Market Day!

Excited to be heading over to the new Victoria Disabled Artists Collective Craft Fair this afternoon. So I wanted to muse here a bit about the intersection between craft and erotic wellness.

Those who have been following my work for a minute now will now that I run a monthly casual online event where we combine doing crafts together, and chatting about some overlap with our processes towards being in our whole full selves. STICC (soft touch intimate craft crossover) happens on the last Wednesday of the month. Historically, it has been an afternoon event since it’s inception in 2024, but this month- because it’s Spring Break, I’m going to re-cast it into the evening time slot of 8-10pm PST.

If you are interested in joining this month, send me an email before 7pm on Wednesday March 26th.: softtouchbodies@kori-doty

So… crafts….the erotic…..

Where to begin.

I guess I would say that I believe that creativity is erotic energy, it’s working with a creative force. Whether we are playing with that energy through a visual arts medium, music, dance, gardening, sport, or fucking ourselves or others, we are accessing a force outside of our own and making something of that. Craft and erotic pursuits are both ways of this divination work that have some amount of resistance to professionalism or elite specialty; of the people. Especially when we are talking about a specifically queer erotic. I mean, if we want to pull that string a little further, I would say that queerness, or rather my queerness as I don’t think there is A QUEERNESS, is also about resistance. It’s a political orientation. Not Gay as in Happy, Queer As in FUCK YOU.

Accessibility plays a big part in what I do, I like to do things in ways that are taking matters of access into consideration. That has been a big part of mostly teaching online over the last few years. I was explaining to a masked client in a session a few days ago what I meant when I described myself as “adjacent” to queer community in this town.

“Well, the person I was partnered with, and who I was care taking, started chemo therapy the same week that the province lifted the mask mandate. So we never really went back. Since she died, I still have people that are close to me in my life who have asthma or immunocompromised situations in one way or another, so I just keep masking, and I haven’t really felt like returning to big crowds or places that don’t feel safe. “

I continued to tell him more about how I had come up in this work in HIV organizations, I knew intimately the stories that we carry in our tradition about people getting sick, society not caring, how long it can take to fight like hell for medicine, how many lives can get lost along the way. We shared about how we each knew people who had lost strings of people, and how we don’t really understand about how compounded COVID infections impact us over the long term.

So, I don’t typically find myself at a lot of community events, but today is different. I love a market where I have a booth, it’s a thing I have been doing since I was 8, dragged along with my dad to the home shows he would work. I worked the free condom table, and then harm reduction information and drug testing at parties in vancouver and the kootenay. As a person who has done a lot of unmasking layers of my neurodivergence over the last 5 years of relative isolation, it’s really helpful for me to know what my job is, and tabling is something I know super well.

AND!!! It’s masked… which makes me feel better, safer, like I am not an odd one out by being masked among a bunch of people that aren’t.

So, back to craft. Making something with my hands, something that didn’t exist before is powerful. I mean, I guess not just my hands, I did make a person, which honestly is a huge ongoing collaborative work. I love working with wool via felting for a lot of reasons, it’s cozy for one. The act of needle felting is one I have referred to as “microdose stabbing” and feels like a sculptural fidget that allows the release of small bursts of creative force to leave the body. I got myself set up with my first gear from local shop, Knotty By Nature, right around that same time, when my partner was sick, starting chemo, and I was gonna be sitting on the couch with her a lot. The emotions navigated through her illness, death and the time since have been all over the place. Having creative outlets is a life line.

I’m happy to have a chance to share and hopefully re-home some of the many things I have been keeping my hands busy with this afternoon. And, as is to be expected, there is so much more to be said on the matter of craft and the erotic. If you want to be a part of that in an ongoing way, send an email to sign up for STICC, this month March 26 8-10P Pacific. And if not then… stay tuned, subscribe here or on patreon, and you’ll get more pieces as they make their way out.