Exigent Care: Interview with Ashley Ramos

Celeste PIETRUSZA

While (sometimes) centering talk about or around sexuality, psychoanalysis, as a field, has historically kept its distance from those in the sex work industry. While sex workers’ accounts could enrich psychoanalytic understandings, instead, as in the larger psychopolitical sphere, their narratives are often silenced or disavowed through a mythologization and pathologization of their labor.

As a parallel to Avgi Saketopoulou’s keynote talk on the “ruse of repair,” I present an interview segment from my ongoing project on sex workers’ somatic knowledges. Sex workers inspired the Marquis de Sade’s libertines, the characters who espoused his political philosophies and narrated the tales of novels such as 120 Days of Sodom. Today, sex worker activists not only embody the ethics of Saketopoulou’s “exigent sadists” in organizing against systemic oppression but also provide important care labor in organizing efforts against the ongoing violence on Gaza and beyond. Through conducting interviews with a psychoanalytic methodology, my hope has been that the quiet listening of analytic practice might serve to uplift liberatory praxis as an alternative to the kinds of weaponized silences that drown out speech.

While I had conceptualized questions for this project around the sense of touch and sex workers’ experiences of trauma in individuals, responses to open-ended questions and prompts went beyond this initial intention. The excerpts here are from an interview with Ashley Ramos, a Puerto Rican and Honduran American sex worker, artist, and activist based out of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Ashley spoke about the sense of vision/sight and collective trauma. In a parallel to institutions that have attempted to shut down conversations about Palestine, Ashley expressed fears and frustrations of people “shutting their eyes to Palestine.” She paints portraits and shares videos of children and families living in Palestine under occupation on social media. “You have to keep pushing,” she tells me, “You can’t unsee things.”

Celeste: Can you say more about how your relationship with your body, in your different kinds of work, influences how you think about and practice care?

Ashley: I think about mutual aid and community all the time. I was an artist first. A lot of my art has to do with my body. I have conversations about nudity, fat people, and a lot of uncomfortable conversations. For most of my life, I was a person who didn’t interact with a lot of people, and the art community was one of my first experiences in finding a community. Being open to other people’s perspectives is a lot of what art is about. I could find common ground with people–even people I didn’t like–but we worked together in this community to find and make something new.

I think when I got into sex work, it was kind of the same thing. I learn from so many people in the sex industry. I was able to have and live a different kind of life for a while that I never thought was possible, which was a sort of freedom that comes with a lot of work. And it’s the same thing as a working artist, you’re able to live this sort of freedom, but also with a lot of work and a lot of leaning on your community. I think that’s how life is supposed to be, and that’s why it was a little bit easier for me to get into organizing for Palestine. It was the same model. You’re sitting in a room with a lot of people. You don’t necessarily need to like them, but you have a common goal and are all working toward it. And you’re also taking care of each other.

Celeste: Can you tell me about how you became involved in organizing for Palestine?

Ashley: I first started raising funds for Nadin Abdullatif, who is kind of a figure in Palestine. She’s 13 now, but many people know her from a video that came out when she was 10. She was talking about how her childhood was being stolen from her and how she didn’t understand why this was happening to her. We raised money for her and her family through the collective Pittsburgh Creatives Against Genocide by throwing a community event. I wanted to bring the community together and not just ask them for their money. I wanted to give something back to the community because it came about when we went to these grief groups with people who wanted to share their grief.

I think I formed some sort of, oh, parasocial relationship with Nadin when I saw her in 2021. She was the person who made me pay attention to Palestine. That’s just out of ignorance. I didn’t have a personal connection until I saw her video in 2021 during the pandemic. But here’s the thing: I’m Honduran and Puerto Rican, and I know very well what happened in Puerto Rico, how Puerto Rico was colonized, and how the struggle in Puerto Rico is a parallel to Palestine. I know what the United States did in Honduras. My grandmother fled violence to come to the United States. And the land we stand on is colonized, obviously. I feel for a lot of Palestinians in the diaspora. I feel for anyone who has had to be expelled from their homeland and live that pain on and off the land, that pain still persists. That’s still generational trauma that sits there with you. Even people who haven’t grown up in their culture still feel this yearning to understand themselves. I was able to make that connection, so I reached out to Nadin.

Right now, with Palestine, I’m seeing a lot of people trying to push stuff away and find hope again. After you see so many dead babies and crushed skulls and dismembered body parts, at some point, you’re going to want a break from that, but it’s at the point where people are kind of delusional. We’re living in a world where we are holding on to this false idea of hope. No amount of people yelling ceasefire is going to convince me they actually care…it feels like we’re sacrificing the soul of the world for the comfort of the United States. And that’s kind of been driving me insane. I know one activist who says that he is actually anti-mental health at this point. After all of what’s happened, there’s permanent damage–how can you not be depressed? To think otherwise is just trying to regain some sort of comfort that I don’t think can be regained fully.

So, I keep making videos on TikTok and Instagram. I keep doing one a week only because when you do one every day, people get really annoyed with you. Sometimes, Nadin’s sister Souhad sends me videos, and sometimes I make videos. They’re going through traumatizing things. They’ve lost their home. She’s starving. Her husband’s workplace was bombed. They’ve been in refugee camps. She is striving so hard to make these videos. I think about her daily life having to walk somewhere to get water and then having to film her children to get sympathy, still knowing that the eyes on Palestine are slowly shutting. So I think about her every day. It’s a lot on my mind. It’s devastating. This 13-year-old used to say that she dreamed about going to school in the United States. But she’s now like, I haven’t been to school in almost a year. Why does everyone else get to have an education? So I keep posting videos and keep posting the same things and I don’t know what else to say.

Celeste: I want to check in about anything you’d like to add, or you feel is important to hear.

Ashley: The individualistic way that people think is sad to me–why would you be like that if you could make a nest of people who all take care of each other? Because when it comes down to it, we’re not just raising funds for people in Palestine. We’re raising funds for people in jail because they were protesting or people who have done a lot of organizing work and who need help with their rent because they were in jail for protesting.

The people who are still here and still working are the people who care about human beings. They haven’t buried their heads in the sand and haven’t closed their eyes. Maybe that is just part of building communities, longevity, and seeing who is here to stick around. I fully believe that if we can get this right, we can do so much more.

Ashley and her paintings can be found on Instagram @ashley_luz_ramos. She is raising funds for Souhad Mustafa and her family, who are currently in the Al Nuseirat Refugee Camp in Gaza. Contributions can be made at https://gofund. me/1c2a2530

Contributor

Celeste Pietrusza, Ph.D is an analytically-informed psychotherapist in private practice in New York and California.  She works in conjunction with the Greene Clinic in Brooklyn.  For Celeste, writing, like clinical work, is not possible without community.  She thanks Nat Newton for their encouragement and support on this essay and the editors of this issue, Roula Hajjar and Safia Albaiti, for the invitation to contribute and suggestions along the way.