Promiscuity Not Production

I was thinking about the essay I shared yesterday, and how it resonated with a few people--actually people in very different fields. And I was thinking that academia is just where I am located, but of course, not exclusively where the institutional burnout, fatigue, shenanigans, are located.

The dance artist Biba Bell suggested that promiscuous engagement across fields, rather than loyalty to a single institution, is a way to resist the singular focus on "productivity". I was thinking: promiscuity rather than production is a kind of memorable shorthand.

What would promiscuity not production look like? Feel like? And that thought reminded me of a talk I once saw in grad school by Brad Epps, a foundational scholar of queer studies and Spanish studies/Latin American studies, who had written an essay on the Argentine poet Néstor Perlongher titled "The Ethics of Promiscuity" (you can read it here in Spanish). I associate promiscuity with Perlongher and Epps. People who, in the 1980s and 2000s, respectively, were reconceptualizing what bodies do, how they move, how they desire, and how we write about them.

To imagine that promiscuity returns, today, as an imperative, a kind of echo or a reminder, is not a coincidence. Perlongher was acting promiscuously in the context of his exile from the Argentine dictatorship (1976-83), in Brazil. Epps was writing about it in the context of the early notion of globalization studies, in dialogue with notions of hybridity and a re-evaluation of mestizaje. I don't agree with everything Epps says there, but I am reminded of how certain terms endure--promiscuity--and how their endurance is a reminder to not lose sight/feeling of what the body knows, how it knows, and senses, and feels, and how those senses can also, have always, informed a liberatory politics.

And then: