Learning from the High Priestess

Affect, Femme Care, and Somatic Practice

Ann Cvetkovich

• Publisher: Duke University Press Books
• Year: 2026
• Print ISBN:
  9781478039310
  9781478034292
• eBook ISBN:
  9781478062868
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Ethnopsychology
• Index: Social Sciences

In Learning from the High Priestess, Ann Cvetkovich integrates theory and somatic practice to assemble a survival guide for artists, academics, and activists in search of new strategies for social justice in times of trouble. Building on her previous work on why feelings matter to political action and intellectual inquiry, Cvetkovich shows how experiments in writing can be a form of affective and somatic practice. She uses four key themes—care, disability and madness, trauma and somatics, and breath—as launch points for reframing discourses of mental health in the direction of practices for decolonizing bodyminds and for the sensory experience of freedom. Engaging with writer-practitioners from Alexis Pauline Gumbs and Alison Bechdel to Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, Staci Haines, and Kai Cheng Thom, with particular emphasis on Black feminisms, Cvetkovich places femme care and embodied practice at the center of movements for social transformation.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Contents
• Introduction: Grappling with a “Mental Health Crisis”
• Chapter One. Care
• Chapter Two. Disability | Madness
• Chapter Three. Trauma | Somatics
• Chapter Four. Breath
• In Process Some Concluding Notes on Practice
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index