This creative and critical essay expands the TikTok phenomenon of the Hot Girl Walk -- characterized by its focus on "goals, gratitude, and hotness" -- into a radical and necessarily political practice. So far, the extensive discourse around the Hot Girl Walk -- like most feminized exercise -- has been about the health benefits, productivity boosts, or products that one needs to buy to achieve the requisite “hotness” for the walk. Yes, it is sort of silly, a momentary fad. But the Hot Girl Walk was born in the pandemic; it is a testament to the ways in which all walks are political, and all walks have radical potential, and the stakes are life or death.
Recently, my walks have been borne out of the frustration of stillness, anger, and the inability to do enough in the face of genocide. Through these walks, I invoke the Hindu goddess Kali. Kali is the divine manifestation of rage. She herself had a mythological “Hot Girl Walk,” in which she roamed the earth drinking the blood of demons to save the universe from destruction. Kali walked in her anger, in pursuit of justice, in pursuit of community care that she enacted through her own body. The worship of Kali points to the necessity of engaging with death – the ultimate unproductivity, the extreme opposite of wellness culture, the liminal space in which we must come to terms with mortality — through walking.