The Erotics of Grieves
Abstract
The Erotics of Grieves explores grieving as a portal to liberation and social transformation. Written at the time of the ongoing genocidal violence against Palestinians in Gaza and the repression of solidarity movements in Berlin, this piece situates grieves in political, historical, and embodied contexts. Moving away from a singular, universalist concept of grief, this work conceptualizes grieves as plural, relational, and metabolically intimate processes that shape and unsettle bodies, communities, and social infrastructures. Drawing from Audre Lorde’s Uses of the Erotic and Fred Moten’s Erotics of Fugitivity, it asks how grieving can resist hegemonic power structures and create generative spaces of solidarity, refusal, and world-making. Through autotheoretical reflection, cultural analyses, and embodied performance practices this article traces the visceral, affective, and sonic dimensions of grieves. Engaging with legacies of mourning rituals, racialized and planetary grief, and the vibratory intimacies of sound, it proposes an erotics of grieves as a mode of attunement to loss, connection, and futurity beyond the fantasy of separation. In a time of structural violence, erasure, and epistemicide, The Erotics of Grieves insists on grieving as a radical force of resistance, fugitivity, and transformative care.
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