PHOTOGRAPHY Cherry Au
Hedonism, classically defined as the “pursuit of pleasure,” has long been burdened by biases rooted in homophobia. The criminalisation of homosexuality across societies worldwide has forced many LGBTQIA+ individuals, both historically and today, to conceal their sexualities and repress their identities. As a result, even the mere suggestion of queer pleasure has often been vilified, conjuring images of drug-fuelled, latex-clad orgies, unprotected intimacy, and rampant outdoor cruising.
The reality, of course, is far more nuanced. The expressions of queer pleasure are as diverse as the many identities within the LGBTQIA+ community, encompassing everything from vibrant nightlife cultures to quiet, intimate moments of sexual, sensual, and platonic connection. And yet, even these interpretations tend to frame pleasure as an individualistic, perhaps even indulgent, pursuit.
But what if we reconceptualised pleasure not as personal gratification, but as a foundation for collective action and shared liberation? As author Prishita Maheshwari-Aplin asks in their new book: “What more can pleasure offer us, and how can we transform this pleasure into intentional practice in pursuit of a collective liberatory future?”
Published by 404 Ink, Roses for Hedone: On Queer Hedonism and World-Making Through Pleasure explores queer hedonism not as a momentary phenomenon or indulgence, but rather a transformational route – whether via euphoric raves, inspired art, marching side by side in protest, or sharing simple delights – through which we can learn from our past, connect in the present, and look towards a more fair, hopeful future together.
Having spent the better part of the past decade working directly with diverse queer communities as a grassroots organiser, Maheshwari-Aplin does not position themselves as a moral authority. Rather, they illuminate the tangible pathways to joy that individuals pursue in their everyday lives, and explore how this pursuit of pleasure might be reimagined to nourish our communities and contribute meaningfully to the ongoing struggle for global LGBTQIA+ equality.
Following a book launch at Dalston’s The Divine, Prishita Maheshwari-Aplin shares how their activism inspired them to pen their debut book, its links to ancient Greek mythology, and how we can cultivate these intentional practices into our daily lives.
I appreciate that “what inspired you” is a big question, but can you share some of the personal experiences you had in the lead-up to formulating this concept that inspired your work?
Thank you for that question, because I think it’s one that is important for me to reflect on. I think that the narrative in this book and the ideas that I try to propose have been absorbed in me and come around through living, more than anything else. It’s almost inevitable for me to have reached this point just through the experiences that I’ve had in and around the queer community in London and also organizing with queer activist groups and community members around the world at various points in the last seven years or so.
It’s almost inevitable for me to have reached this point just through the experiences that I’ve had in and around the queer community in London and also organizing with queer activist groups and community members around the world at various points in the last seven years or so.
During that time, I’ve been drawn to reading and understanding the different schools of thought around how we understand our own queerness, and how queer culture both forms and sustains itself and propagates itself. I think it’s such an incredibly rich and interesting subcultural identity. As with all marginalised groups, there’s a tendency to categorise and box experiences too much, but I also think there’s such beauty in the sharedness of it all. I think for me, it was just living and loving and experiencing what all the community can offer, but also gaining an understanding of where I think we need to go next.
The book opens with the quote “A love letter to the queer will”. Why was this important for you to use this book to address queer communities on this subject?
I think that LGBTQ – I’m going to say LGBTQ plus rather than queer in this specific instance, because I think that the LGBTQ plus movement for equal rights and for access and for protection from discrimination, especially since the 70s in the US and the UK and in the West, has been obviously incredibly important for the safety and needs and progress of the community, but I also think that it has come with a level of palatability and assimilation from the queer community, this kind of sense, and the fight for things like equal marriage and access to the same systems and workplaces and structures that cis het people automatically are included in has perhaps required a level of distance from our own radical ways of living and seeing the world and relating to one another, so that we can be thought of as fitting in or assimilating into those systems.
While that’s been really important, I think that along the way, perhaps internally, we’ve started to lose our sense of identity and belonging, and our sense of responsibility that comes from creating something safe and beautiful together, even if that means exclusion from the rest of society. It’s such a fragile line to tread between safety and community in the world we live in, but I wanted to address this to the community and especially to the queer will for change, the power and the strength that we have to make things happen ourselves and to look after each other. Despite all of that assimilation and all of that bending to the will of society to basically request a better way of being treated, we’re still in a situation now where trans people are facing extreme discrimination and violence across the world, especially in countries like the UK and the US, which at one point were perhaps seen as really progressive on LGBTQ rights, and it feels like it’s a time to once again look at the ways in which we’re actually creating safety for ourselves, and whether that needs to be done in a different way and like through the power of our own queer will, rather than palatability.
It’s such a fragile line to tread between safety and community in the world we live in, but I wanted to address this to the community and especially to the queer will for change, the power and the strength that we have to make things happen ourselves and to look after each other.
The book presents hedonism “not as a momentary phenomenon or indulgence” but as the cultivation of joy, and how this, once acknowledged, can be channelled into collective action. It’s the first time I’ve really seen “hedonism” depicted as anything other than self-interested or individual pleasure. Has this been the same reaction you’ve received since discussing this topic, and is there a taboo about pleasure or hedonism you’d like to break?
I love that feedback, because that’s what I was trying to go for. Generally, that is the sense I get from friends and others who have read the book so far. I’m definitely not going to pretend like I’m the first person ever to propose something like this, there may have been individual thinkers and theorists who have drawn these links before, and in the book, I draw on the work of adrienne maree brown, who wrote Pleasure Activism, and also José Esteban Muñoz, who wrote Cruising Utopia, both of whom talk about this sense of shared joy or pleasure being a part of our creation of utopia or activism. The book itself is like it opens with, and is very much rooted in the essay by Audre Lorde, ‘Uses of the Erotic’, which, again, the whole premise of it was that shared pleasure can be a driver of change. I wanted to use the term “hedonism”, and I wanted to reframe the word because, as you say, the word has a very loaded history and definition.
I say in my introduction, the mainstream canon presents hedonism as this inevitable and individual spiral and destructive energy, and I really wanted to reframe it as not a destructive energy, but as a creative and innovative and world-making energy – if it is engaged with intention – because I think that that’s where I find my community falling short sometimes. We are perhaps still functioning within the trauma and the pain of the 70s and the 80s, where joy and pleasure and hedonism and a reclamation of our sexuality and identity, through sometimes unthinking or escapist sex and clubbing and drug use, is still very much embedded in queer culture and a way in which we think that we are claiming our identities by engaging with. And, while I’m definitely not demonizing that or saying that there’s anything wrong with it, I just I wanted to take the idea of queer hedonism as this self-fulfilling experience and cast a different eye on it that doesn’t just put it in the context of joy in the face of trauma and escapism, but instead asks, what more can we do with it?
I wanted to take the idea of queer hedonism as this self-fulfilling experience and cast a different eye on it that doesn’t just put it in the context of joy in the face of trauma and escapism, but instead asks, what more can we do with it?
How did you go about formulating your chapters and sectioning these ideas?
I had good fun with this, actually. When 404 Ink asked me for the chapter breakdown, all of a sudden, I feared that my idea was becoming a real book, and I didn’t know how to structure it, but it was really interesting to think about how it could be shaped. What grounded it was that, along with talking about what more hedonism and pleasure can achieve, I wanted to try and use examples within the queer community and around the queer community to expand our definition of hedonism as well. The definition of hedonism is the “pursuit of pleasure”. While there are lots of different ways of looking at that, even just pleasure itself – the experience of pleasure is such a wide thing, there are so many different feelings and sensations and experiences that can bring us pleasure – so I thought about the different categories of love that the Ancient Greeks had. They had at least eight different words for love, each representing different experiences of love.
There is “Eros” which is erotic love, and “Philautia”, which is self-love, so I chose four of those and then a fifth for the conclusion that I felt could create a framework within which to say: if we can have these different types of love, these different experiences of love, then we can have different experiences and types of pleasure that are associated with these loves. And thus, the pursuit of those pleasures is hedonism in all its different forms. I tried to think about a journey from sex and drugs and clubbing all the way through play and towards community care. Not that it’s a linear journey, but I tried to expand the idea of hedonism from our mainstream perception of it.
If we can have these different types of love, these different experiences of love, then we can have different experiences and types of pleasure that are associated with these loves. And thus, the pursuit of those pleasures is hedonism in all its different forms.
Did you find those words through your research? Did you find the language as you were researching this topic, or was there an interest in ancient Greece within you already?
One of my special interests as a teenager was ancient Greek mythology. I read a lot of different books about ancient Greek mythology, and my first tattoo was of Medusa. I grew up in India until I was nine, and my grandma was a practicing Hindu, and while I never really grew up religious in the same sense, I was definitely very spiritual. I think that the structure of Hinduism as a more Pagan-leaning festival with lots of different gods that have different roles and have different associations with nature and with the movement of energies, I think that really appealed to me.
As I grew up and got to learn about other religions and cultures and histories, I think the ancient Greeks’ combination of aesthetic beauty and stories that were just so rich, I found myself really fascinated by all the different characters. What I love about ancient Greek mythology and their gods – which is, I think, similar to Hindu gods as well – is that while they are gods, they are not above human characteristics. They are very flawed. They have darkness, they have jealousy. They act out. I think I was so fascinated by the human messiness of these gods, despite the fact that they held the world within their grasp. I related to the way that then led to philosophical concepts within ancient Greek philosophy and theory, because there was always this understanding of the complexity, and also the light and dark, not that it’s binary like that, but of human nature, I guess it was the naturalness of it. Homosexuality was very normalized, as far as we understand, in ancient Greek culture – there were some rituals that involved sort of orgies and all kinds of things. And I think that’s another way I think it links to these themes.
What I love about ancient Greek mythology and their gods, while they are gods, is that they are not above human characteristics. They are very flawed. They have darkness, they have jealousy. They act out. I think I was so fascinated by the human messiness of these gods, despite the fact that they held the world within their grasp.
I know your expertise lies in these areas of queer studies, but was there particularly anything surprising or insightful that you came across in your research?
I guess it wasn’t surprising in the same way, because I don’t think I had a pre-conception about it, but something that I love learning about – and gave a different angle to my chapter about partying, clubbing and nightlife that I was expecting to get – was my interview with Pawan Dhall, a gay archivist and community organizer who lives in Kolkata, in India. I interviewed him a few years back for an article about an archive he had called Varta, which archives all the materials from this support group called the Council Club. It is one of the earliest-known gay support groups in India, set up in the early 90s in Kolkata. I reached out to him, and I wanted to speak to him about nightlife and clubbing in India. What was it like for gay activists and gay people? And for queer people in India, how did they use nightlife and partying and clubbing as a way to manage or escape from the extreme homophobia?
What I found really interesting was, even though I kept on trying to ask him about specific venues that they would go to or what kind of clubs or bars were coming up, and also trying to speak to him about cruising, the main stories that he told with lots of fondness were about these private little parties that they would have in homes that weren’t even particularly erotic or debauched. He described them as schoolboy parties, very PG-13, and they would just eat food and do a little bit of dancing. I think from that, what I got was how important it is just having a safer space to be even a bit flirty.
It can get so overwhelming to think about how we can have any influence or impact, or can cultivate those practices, when all of the issues that we are being confronted with feel so large and so unmanageable. We can end up feeling quite powerless, but I think that focusing in on the micro level, on the immediate, on the local, is how we can start to build those connections and those practices and embed our values in action.
It’s been a difficult time for queer communities across the globe, and I love that more than just advocating for action, you are investigating how we can connect with our inner activist and engage with self-motivated and intentional practices. Aside from reading your book (of course!), where can readers start in cultivating these intentional practices into their daily lives?
It can get so overwhelming to think about how we can have any influence or impact, or can cultivate those practices, when all of the issues that we are being confronted with feel so large and so unmanageable. We can end up feeling quite powerless, but I think that focusing in on the micro level, on the immediate, on the local, is how we can start to build those connections and those practices and embed our values in action. Literally, like zooming in on ourselves and little lives and worlds and thinking, “I can do these bigger actions, and I should still be engaging with what’s happening around the world, but what can I do today to support someone in my life? What can I do today to help someone?” Maybe it’s volunteering at a local community garden, or supporting a loved one to do whatever they need to do. I think it’s about zooming in and looking at our immediate facilities and the way in which we relate to one another.
There’s a ripple effect that happens (it sounds kind of like wonky and a bit like spiritual bullshit) but I genuinely believe that the way in which we embody our values when we relate to the people that are in our immediate lives – it doesn’t matter whether we’re being like incredibly vocal activists – if we’re not treating the people in our lives with care and communication and consideration and meeting the values that we hold, then it doesn’t really mean anything. What we’re doing outside of that, I think that then gives us the power and the energy to be able to drive change together as well. When we feel safer, when the people in our lives feel safer, we’re then able to have to fill our cups and have the energy to transfer that into bigger actions or movement building for change on a national or international level.
I talk about it in my book as this “pleasure mycelia”, and I talk about the little mycelium that connects fungi under the ground and connects them to other plants. I’m not the first person to make this connection, but that really represents this interconnectedness under woodlands, and scientists have referred to it as this Wood Wide Web. This means that all these plants are interconnected, can rely on one another, and provide mutual aid when needed. I think of us as all connected to one another through these mycelia, too. Through actions that bring us shared joy and pleasure, we strengthen those mycelia to one another. When we have a beautiful meal together and giggle and make a piece of art together, we’re strengthening those pleasure mycelia and I think it’s down those channels that when things are hard, we’re able to then tug on them and get the support we need, or provide the support we need in a big network.
Roses for Hedone by Prishita Maheshwari-Aplin is available to order now from 404ink.com
Enjoyed this story? Help keep independent queer-led publishing alive and unlock the BRICKS Learner Platform, full of resources for emerging and aspiring creatives sent to you every week via newsletter. Start your 30-day free trial now.