This event is part of the Put Your Hands Where My Eyes Can See group exhibition. This Exhibition occurs at Chocolate Factory. See full exhibition information.

This is an online event on Zoom. RSVP on WithFriends for access information.

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“For us to survive in the mouth of this dragon we call America, we have had to learn this first and most vital lesson– that we were never meant to survive. Not as human beings. And neither were most of you here today, Black or not.” – Audre Lorde

In this workshop, Black Femme Brunch will guide participants in leaving behind the present and pursue the possibility of a future world: a world in which Black, fat, dark-skinned, poor, disabled, neurodivergent, queer and trans femmes and women (henceforth: The Center) do not exist in the clutches of the dragon, but instead glide through life free of its menace. All participants will then collaboratively facilitate a dreaming salon that imagines sustainable futures for The Center.

We will craft a world in which the needs and desires of The Center are the standard of care, access, and community. To guide our visioning, we will discuss how power and access to humanity is withheld from The Center and then framed as individual moralistic failing. This is done in order to maintain the illusion that we deserve less. When we stand in the resonance that there is no need to repress The Center, we can imagine all that we do desire.

Working together in small, self-selected break-out affinity groups, we will actively vision a future that sustains the needs and desires of The Center. Our dreaming will garner a safe place for kikis, connection, care, learning, family, gender expression, sexual expansion, sustainable living, and interdependence.

Fatphobia, ableism, patriarchy, transmisogynoir, and whiteness require the fuel of anti-blackness to sustain trauma, pain, and the disintegration of our wholeness. Our goal is to manifest a world that opens us to our fullness. May our brave dreams generate enclaves of care, safety, pleasure, play, rest, and ease that will allow us to pierce the dragon.

Black Femme Brunch builds community by being a radical, irreverent, and unapologetic celebration of trans and queer black femmes of all genders. Founded in 2014 in Washington, DC by Tuere Khanyisa and Shaan Wade, Black Femme Brunch began with a simple idea: to create an oasis for black femmes in the desert of white queer events, black straight spaces and cisheteronormative LGBT events. Under the stewardship of current creative co-directors, Tuere Khanyisa and Janae Williams (juh weems), since 2015, Black Femme Brunch has curated an Annual DC Black Pride Concert, hosted kink and sexual health events, hosted artbuilds, film screenings, parties and picnics amongst other rich offerings. Black Femme Brunch has been featured on the Black Joy Mixtape (an award-winning black feminist podcast), collaborated with Blk in Space, Halcyon Arts Lab, BYP100DC, BLMDC, Woolly Mammoth Theatre and has presented at International Mx. Leather & Bootblack Conference, Common Field Annual Convening and at the Black Sex Workers Conference. Black Femme Brunch will continue until the entire world is Black Femme Euphoria!

Tuere Khanyisa (Zaddi) is an afrofuturist writer, editor, visual artist and curator of black trans and queer spaces. She is a Dominant genderqueer Black femme who is also fat, kinky, poly and playfully describes herself as “gender suspicious.” Her messianic imperative is to invigorate and unite the black queer and trans community with the radical notion that pursuing pleasure is affirming, powerful, and a long denied and reclaimed right of black people’s humanity. She works to demystify understandings of kink, leather, and sex positivity by offering people safe containers to explore and encounter them without judgement. Zaddi loves writing black speculative fiction and imagining new worlds where black people in the future not only survive, but thrive. Zaddi is the creator and creative co-director of Black Femme Brunch, Road Captain of the Mid-Atlantic Onyx Pearls, an intern of the Carter Johnson Leather Library, and the POC Liaison of IMsL/BB.

Janae Williams (juh weems//fatblackclit) is an interdependent-disciplinary artist whose practice takes cues from: the black baptist church pews she was raised on, the many generations of shapeshifting fat black femmes, dykes and gender-suspicious beings before (and after) her and her love of Seeing black folks. Since 2015, JANAE has organized Black Femme Brunch, an irreverent celebration of black queer and trans femmes based in Washington, DC. She stewards each enclave of her artistic and curatorial practice as an invitation to black folks into witnessing themselves in their wholeness, envisioning (and practicing) liberation for themselves and maximizing play and pleasure as hallowed tools of black bodily and spatial sovereignty. Supported by the Halcyon Arts Lab Fellowship, JANAE composed “hand-i-work”, a suite of arrangements (recompositions) of hymns and spirituals recovered from her childhood memories and piloted Black Intimacy Practice (BIP), a container for black folks (specifically those who are fat trans and queer femmes) to explore and expand their relationships to touch and movement through play. Currently, juh is constructing a world (futureniggaheaven) where black folks are free. futureniggaheaven is protected by nearly 900 peculiar beings called ALLUS (a portmanteau of “all of us”) who are angels protecting black folks’ imaginative capacity for visioning liberation, sovereignty and expansive modes of care and being.