My body my rules, or pedagogy of liberation
Professor. Transfeminine. Pansexual.
The semester begins again — and I place myself back into the world, my desire entering the classroom without asking permission. I seek a partner without catechism or confirmation, one who rejects the bad faith of normative affective scripts and knows how to share a pleasure that thinks.
Among what I offer: unhurried companionship, affectionate touch as a native language, and cunnilingus without restraint — understood as an ethics of attention.
I know how to listen with my entire body, with care and commitment. And I fuck well — not as a promise, but as a practice of redistributing pleasure.
Toys are welcome as extensions of the body and of political imagination, as is colored friendship, which destabilizes the hierarchy between affection and desire, and the relationship of three, which exposes the fallacy of the sovereign subject in love. Nothing frightens me — this is a movement toward the disobedience of minimal love. I teach what monogamy has forgotten: no one is the center, everyone is language.
No false promises. What I do not accept is the absence of real presence.
Those who fear my pleasure have already arrived too late, for my body does not ask for permission or absolution — it interrogates power, it teaches. When my body and my rules unsettle the social order, it is because what is found here is not a scandal, but a thesis in action.
Those who fear this pedagogy have already failed.
Anima Mea
Context Note for International Readers
This text belongs to Mulheres Tara, a Brazilian literary project that brings together voices situated at the intersection of gender, desire, politics, and lived experience. Written from the position of a female soul in the body of a cisgender man, the piece operates simultaneously as manifesto, personal essay, and pedagogical provocation.
In the Brazilian context, public discourse around gender and sexuality remains deeply shaped by religious morality, heteronormative expectations, and institutional violence against trans bodies. Within this landscape, affirming pleasure, affective plurality, and embodied knowledge is not merely confessional or erotic — it is a political act.
The text draws explicitly on existentialist feminist traditions, particularly Simone de Beauvoir’s understanding of subjectivity as situation: one does not simply possess a body or a desire, one becomes them through social conditions, resistance, and choice. Here, the classroom functions as both literal and symbolic space — a site where bodies, knowledge, and power intersect.
Erotic language is used deliberately, not to provoke scandal, but to challenge the separation between intellect and desire, ethics and pleasure. Terms that may appear explicit are mobilized as conceptual tools, naming practices of attention, reciprocity, and redistribution rather than acts of domination or consumption.
Rather than proposing an alternative identity or model of love, the text interrogates the very idea of normative intimacy. It rejects the figure of the “sovereign subject” in favor of relational ethics, shared vulnerability, and presence. Pleasure, in this sense, becomes method — a way of thinking, teaching, and unsettling inherited hierarchies.
For readers outside Brazil, this piece can be read as part of a broader Latin American tradition in which the personal, the political, and the pedagogical are inseparable — and where writing the body is a way of reclaiming agency, knowledge, and futurity.
John Bernardes Justiniano