“Let’s Talk about Sex”

Abstract

Women’s voices and spaces for talking and sharing their health concerns are of primary importance to the possibility of empowerment. Discussions about the body and sexuality, while often mapped onto female-assigned persons, have historically been treated as taboo. Without conversations around the bodymind, well-being, and sex, heteropatriarchal controls over women’s bodies persist. In the age of Trump and abortion bans, it is crucial for marginalized groups to reclaim their means of bodily and sexual empowerment. This chapter suggests that humor and other rhetorical and poetic compositional devices are important means of health-based subversion in the punk and rap feminist trios discussed. Humor is a helpful way to break down some of the fear, anxiety, and stigma surrounding women talking about (and) feeling, including touching, their bodies. This chapter affirms how the ear, as an idealized body part in which information supposedly penetrates, is constitutive in reclaiming women’s health.