[“Zena: What do you think health care providers would need to learn as part of their training to become pleasure-centred? What would your curriculum look like?
Dawn: I’d start with helping them learn their own experiences of body and pleasure. If someone wants to go into a profession that helps facilitate spaces for healing, they need to start with themself. What are your experiences of boundaries and consent? Do you understand your body and your edges and how to communicate around them? Where do you notice things feeling tender and shameful and scary?
I want health care providers’ training to be about empathy and understanding the role of pleasure in their lives, and the barriers to it, so they become more skilful at talking about pleasure with patients, including when people are experiencing pain or are in crisis. I think it’s important for providers to normalize conversations where we can talk about what feels good. I would love to have health care providers ask me questions like: What brings you a greater sense of aliveness? How might we work with your body to find ways to make the things you enjoy doing feel more ease filled? What kinds of support would help you to experience less burnout? What kinds of pleasure are you experiencing? What can we do that increases your pleasure or gets you to a place where pleasure becomes possible? Questions like these open up different conversations and create opportunities to dream, create, and share resources.
Becoming pleasure-centred also necessitates attention to health care providers’ learning and working conditions. What kinds of support do they have? What kind of power exists in their schooling and learning? What kind of accessibility do they have?
I imagine this radical future where those of us seeking care feel utterly supported and like we have lots of choice and the people providing care feel extraordinarily supported and able to be vulnerable. I think this would help our care providers’ way of working and learning feel more generative and less about burnout, tolerating, pushing through, and performing a certain level of wellness. It would also make it easier for Black, Indigenous, and people of colour, disabled people, sex workers, queer and trans people, fat people, parents, and others who don’t fit the narrow stereotype of what a health care provider looks like to become health care providers.
When it’s not about working a forty-eight-hour shift with three hours of sleep or getting through a hundred patients in a week, people with radically different identities, experiences, and abilities can provide health care, too. If health care providers were brought up inside of a system where collaboration was deeply valued over competitiveness or being able to outlast or outperform, I think it would help enable people to show up with more curiosity, empathy, and a commitment to finding our way together.”]
Pleasure as the Baseline: Interview with Dawn Serra, from The Care We Dream Of: Liberatory & Transformative Justice Approaches to LGBTQ+ Health, edited by Zena Sharman, 2021