Where does the artist live in your body?

The uterus, chalice, ox head shape (and horns of the fallopian tubes), this powerful organ of the female mammalian body, reduced to its biological function, carries within itself a spectacular symbolic force. Come with me and let's play with metaphors. Throughout a life of maturation, every month, very stimulating impulses, ideas, and desires surface, following a trajectory of luck and readiness for fertilization. Internal layers of wisdom, acceptance, and receptivity are formed in order to sustain, to provide a substrate for something chosen to germinate and develop. These ideas carry within them the power of seeds. Whether through literal or figurative fertilization, the process is always extremely powerful in meaning and representation. Sometimes it teaches us about the end, about death, in a sensitive and subtle way. Other times, it gestates the human creature with its individual and collective impacts.

Female creativity, in this context, is redundant. When it is freed from constraints, it emerges as a profoundly insurgent act. Beyond producing and performing in a literal sense, its figurative exercise implies something very dangerous: the ability to live in tune with one's own senses, desires, and rhythms.

This is where the erotic enters as an intimate experience of existential autonomy, not as a sexualized performance for the pleasure of others. As Audre Lorde states, “the erotic is a vital force that springs from lived fullness and connects us to what is most whole in us.” To access the deep erotic is to be guided by sensations that do not follow domesticating protocols. It is to think beyond the herd, beyond the mirror of others, beyond the meritocratic and suffering-conditioned Judeo-Christian morality.

This male-centered culture, fearing this power, turned the erotic (female body) into a field of control. It reduced, objectified, and pornified it for internal consumption. It turned our source of life, our blood, our ancestral and immanent connection into something dangerous and vulgar, so that we would dissociate the interdependence between body, creativity, and spirituality.

It turns out that culture has failed, fails, and will always fail as long as it tries to fix what is made up of movement. The erotic (of the female body) is too curious. Its function creates worlds, remakes networks, regenerates in rhizomatic flow. It is too fertile to fit into Order with a capital “O,” which we know to be artificial and invented. It is subversive because it escapes. Even if we wanted to, we couldn't contain it.

...And we know, historically, that culture exiles/destroys that which it doubts, that which it mobilizes, that which carries within itself the pleasurable impulse to live feeling finitude — something that evokes, indeed, a right to one's own nature.

Therefore, thinking erotically—that is, in connection with one's own desire, pleasure, rhythm, dream—is spectacularly liberating. It means breaking with expectations, giving oneself something new and less predictable. It means thinking about oneself from within, based on one's own sensitive compass, rather than on the reflection projected by a culture that perpetuates itself at the expense of forgetting who we are and what we are capable of.

In this context, Lilith and Aphrodite emerge as living archetypes of this indomitable erotic force. Lilith, Adam's first wife, who refused to be silenced and lie down beneath him; who preferred exile to having to obey the orders of that supposed god. Lilith is an erotic force that ejects itself from doctrine, even before the word. She is attentive to gestures. She is the living being who refuses to be accepted, who cannot bear to put on a sweet, good-girl face in order to fit in. Aphrodite, on the other hand, often smeared with the image of romantic beauty, evokes the power of creative excitement—she who enjoys herself, who transforms the world around her with her entire presence, with her lively sensuality, with her sovereign choice. Both are expressions of what the culture of violence cannot appropriate: women in a state of power. Not to function, but to de-mechanize themselves. To deepen their capacity — and not to (un)develop themselves.

The erotic, understood in this way, is a bodily intelligence that brings us back to ourselves. It is a sacred territory where no external authority has jurisdiction. It teaches us to recognize the signs of our own yes and our own no. To be guided by internal excitements that cannot be prescribed or explained. And that is precisely why the erotic is revolutionary.

From a biological perspective, we are mammals. We procreate. But what is rarely recognized is that this process only happens because there is pleasure — and not just necessity. If gestating, giving birth, nurturing, and releasing into the world were traumatic or unpleasant by nature, the human species would have already ceased to exist, because we would quickly learn about what puts us at risk. The female body is, in itself, a space for sensory creation. Therefore, creativity cannot be reduced to the mental. That is why we need to integrate the uterus, the cycles, and the states of enjoyment that constitute us.

When we talk about giving birth, we could never reduce its meaning to a single event, without evoking the process, without due reference to a deeply impactful, visceral, and mental journey that disrupts, mobilizes, and transforms a woman's psyche, regardless of who she is, where she is, and with whom. Giving birth is not just about having children. It is not “shitting out a watermelon,” as we hear around. Emptying childbirth is a betrayal that, through trauma and violence, we have learned to perpetuate.

By seeking a relationship with the body and creativity, we can gain momentum to project new realities, new perceptions. We can access a visceral place of excitement, transformation, and self-confidence. Giving birth is sexual, because feeling-thinking is offered to the body that creates language. We give birth to ideas, projects, dances, texts, paintings, books, visions of new ways of living. All of this is born from within. Not from the fear of scarcity. It is born from the abundance of the body that knows itself, that activates the imagination, that dares not to accept normosis.

Awareness of this power is political. Living in contact with one's own creative source, recognizing oneself as an erotic and sensitive being, undermines the foundations of the hierarchical social structure that is sustained by the repression of bodies. Social diagnoses and prescriptions about what we feel and how we express ourselves aim to keep this power out of reach.

As Silvia Federici teaches us, during the formation of modern capitalism, women's bodies — especially their uteruses — were transformed into the property of the state, the church, and their husbands. The massacre of witches was also the massacre of female autonomy, of bodily knowledge, of embodied creativity. The body that feels, that dances, that intuits, was silenced, punished, separated from the earth, from herbs, from its alchemy. A woman who knows herself is a threat. A woman who feels pleasure is uncontrollable.

It is no wonder that we feel infantilized, disconnected, devitalized. The structure that permeates us wants us distracted, anxious, medicated, stereotyped. There is an explicit agenda of disconnection from the origin of life—from real, lived, felt life. We are led to performance, acceleration, the aesthetics of perfection, while silencing the wisdom of the body that knows how to stop, pulse, give birth, and die in cycles. That is why we resist. That is why we create.

Creators by nature—of language, of culture. We are the species that questions, that doubts, that imagines. We are born in entirely free bodies, and over time, socialization alienates us from ourselves. Moral repression distances us from direct experience with pleasure and convinces us that thinking is more legitimate than feeling. But look: we don't feel thoughts. We feel what they provoke in us. That is why feeling guides us. That is why feeling that you can is power.

Our senses are an internal compass that connects us to the world. We are in constant contact with people, objects, plants, sounds, smells, words. Everything passes through us. Everything affects us. And that is why we need to validate our sensory experiences, recognizing our emotions as ethical guides rather than weaknesses.

The intensity of catastrophic, inhuman, and terrifying information to which we are exposed daily is not neutral: it shapes our nervous system, putting us in a constant state of alertness and reactivity. We lose our center, we lose our ability to listen, we lose our imagination.

And here, once again, creativity appears as resistance. Not as the production of things, but as the reinvention of life. As Gloria Anzaldúa says, we are borderline beings — we inhabit many worlds and belong to all and none at the same time. This condition, although painful, is fertile. We create from ruptures, from margins, from in-between places. Imagination is what allows us to cross the symbolic desert and open up new paths of existence.

Therefore, creating is not a gift, it is a right. A right that needs to be practiced every day, in small everyday actions: choosing silence instead of chatter, dancing for no reason, saying “no” firmly, embroidering a word while crying, cooking with the knowledge of what nourishes (or poisons). The creativity I am talking about is not about doing more, but about putting your soul into what touches you and what passes through you. We are not crazy. We are revolutionizing theories, making revolutions part of everyday life. Nothing will stop us from remembering who we are and why we are here.

Between Choice and Subjugation

Since leaving my profession and career behind to dive headfirst into immigrant life, I have devoted myself to other ways of living and thinking. From institutional work to everyday experiences, I began to reflect deeply on hegemonic culture and how it, through its familial, emotional, educational, and economic mechanisms, structures and freezes our paradigms and regulates our perception of our autonomy.

There is an important symbolic turning point when we manage to stop and ask ourselves: "Wait a minute, does this make sense for my life experience? Is this how I want to live? If I die tomorrow, is this how I would like to have lived my story? Are my choices based on my conscious will or on nameless fears? I dare to look fear in the eye and ask: what do you want from me? - in an attempt to name and confront it (?)"

The answers that emerge will be personal and unique. However, they invariably lead us to question what has been established up to that point and push us in directions and attitudes that will disrupt the supposed natural order of things. And it takes courage—and some faith—since, when we disagree with the forces that sustain the current economic and social macrosystem, we encounter the many layers of censorship and prohibitions imposed on a more authentic becoming-woman.

I am interested in topics such as domination, subjective prohibitions, and control mechanisms—not only as subjects of study, but also as reflections on the reality that has affected me personally for a long time.

As a white, middle-class Brazilian woman, I played the game with the “rule book” under my arm. I studied for years, worked, studied some more, and followed all the steps that were supposed to guarantee me a minimally stable, recognized, and dignified working life. Until I realized that, from where I was looking at my life, the path ahead was one of exhaustion and a compressed, standardized existence.

It's difficult to say this without feeling a little naive and unsuspecting—but I have to be honest. I always wanted to give birth and raise my children. I didn't find the model of children in daycare, with nannies, full schedules, and rushing around, appealing. And look, this isn't an alienated criticism, because I observe the struggle women go through to raise their children without resources or support. However, until then, I thought, if it's not someone like me, who studied, who was able to seek knowledge about childhood, bonding experiences, structural gender oppression (with the invisibility of domestic and care work), who has a partner with me, supporting and sustaining choices that are unusual in my generation, who else would it be (?).

When we began gathering strength to live abroad, this reflection was present: how to create space to experience motherhood fully, without the pressure of the market, productivity, and acceleration that I already knew (and hated)?

We left Brazil with a genuine desire to build another reality: a more expansive life, with more time for good living, trips to learn about other cultures, other languages — to open up new horizons. When our first child was born, the pressure to return to the old way reappeared with force. That's when I experienced a profound identity crisis. We didn't want to leave him in daycare all day to follow normative lives that we already knew where they would lead. So, I decided to give up on continuing on that path that had already shown me its limits in terms of pleasure, stimulation, and meaning.

It was at that point that I strongly felt the symbolic weight of the culture operating around me — especially in the way my choice to prioritize my time as a woman and mother was interpreted. Instead of being recognized as a gesture of courage and autonomy, it was read as a gesture of someone who had lowered herself to the life of a housewife, who had given up, who didn't have the strength to continue, who was lazy, who lived outside the reality of the world. That's right, even though I had already had a supposedly adult life of paying my own bills, with jobs of some social value, I imagined, as a teacher, obstetric nurse, researcher.

More than that: the simple fact that I had become financially dependent on my partner—even within a shared project, discussed, desired, and undertaken by both of us—began to carry more weight in social perception than all the immense, extremely repetitive, tiring, daily work, full of unpredictability, that is raising a child in this society without unpaid emotional support networks. As if being financially dependent on my partner insidiously nullified my intellect, my labor force, and the full agency of my adult life.

Care work, which is essential and fundamental, continues to be undervalued because it escapes the immediate logic of the market, even by women themselves, who mostly perform it. But it is precisely this work that silently sustains the functioning of social life, as we already know. By caring, we contribute — in a concrete way — to the overall health of our children. This has a direct impact on public health, education, and safety systems. Children who are cared for and allowed to play tend to get sick less often, develop more evenly, and require less from the state throughout their lives. Even so, the hegemonic culture insists on valuing only what is counted as capital. What is at stake is not only power, but symbolic authority, a clear message of recognition of social value. And it was this distortion that struck me hard, making me wonder: since when is sustaining life — with all the daily implications experienced by all of us, from the time spent on organization, planning, and execution — less important than sustaining a bank account?

When it was just the two of us in the world, we lived the reality of two autonomous adults together, each focused on their own lives, with our libido at work and sharing our free time. With children, we moved out of the center.

Of course, providing for our children remains important and indispensable, undeniably. But we have to go further to reflect. We are challenged to undergo a process of intense maturation, since our needs now come after our child's fever, our child's sleep, our child's needs.

Are we the ones denying this reality, or is it a society that operates on an authoritarian logic, removing us from the concrete and symbolic power contained in this experience, which is numerically female and everyday?

Why do we continue to deny this at the expense of symbolic-practical subordination without asserting ourselves from our place as non-machine bodies?

Why do we accept without complaint the separation of the domestic and work worlds, when for women both stem from the same being who only accumulates responsibilities?

Why do we accept a hierarchy that privileges mechanistic thinking and linear rationality?

What happens to our perception and our ability to engage in emotional relationships in a way that allows us to express our sensitive integrity—without silencing what we feel and want for ourselves when we raise our children?

Why does culture make us feel inferior when we put these fundamental conditions first? If my body and my hours of existence are at the disposal of an experience that is social, in theory encouraged, why does culture demand and expect me (and us) to care, look after, and dedicate ourselves without asking for anything in return?

What leads women to repeat narratives that are detached from the sensitive experience of raising children in favor of patriarchal confetti, whose applause seems conditional on us giving up what happens in our bodies and cycles in order to have the same social value?

Why do we take so long to integrate our sexual and reproductive power with our intellect within our realities in large groups, if not because of the prohibition imposed on us by the rules of the patriarchal game that tells me I will only be good enough when I do this and that, but we all know that we will never be enough in a structurally misogynistic and racist culture, because we will not deliberately kill people for territory, because violence does not define us, because we bleed, we get pregnant, we give birth, we breastfeed. Our constitution is one of connection with life, with inclusion, and never with killing as justifiable or affirmative. The alienation of our condition has led us to terrible macro-systemic consequences.

Culture is born from us.

Why do we delay breaking free from oppression and structural exploitation within ourselves in the family environment, and also laughing together about how innocent we once were?

We are the ones who live and embody social transitions and maturation in our bodies. Every woman knows that raising children requires immense altruism, that the pleasure of the experience can easily be overshadowed by daily difficulties. Therefore, I want to leave behind essentialisms that border on the brutalization of women.

There is another important aspect that is not unrelated to blame and judgment: the rejection of the logic of the triple shift. In my case — as with many other women — this choice did not come from passivity or escape, but from a mature reflection on the kind of life I want to sustain. The emancipation I seek transcends capital. For those of us who had a professional life, immigrating was never about survival, but about getting our time back. Working under constant pressure and stress in an increasingly exploitative system, without social rights, taking care of children, constantly managing family life, trying to maintain some semblance of mental health and a body in shape for gringos to see, as the ideal of female independence? What a trap. As Silvia Frederici said in an interview: “No, we are not emancipated, we are tired and in crisis.”

Not accepting this model does not mean erasing oneself or settling for less. I am a feminist and would never tell a woman to have children, let alone depend on a sexist partner, which is unfortunately very common. On the contrary, it means claiming a sovereign, deliberate stance over one's own time, body, and desires. To challenge the patriarchal system from within the place where it originates, where women-mothers assert themselves as not subjugated to the power that money evokes, is to affirm that creative life, emotional health, and freedom of presence in everyday life are of central value. That we can position ourselves in the world based on a conscious and non-submissive choice. And that this does not make us any less radical in our thoughts on social justice, any less feminist, any less capable.

Many of us are trying to break free from this cycle that only drains us. And in breaking free, there is great discomfort, but there is also space to recreate the world based on other affective and sustainable logics.

If the quest for independence through access to capital via work is not necessarily emancipatory in itself—since, in order to access it, we remain subordinate to patriarchal, financial, and productivist institutions — then what can liberate us, or at least move us beyond the repetition of domination/submission to hierarchies that will never benefit us in the long run?

For me, art has been a source of power. Art demands our freedom. It trains us for freedom. It involves risk, presence, body, imagination. It operates through displacement, subversion, transgression. It disrupts the norms that colonize us from within. Art — whatever form it takes — gives us back the autonomy of gesture, of time, of desire. As they say in my homeland, it is small, but it is big.

While capital is conditioned by artificial systems that classify, control, standardize, and hierarchize us, experimenting with art can be the field where an emancipated body experiences being. A body that is not at the service of others, that does not explain itself, that does not justify itself, that feels, that moves, that creates worlds and re-enchantment through the exercise of perception. And that is profoundly revolutionary. From subjectivity embodied as a political gesture, to everyday life as a symbolic space for fostering and creative input.

Raising children transcends the patriarchal gaze when a woman inhabits the time of creation to recreate herself subjectively in her own way and for her own pleasure. This is an important shift. Giving ourselves permission, offering ourselves, not conceding what is rightfully ours. This is how we create new worlds, we create escapes, detours.

Inhabiting discomfort will be the dwelling place of our autonomy. It will serve us to create more expanded ways of finding meaning, satisfaction, and communion, without obeying the order that we must be submissive and suffer in order to deserve enjoyment.

If not me, then who?

Before calling myself an artist, I was an obstetric nurse. In that profession, I found the sacred in touch, in the ability to be with someone who suffers from the things of the flesh, in the strength of the body that generates life, in the silent power of women who go through childbirth. I deeply loved my work, but it was a constant dance of resistance against the hegemonic forces that want to control, tame, and define a woman's creative path through the objectification of the body and unnecessary interference in childbirth. I demanded of myself to provide good care, but I felt the insidious weight of institutional oppression.

Then, one day, I decided to step away from clinical, academic, and scientific practice to embark on a pilgrimage carrying the following question: “What else do I love to do, besides being a nurse, researcher, teacher?”—a kind of expedition that would require deeper investigation into art, mobilization, and listening to a more sensitive, less obvious, more hidden layer of my desire. I entered uncertain territory, where the risk of seeking meaning was greater, loneliness was denser, and grief was inevitable.

To this day, I wonder where I got the strength to take such a decisive leap... I had no idea how difficult the journey would be. I remember at that time I had a familiar impulsiveness and excitement, like a sensory memory of jumping into the deepest part of the pool from a diving board for the first time as a child. We know how to swim, but jumping from up there, falling to the bottom of that water, having to climb to the surface alone and swim to the edge on our own is quite an adventure. It was an impulse from a deeper place—something more ancestral that whispered that it was time to go with the flow of life, derailing the train, tearing up the map, following my intuition, my own “huevos".

“Freedom is not enough. What I desire still has no name.” I remember when I read that line by Clarice Lispector, as if in a meeting of great sisterhood, I knew where she had written it. A force, something unnameable but which contained the desire to experience, discover, unveil. It took me a while to face my own words, invent my own text, use my own metaphors to say what I think in an interesting way, since I put myself in a no place to say who I am. Motherhood certainly anchored this shift, but it didn't settle me for a second.

I had enormous resistance to writing. I grew up without confidence in the act of writing. As a child, my “diary” was stolen and read without my permission. This event invaded me and embarrassed me. I understood that it was better to keep things to myself. It was the same with my dancing. I value my privacy very much, existing in a time and space that is mine alone, which does not obey external logic. When writing returned as a daily activity, I once again experienced great anguish. I had the impression that once I started transcribing my stream of thoughts onto paper, I would no longer be able to stop. It would be an unrestrained movement where I could denounce and vociferate all the barbarities, violence, silencing, cowardice, injustices, abandonment, and humiliations that I had experienced and witnessed, and where I could redeem myself, narrate in words (because I already painted and already vented my need for self-expression there) my protagonism and my autonomous thinking.

“One is not born a woman: one becomes one.” I love this line because it reminds me to ask: What does it mean to be a woman? What defines me as a woman? Is being called female the same thing? Is it having a body with a uterus? Is it wearing skirts, high heels, colorful earrings, and lipstick? Simone de Beauvoir had a lot to say on this issue, pointing out in a way that had not been propagated until then that the idea of “woman” has been historically fabricated to be the “other” in binary culture, suggesting that a clear understanding of this opens up spaces for us to challenge ourselves in terms of autonomy, independence, and emancipation.

This phrase of hers resonates with me as an invitation—to (de)construct, to touch on the idea of imposed identities, to affirm one's own existence with lucidity. It is in this spirit that I understand what I have experienced so far: a continuous march of detachment and reinvention. Thanks to the company of women who have asserted themselves through their voices and knowledge, I do not feel totally alone. Each one, unraveling her own prohibitions, has found a way to craft her unique story.

I think of Elza Soares, with that raspy voice and indomitable strength, echoing the power to resist and shout: “I don't want to be the woman of the house, I want to be the woman of the world”—teaching me about the relationship between creation and the struggle for sovereignty and an act of self-love. Maya Angelou, courageous and sweet, says that persistence is a way to win: “We may encounter many defeats, but we must not be defeated.” bell hooks expands on this vision and connects resistance to love, love for oneself, love for those who want individual/collective liberation and invent new ways to find communion. Lélia Gonzalez, in studying ancestry, the politics of the body, evokes for me the idea of creation as an active gesture of cultural revolution.

 In short, becoming a woman is not a path free from intense discomfort and exile. The world wants us to fit in, to remedy ourselves, to anesthetize ourselves with false solutions. The pressure is direct and indirect from all sides for us to be standardizable, predictable, transparent, and comparable. All of this entertains, distracts, and distances anyone from their creative, authorial, and authentic pulse...

Then Clarissa Pinkola Estés comes along and tells me about the wild fire, an aspect of the human psyche that, even when buried under normative rubble, never goes out. It stays there, like a small hidden ember. You need to blow on it hard to raise the flame and bring back the internal heat that warms the whole house.

I can't prove it, but I know that an ancestral rhythm dwells within me, an ancient force that gives me deep sustenance and insists that I take it slow. The warm facet of the desire for communion, which refuses domestication, which allows itself eccentricity, which allows itself to redefine notions of dependence/independence, which uses its own “ovaries” to continue creating even when invaded by doubts.

I know that following this fire means entering a deep aquatic underworld, where you cannot see with your eyes, where you need more imaginative and dreamlike artifacts to find answers and new paths to climb. It means participating in life with the feeling of being wonderfully insignificant. Looking at art, its symbols and representations as the great connector of individuals, subjectivities, and collectives. In these moments of putting on my seal skin and diving in, I honor these invisible companions. Sitting by the fire on the dark night of creative exile, I thank Clarice, Simone, Elza, Maya, bell, Lélia and Clarissa. Their words, their unique, authentic ways of talking about mundane, common things, their lives as a reference accompany me and challenge me to be faithful to my fire, the wisdom of my body, my cycles, and to trust my pulse.

And it is on this path, between movements and rests, that I find myself. In a kind of dancing hangover, experiencing the process of learning about my own rhythm, discovering other shapes and colors, softening my relationship with time — as part of a ritual of self-care. All these aspects that concern female existence embodied in practices of wisdom. All this that we all deserve, but that is not given to us lightly or passively — much less by right. All this that, if I don't grant it to myself... who will give it to me, right?