we all face pestilence in some form no matter who we are. many marginalized people are called pestilence by others, told we are parasites. told we are harmful for depending on the human social organism, even as billionaires profit off our labor, and often inflict pestilence on us. in adopting the name Zaraza, we choose to center ourselves in this narrative: if, as we are told, by living, we corrupt and contaminate a world that would cast us out, then that is our sacred right. we choose life, we choose pride, we refuse shame.
we all face incapacity in some form no matter who we are; every one of us is no more than temporarily abled, and we often do not comprehend or respect our limitations until we reach them. as someone who is often incapacitated, and has often been shamed for it, subjected to the terrible equation of capitalist society that sees a body in pain and says "that person should feel worse, particularly about themselves for being 'useless'," it is refreshing to enjoy fantasies where incapacity-in-pleasure, incapacity-as-pleasure, is possible, desirable, sought.
we all hold pain within ourselves no matter who we are, and whether we choose to or not. Zaraza is a hedonistic movement & a spiritual sadomasochism, a radical acceptance and transformation of the pain the world brings to us, a body-politics of the plagued body politic. we envision worlds where the pain that transforms our experience of our bodies, and the ways we are enabled to act on it, are subject to different rules than they are in this world; by imagining ways that pain might coexist with enthusiastic consent, we buy ourselves space to be present with pain.
autonomy is the only true health in a world that imposes nonconsensual goals and falsehoods about health on our bodies. we desire a world with perfect bodily autonomy. we reflect on visions of worlds where people make choices, some with more autonomy than ourselves, some with less; we explore rights and wrongs in those worlds and their differences; we deconstruct the human, statist structures within us that have marked our lives with wrongness-of-self, even as, in life, we strive to achieve our own autonomy and honor that of others.