The Wrong Tern is a queer creative collaborative bringing people together for debauchery

Hedonic Indulgences, Sensual Pleasures, Whimsical Delights

In a world that disciplines the body and commodifies the soul, the pursuit of hedonic indulgences, sensual pleasures, and whimsical delights is not self-indulgence, it is survival strategy and sacred defiance. As José Esteban Muñoz reminds us, queerness is not just an identity but a horizon, a longing for something more than the dull now of capitalist realism. When we claim beauty, leisure, and softness, we are not running from reality, we are striving toward a better one. Rest, joy, touch, and laughter are not trivial; they are revolutionary acts in a system that would prefer us joyless and compliant.

bell hooks taught us that love and pleasure are political. She wrote that healing from oppression begins in the interior, that self-care, sensual expression, and community joy are not luxuries but radical rejections of domination. In a culture that weaponizes exhaustion, overwork, and silence, to choose to love yourself, to decorate your body, to savor food, to take a nap in the middle of the day, these are acts of resistance. Pleasure, like rest, interrupts the cycle of extraction. It says: I am not a machine. I do not belong to your system.

Liberation begins in the body. Community mischief and radical tenderness are forms of healing. Tourmaline reminds us that “joy is not neutral”, that joy is insurgent, especially when it insists on existing without apology or purpose beyond itself. Pleasure is not a retreat from struggle, but the very soil in which resistance must take root. To feel good, to feel alive, in the midst of a world that targets your existence, is profoundly subversive.

So yes, dance. Rest. Eat with your hands. Wear colors that scream. Laugh loudly with your people. These are not detours from liberation, they are its heartbeat. The system does not want us well, whole, or enchanted. It wants us obedient. Pleasure disrupts that. Sensual delight reroutes power. Whimsy throws a wrench in the gears. When we gather to feel joy—trans joy, Black joy, queer joy—we write new maps for the future. Not just resistance, but emergence. Not just survival, but life, in its most radiant form.