The Reticent Revolution of Sexual Daydreams

Abstract

Daydreaming is a spoken word poem that captures the intimate moment in which a woman fantasizes about having sex with her ‘crush’. Although romantic and tender at times, this piece is not a snapshot of ‘everlasting love’ between two people, but of the reticent revolution of self-love, self-indulgence, and self-surrender that invokes sexual daydreams. brown’s (2019) ‘Pleasure Activism’ observes the sensual imagination as a private and safe place where we develop fantasies of what we desire – what we want to do to others, or what we want done to us by others or what we want to witness, while acknowledging that these fantasies are heavily influenced by cultural social norms and intersecting systems of hierarchy that can perpetuate the disempowerment of ourselves and others. This leads brown to recognize sexual fantasies as sites for radical healing and liberation – as a quiet space where we get to intentionally work on developing new fantasies and generate power in and/or out of the bedroom. Inspired by brown’s work, Daydreaming challenges androcentric and suppressive cultures of sexual exploitation and repression by (re)imagining and (re)claiming sex as something full of reciprocity, rapture, and vocality, thus disrupting the long-standing history of silencing survivors of sexual trauma and the patriarchal view that sexual pleasure is primarily for white straight cis men. As such, the poem embodies counter-hegemony, not only offering us an opportunity to see, feel, sense, and imagine differently, but to also (re)shape “our real-life desires and practices”, as brown (2019) puts it (p. 222). By creating space to envision new imaginary landscapes of sexual healing, sexual empowerment, and sexual liberation, Daydreaming reminds us of the power and potential of the radical sexual imagination to liberate a part of our (sexual) selves from within. It seeks to celebrate the political and liberating process of shamelessly luxuriating in our own erotic imaginations to activate our inner sexual worlds, and thus to produce social change.