Lively collaborations: feminist reading group erotics for liveable futures

Following Audre Lorde's powerful framing of the erotic as an enlivening, creative, and potentially transformative force, feminist reclamations of the erotic have emphasized the power and joy of collaboration. Such approaches emphasize that while the erotic is not necessarily sexual, it is a fundamentally relational form of love. In this article, I consider the power of the erotic within feminist postgraduate reading groups, and attend to the ways in which lively, trusting, intellectual connection encourages vibrant thinking, a greater sense of resilience, and, potentially, an inclusion of diverse voices in academia. Such collaboration not only creates spaces of generative refuge from the oftentimes patriarchal and individualistic structures of academia, but also potentially transforms those structures both by supporting those students who might not otherwise find academia welcoming and by emboldening them to take up more space. By way of illustration, I use the animated cartoon Steven Universe—a radical queer celebration of deep collaboration—to consider how we might best care for and encourage such experiences. In particular, I focus on what the figure of the "fusion," a manifestation of shared experience, might teach us about creating liveable futures, including the attunement, openness, responsibility, and honoring of co-creation required to create and sustain such transformative, collaborative, conversations.