There’s a slipperiness to any investigation into bodyliness vis a vis identity politics. The slipperiness being that identity has historically been used to oppress people outside of the non-normative identity matrix (i.e non white, cis, heterosexual men): a long and tragic history of the pathologisation of bodies by way of their given identities. People who menstruate pathologized as hysterical; queer folks and same sex loving folks pathologised as mentally ill and the long history of race science used to justify the oppression of black people and people of colour.  But, historically, identity politics has also offered a radical and revolutionary lens through which to do the work of liberation. As The Combahee River Collective espoused in their historic statement of 1977, originating the term identity politics in its contemporary usage: 

And, so, from here we begin. As two Black, queer non-binary babes from Southern Africa obsessed with desire and memory, the body and history, navigating a globalized world where blackness knows no borders and yet is found everywhere in chains, we are trying to draw a map with our(many)selves at the center(s). 

• Saeed Jones “Last Call” (poem)
• Romeo Oriogun “What the World Won’t Show Us” (poem)
• Cameron Awkward Rich “Tonight,” (poem)
• jayy dodd “I Have a New Obsession with Bones” (poem)
• Desire, “You Think I’m Horny” (lyrics)

• Maneo Mohale, “Papaver Somiferum (Miss You)” (poem)

• Danez Smith, “Reimagining Ourselves in an Increasingly Queer World” (prose)
• Nakhane, “Teen Prayer” (lyrics)

• Danez Smith, “Reimagining Ourselves in an Increasingly Queer World” (prose)
• Nakhane, “Teen Prayer” (lyrics)
• Jericho Brown, “Like Father” (poem)
• Koleka Putuma, “Water” (poem)

• Kopano Maroga, “at swim, two boys” (poem)