know is that now was not the time I would offer some white feminist autoethnography about my incapacity for pleasure during the pandemic. I even said as much to my therapist—a person with whom I unexpectedly vibed in our newfound relationship this spring. Each week we talked about how I was coping and my roadblocks to pleasure. I was frustrated that orgasms weren't coming as easily and that I felt disconnected from my body. He told me that it "made sense" because my anxiety response was flooding my brain. He knows I'm a professor, so he asked if I had ever read anything about pleasure and social environment (I am a communication studies professor who studies sex). I laughed so hard it caught even him off guard. I have been reading and writing and thinking for fifteen years alongside folks who have centered bodies and pleasures and sex and intimacy. When I caught my breath, he plainly said, "great, what are you reading right now?"

Black and trans voices have long taught me about the power of pleasure and about capacious and intersectional possibilities beyond the status quo. They have taught me to think both beyond an orgasm, and alongside an orgasm—they have taught me to think collectively. I had literally been resting near adrienne maree brown's book Pleasure Activism, perched on my nightstand for months, when I finally opened it up a few weeks into the pandemic. The collection reminds me, first, how Black women, both then and now, work to amplify pleasure and the politics of feeling good under the conditions of white supremacy. Joan Morgan educates me about the variegated ways Black women "claim pleasure and a healthy erotic as fundamental rights."¹ Those ways, she describes, are marked with stops and starts and stutters and therefore complicate "our understanding of black female subjectivities in ways that invigorate, inform, and sharpen a contemporary black feminist agenda."² Since 2013, Morgan's own Black feminist collective (called the Pleasure Ninjas) has aimed "to push forward Black women's pleasure as a feminist ideal."³ Second, I am also reminded of Juno Roche's work which recognizes the possibilities of pleasure despite cisheteropatriarchy. They have taught me the importance of asking about pleasure in discussions of gender affirmation surgery, gender transition, and the overall capacities of our bodies.⁴ Like Roche, I remember that asking how folks are able to learn something new during a confusing time might shape what pleasure can be and become during the pandemic. Although the beginning of the US COVID-19 outbreak wasn't the first time I felt the liberatory power of pleasure, the question "what are you reading" called me to think about what pleasure could be beyond individualized modes of feeling good.

What could pleasure be in the pandemic? What could it become? Could it ground our relationships over Zoom and Houseparty? Our marches to the district court for Black justice? Could we feel pleasure in our bodies without the presence of others? These are the questions that fuel my anxiety...