Ternura Radical
What might it mean to bring a notion of care to governing AI across its lifecycle? What might it mean to recognize the labour, the agency of the communities whose data are used to train the AI tool, and both, the harms and benefits of the AI tool for those who may engage with it or be impacted by its use, all through a lens of care? In our ongoing effort of learning from worldviews beyond policy and outside the colonizer’s frame, we draw from the wisdom of ternura radical, or radical tenderness.
Understanding Ternura Radical
The term ternura radical emerged in the course of the work of a performance collective, called La Pocha Nostra, between 2009 and 2016. The concept emerged in the context of the radical performance pedagogy workshops facilitated by the collective, and was given a manifest form in 2014-2015 by performance artists Dani d’Emilia and Daniel B Coleman (nee Chavez), who published the Radical Tenderness Manifesto in Hysteria Magazine, which was later translated into different languages.
The collective, directed by radical pedagogue Guillermo Gómez-Peña, recognizes ternura radical as an entity-force that “moves, transforms, and disseminates itself in many ways.” Its roots lie in the transfeminist community of Mexico, and accordingly, both as a term and practice, any mentions of the concept would be incomplete without citing the work and wisdom of Lia La Novia Sirena, a Mexican trans activist, educator, and performance artist. The term is defined in La Pocha Nostra’s manifesto as a framing concept for the collective’s political-artistic practice that challenges authoritarian hierarchies by embedding responsibility and participation.
Ternura radical recognizes that no one raises their voice in protest without cause: For some, it is a matter of life and death. For some, it is a matter of solidarity. Regardless, there are difficult stories of injustice, violation, violence, pain, and grief behind a protest. No injustice that forms the subject matter of the reason for a protest is theoretical. It recognizes that even the strongest and most vociferous actors within a movement carry grief, fear, and trauma, and makes room to embrace the vulnerability and potential fragility as an integral part of the fight. Ternura radical invites us to “take each other’s pain into our own hands” and to see it as “the fire that gives power to the movement.” For feminist and LGBTQ+ movements, this has meant creating spaces where bodies can hold each other's anger and sorrow in a loving way.
What Ternura Radical unsettles in AI governance
In AI governance, Ternura Radical offers an antidote to the emotional sterility of technocratic policy processes that routinely suppress grief, anger, and collective pain in favour of neutral, proceduralist language. The communities most harmed by AI systems, namely those that are subjected to predictive policing, biometric surveillance, algorithmic hiring discrimination, or automated benefits denial, do not experience these as technical errors. These harms are experienced as violations of dignity, safety, security, and future. A governance framework shaped by Ternura Radical would create deliberate space for this pain within institutional processes, treating the emotional testimony of harmed communities not as supplementary stakeholder inputs, but as primary evidence and a moral compass for policy design.
La Pocha Nostra's pedagogy encourages autonomy, challenges specialized knowledge by creating spaces where interdisciplinary dialogue and artistic imagination can flourish, and insists that the process itself is the project. Applying this to AI governance means valuing the quality of relational process, namely the care with which affected communities are heard, the safety created for vulnerability, and not policy outputs alone. Ternura Radical challenges the cult of invulnerability in technical leadership, and makes the case for openness to self-reconstruction and a willingness to be changed by encounter with those most harmed.
Ternura Radical invites us to shift away from the system’s weaponization of a transformative body of work and life, and calls on us to remember that the master’s tools will not dismantle the master’s house. Weaving it into AI governance is an invitation to recognize the full political import of what it means to embed care in governance practice. It asks us to learn from the historic efforts and labour that have constituted an embodied governance mechanism: Efforts to resist colonialism, extractivism, settlement, military and economic occupation, erasure, genocide, violence, and the imposition of dominant worldviews and othering of long-held practices and ideas.
Ternura Radical offers us a way to create and nurture ways of being that interrupt violence. It is a mode of political-affective re-existence, and helps us see the vulnerabilities that went into various attempts to interrogate systemic violence, and the embedded care and collective work it took to arrive at these efforts.
References:
Dani D’Emelia (2018). Ternura Radical: Radical Tenderness. https://danidemilia.com/2018/10/26/ternura-radical-radical-tenderness-post/
Dani D’Emelia (2015). The Radical Tenderness Manifesto. https://danidemilia.com/2015/08/12/manifiesto-de-la-ternura-radical/
Gómez-Peña, G. (n.d.). La Pocha Nostra Manifesto. https://www.guillermogomezpena.com/lpn-manifesto/
Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics. (2006). La Pocha Nostra Archive. New York University. https://hemisphericinstitute.org/en/hidvl-collections
This article draws from the wisdom, practices, and life work of groups and communities from the majority world. While educating ourselves on various worldviews is important, we understand that our actions can also contribute to and enable appropriation. As part of our ongoing attempts at practicing accountability, we invite readers to consider supporting the work of LaPocha Nostra or Lia Garcia to support the lives and work of people from the transfeminist community in Mexico.
