Twerk Like a Scholar: Embodying the Erotic

by Gregory Valdivia 

I came across this video, and it made me think of our class conversations around sexual subjectivity. This video highlights the feminist discourse around twerking and exposes this art form as a reclamation of cultural tradition and erotic autonomy. 

I love this concept of erotic autonomy, because it gives me a language to discuss the “slut vs. scholar” debate. In this case, we see the “slut” not only as an embodiment of cultural and erotic knowledge, but actually we see this embodiment infiltrate into academia. YAS.

These girls state that twerking is a feminist/cultural/scholarly issue because it unearths a conversation around bodily autonomy and placing the notion of the “ideal woman” onto all women’s bodies. 

Kimari Brand, the twerk scholar, believes that twerking dismantles the politics of respectability, which are assumed cultural iterations of domesticity that restrict women from sexual self-determination and as she calls it, erotic autonomy. She would twerk in public to demonstrate that twerking is more than just a “sexual” dance, but rather it is the cultural performance of empowerment, fun, health, and radical change.