The Joy of Reproductive Justice
With BIPOC-centered storytelling, a Seattle organization builds power one party at a time.
Josefina Mora-Cheung is making space for joy.
As Surge Reproductive Justice’s Our Words Build Power organizer, Mora-Cheung and her colleagues are cultivating activism through community and enjoyment with Just Speak, a quarterly BIPOC-centered reproductive-justice storytelling series that pairs activism with performance. “We think that’s super important, because our communities oftentimes don’t get to center joy and having fun and eating good food and just having that connection time,” she said.
The series’ latest edition, Just Speak After Dark, which focused on sex-positive storytelling, was hosted by Goddess Briq House and featured a lineup of performers at Pioneer Square’s Gallery Erato.
Events like Just Speak After Dark highlight sex-positive conversations and performance, says Mora-Cheung, but they also serve as an entry point into Surge’s related activism, rooted in the values of reproductive justice, the human rights framework founded by Black activists that contextualizes abortion as just one right among many when it comes to bodily autonomy, reproductive freedom, and racial justice.
“It is really important for us to have a place where we can engage people to learn about our campaigns, learn about our work, and see if they want to plug into the work that we’re doing around health care access, around Medicaid reimbursement for doulas, around decriminalizing sex work, and ending the Black perinatal health crisis,” says Mora-Cheung.
It’s not unusual to see storytelling integrated into activism: Abortion stories in particular have been critical to the rhetoric of the mainstream reproductive-rights movement for years. But often, speakers are only invited to share stories that make a specific political point or are employed in an effort to change minds on the issue.
What sets Just Speak apart is that it’s made with community in mind — and speakers are paid for their time. The stories are as unique and expansive as the folks telling them. “There’s a lot of people who want to be able to do art and storytelling as a more consistent thing, but they don’t have the resources to,” says Mora-Cheung. Getting a stipend makes it easier.
So does sharing a space that’s safe and structured with significant community input. If community members want to see a certain subject covered, they can let Surge know. Last year, for example, the organization broke format in response to the proliferation of bans on gender-affirming care nationwide, and held an edition of Just Speak focused on the gender binary, centering trans and genderqueer people, who are often left out of broader conversations about reproductive justice. “We thought it was super important to have that conversation around the gender binary last year,” says Mora-Cheung. “We really do want to explore with community: What are other topics that they want to talk about and reflect about?”
Over the years, Just Speak has tackled parenting in the movement, abortion, and other themes, Mora-Cheung says, through written pieces but also movement, drag, and burlesque. One artist, Doula Lo, even contributed a live painting. Performers often come back after their first experience with the series, and it’s always free to attend. You can bring cash if you want to tip a bartender or performer, says Mora-Cheung, “but we never charge” — and there’s always delicious food (and usually a DJ).
The goal of Just Speak After Dark was “to really highlight and center the narrative around BIPOC sex workers, who don’t really have spaces to share around their experiences, the way that their communities perceive them, and especially for folks who are LGBTQ, it can be really difficult to share those narratives,” says Mora-Cheung. “So the ‘After Dark’ theme was really requested to have a space so that people who were sex workers or are in the world or even folks who just want to share about their sexuality have a safe space to do that, especially as Black folks and People of Color specifically.”
Surge holds Just Speak throughout the year: Just Speak After Dark typically takes place in February or March, and the next edition will take place in September — rotating theme TBD. For anyone interested in being a storyteller at one of the events, says Mora-Cheung, Surge typically posts calls for storytellers on social media ahead of time. Folks can also attend just to watch the performances and meet new people in a BIPOC-only space. The community aspect is important, says Mora-Cheung, because “it can be really hard to find a space that is led by an organization that’s willing to have a fun time and can center communities.”
The joy is also intentional. It’s what makes Just Speak “a space that combines the political with a really fun and creative outlet,” says Mora-Cheung — one that builds community and brings people into the movement for reproductive justice, all while making sure they have a good time, in a space that feels safe and welcoming. Four years in, says Mora-Cheung, “We want to continue doing it as long as community will have us.”
This story was originally published at the South Seattle Emerald.
What I’ve been up to: I’m having a hot ballet summer, first in the spring edition of Take Pause, my Seattle studio’s biannual performance. I was in a piece choreographed by Kaitlin McCarthy, which borrowed a lot of ballet vocabulary from Swan Lake, but with fan choreography and flamingos instead of swans. It was wonderful to be in a performance that had a sense of humor and lightness and really hit with audiences — ballet choreography can be kind of dour sometimes — and I got to dance with the most fun, friendly group of regulars from my ballet classes and wear the most eyelashes and this pink leo I am obsessed with and I had friends and family in the audience every night. What a treat!
I also went to a ballet intensive in Salt Lake City, which is a week of all-day training that ends in a performance. (It included a ballet class with Ballerina Farm, but that’s a story for another time.) The intensive experience is as great and terrible as it sounds, and this year, it helped me dispel one very unhelpful ballet myth that’s often used to justify harmful body ideals: the idea that ballerinas have to be tiny because it makes them easier to lift. At this year’s intensive, I went to a pas de deux workshop. Pas de deux, which means “dance of two,” is the kind of gallant, elegant, very romantic, typically very gendered partnering you see in classical ballets. Here is a very famous one from Swan Lake:
At the pas de deux workshop, I got paired with a dancer from Ballet West and we practiced walking together, promenading (when you balance on one leg and your partner moves you in a circle), turns, balances, and finally lifts. And now that I’ve actually seen the technique that goes into lifts, I can tell you that the ability to hold your position and commit to the lift (and jump high enough to get into it in the first place) is what actually makes a difference, not what your body looks like.
If I didn’t hold my position and sort of catapult my body in the direction the lift was supposed to go, it made it harder for my partner to maneuver me through space. But when I did, my partner could hold me up and set me back down like he was casually picking something up off a high shelf. I’ve also heard that dancers can be difficult to lift if they’re afraid of the lift and sort of shrug out of it or otherwise try to control what’s happening — weirdly, despite a longstanding fear of heights, this was not an issue for me, maybe because I didn’t really know what to expect so I didn’t have time to be scared of the lift before it happened, and then it just felt like flying.
As this Dance magazine piece explains, it can actually be harder to lift dancers who are smaller if it means they’re less muscular and don’t have the strength to hold their positions. Also, there was one piece in the intensive’s show this year in which a group of decidedly non-professional male dancers lifted every single woman in their cast, so I think we need to call bullshit on the “dancers must be small for the lifts” argument. Besides, lifts are cool, but while they’re employed heavily in classical story ballets, plenty of pieces don’t use them at all, and in more contemporary choreography, partnering happens between people of all genders and body types. Thank you for supporting my ongoing one-woman crusade against body-shaming in ballet!
What I’ve been covering at Axios: Amanda Knox, TV, the legacy of Brown v. Board of Education in Seattle, and the minimum wage. And yes, I will be covering abortion policy in the coming weeks, including reporting on yesterday’s Supreme Court ruling on mifepristone. My Axios contract ends at the end of June, when I’ll be a free agent again, so if you’ve ever wanted to work with me, now is a good time to reach out.
What I’ve been reading and listening to:
My friend Sarah deconstructs Britney Spears’ memoir with some incredible insights from Eve Lindley.
The surprising friendship between Michael Cohen and Rosie O’Donnell.
What I’ve been watching: I’ve seen The Idea of You twice now. Leave it to indie queen Jennifer Westfeldt and chaotic generalist Michael Showalter to make a well-executed romantic comedy! That bungalow! The caftans! The representation for those of us whose gender identity is Lady with Bangs!* PLEASE MAKE MORE MOVIES LIKE THIS! I WILL GIVE YOU ALL MY MONEY!
*This is a joke. If anything we are overrepresented!
I also got a terrible cold while traveling, so I’ve been watching a lot of movies, and I highly recommend Lisa Frankenstein, a campy goth romance with a screenplay by Diablo Cody that was directed by Robin Williams’ daughter Zelda Williams, and the new Richard Linklater movie, Hit Man, starring Glen Powell, the Tom Cruise of my generation (but blond and without the scientology). I watched the documentary about the TikTok dance cult, too, but I kind of wish I hadn’t.
My Buffy rewatch also continues, now supplemented by Slayerfest ’98, an exhaustive and thoughtful rewatch podcast. I’m also reading Evan Ross Katz’s oral history of the show, because I do not have casual interests.
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Playing you out: This is one of my favorite movements from Swan Lake, both in terms of music (I ❤️ Tchaikovsky) and choreography (exacting, gorgeous corps work!). Also, the way they stand still at the end? Probably one of the hardest things to do on stage.