Writer Macarena Gómez-Barris on finding beauty in ambiguity

This [term] 'femme' becomes more possible to me as a figure for not just embodiment, but for thought, action, engagement, connection.

Macarena Goméz-Barris is Professor and Chair of Modern Culture and Media at Brown University, founder of the Global South Center at Pratt Institute, an organization which supports artists, activists, and scholars in their efforts to decolonialize local and global communities.

In this episode, Goméz-Barris talks about how one can and must find beauty in the most ambiguous of places, how she uses the word “femme” to escape the embattled histories of the word “female," and how she has—and hasn’t—moved on from a traumatic early swimming lesson with her father.

References:

Constantine Petrou Cavafy

Waiting for the Barbarians

Audre Lorde

Uses of the Erotic, The Erotic is Power

Saidiya Hartman

Octavia E. Butler

Parable of the Talents