About
Elisabeth Bolaza, PhD, MPH
Mama | Researcher | Author | Educator
People come to me for real talk.
sex, birth, culture, change
Hello! My name is Elisabeth Bolaza, PhD, MPH. I’m a mama of two young girls, the Principal Investigator of The Birth Pleasure Study, and the founder of Sorada Research & Consulting. I get my kicks disrupting status quo thinking about mamahood, health, and sexuality. I focus on mamas because, well, mamas got it rough. Too many of us are suffering, struggling, sleep deprived, run-down, beat-down, and…did I already mention sleep deprived?
Too many of us are hurt or harmed in the process of building our families. Too many of us lose our lives bring our babies into the world. The pressure-cooker of our lives, from pre-conception to postpartum, has been turned on high for too long. We’re cooked. We’re in a crisis that keeps escalating. Mamas need solutions. Real solutions.
My personal mission is to make a difference in the lives of mamas and birthing people. When mama feels good, the world is a better place. For everybody.
We can and should be living our lives with all the pleasure, power, and freedom we can handle. We can and should be living our dreams out loud.
I am studying pleasure because I have a serious hunch that pleasure is vital sign. Our wellbeing, our satisfaction in life, and our ability to be our best depend on how we feel. So far my research is showing that that is the case. My work is all about this possibility – us feeling and being our best. Beyond survival, thriving is our birthright.
If you’re interested in working with me as a mixed methods research consultant, reach out at contact@elisabethbolaza.com to connect. Sorada, my new consulting practice, is going to bring rigorous research praxis where it can make a big difference for physiologic birth and reproductive justice work. I can’t wait to dialogue and co-create a future that feels good for all of us.
Shine on,
Dr. Elisabeth Bolaza
Principal Investigator & Founder of Sorada
Academically Speaking
I’m a reproductive anthropologist, an unnecessarily fancy term for someone who thinks long and hard about our culture, the structures that constrain and uplift us, and our ways of sexual and reproductive life. I hold a PhD in Human Sexuality, with an emphasis in Sexuality Policy Leadership from the California Institute of Integral Studies. I also hold a Masters in Public Health from UC Berkeley, and BS in Biology from UCLA. I’ve taught in the School of Professional Psychology and Health at CIIS at the Masters level as Adjunct Professor, rounding out my many years of experience teaching sexuality in different venues – from the street to the stage, clinic to conference room.
I bring to sexuality studies my backgrounds in basic research, clinical research, street-level sex ed, and clinical sexual health counseling. I am committed to anti-racist, anti-classist, intersectional feminist approaches to knowledge building and change-making.
My commitment is to make my work accessible and useful to everyday mamas and birthing people, and their families.
I am Principal Investigator of The Birth Pleasure Study, a mixed methods study of pleasure as experienced in labor and giving birth. This research focuses on the sexuality and the social justice issues facing birthing people. The dissertation is currently being reworked into several manuscripts and I look forward to releasing the results and publications soon.
You might see from my writing style that different sides of me wrangle over the Keyboard.
I’m part groomed scholar and part rough-around-the-edges hood chick, with some hippie yoga goddess sprinkles. And coffee. So much coffee. I, like you, contain multitudes.
I’m not always sure whether or not I should bleep out my bleeps. When I get heated about things I’m passionate about, which is often, formality feels fake. Also, theoretical and academic language can obscure as much as it can illuminate. It can be alienating.
I do my best to communicate with each word and sentence, with grit and honesty. My hope is that with time all this will gel into one voice. ‘Til then, enjoy the ride! I know I will.
(This pic is Naomi and me, in case you were curious).
On my positionality (aka my roots):
Sexuality, health, and motherhood. That’s what I study, sure. But my scholarly and professional work grow out of my story. My roots are my roots, and they go with me wherever I go. They inform everything I do.
I am a first generation high school, college, and graduate school graduate.
I’m the daughter of a wild child, Southern, Harley-riding, homebirthing, Hells Angel, renegade, teen mama. She is a survivor, a fighter, and an example of how we all have the power to reinvent ourselves over and over again. She inspires me every day.
In the absence of my bio-father, I was lucky enough to have a great dad step in. A good man with a huge heart, but troubled, like my mama. He grew up in and out of gangs and prison, was a three-striker felon, a fugitive, and a recovering multi-substance addict. His story is extraordinary – but I’ll just say he eventually found his way to a simpler, more peaceful life. But it was he who got me into martial arts at a young age, and he taught me how to risk a hit to make an impact, to wipe the blood from my nose, stay in the ring, and keep fighting til the buzzer sounds.
Both my mom and dad played the tough cards they were dealt the best they could, and with hearts of gold. I’m proud to be theirs.
Look at us being all tough. Dragon Force Dojo in the house! Woosah! That’s my little brother Rich, me (age 17), my older brother Jamie, and my dad Bob.
And all those trophies, well, they’re mostly mine. I was pretty hot sh*t back then.
But, I think it’s important to share that I grew up pretty rough.
- in trailer parks and broke neighborhoods in the High Desert of California, usually one of the only white kids, which honestly got me picked on quite a bit
- sleeping in sleeping bags on empty bedroom floors instead of beds
- waiting for hours for case managers to get food stamps
- digging into boxes of top ramen and pouring massive jugs of Tampico orange drink into reused red plastic cups, sometimes with super-fun cracks in em.
- on the run from the law in Mexico, living off-grid with no electricity or running water
- I won’t go into it, but basically all the ACEs. All but one.
- with six siblings, I grew up a middle kid, then an only kid, then the oldest kid, then a middle kid again — as family circumstances shifted in the unpredictable winds of my mama’s wild life.
Why do I want you to know this?
Because my experiences have informed my path. My roots and my values are baked into my work and shape my research agenda. I’m no neutral observer of phenomena. I want to understand so I can leverage what I’ve learned, with others, to shift things for everyday regular mamas in big and small ways. That’s the point. I know whose team I’m on.
Why Mamas & Sexuality?
I wasn’t always going to focus on mamas with my research career. I was going a completely different direction. I had been preparing to work on a dissertation focused on poverty and sexuality, how folks living in the most impoverished and marginalized spaces manage to create fulfilling sexual relationships. I was sick of the pathologizing lens applied universally to financially marginalized people by the public health world – that all sexuality is about for low-income folks is risk and disease, not love, passion, fun, or connection. Definitely not pleasure. Or power. It’s work I still plan to do, one day. But, I couldn’t have foreseen how things would change for me.
Presenting at APHA National Convention, 2019 in San Diego, CA on birth pleasure, with my 6 month old infant daughter Naomi in tow.
My dad, Bob Todd, doing what he loved best.
Tragedy slammed me to the floor.
It was May 8th, 2015. It was a gorgeous sunny day. I’d just put my breakfast plate in the sink, when my phone rang. A police officer. From Michigan. My dad had gotten up early to go fishing with a buddy. Their engine cut out, and they drifted in front of a large freighter boat on the Saginaw River. They jumped, trying to escape the collision. His buddy came back up. My dad never did.
That summer we got pregnant with our firstborn.
I moved through my first pregnancy as I moved through the grief of my dad’s sudden death. The presence of new life and new death was a daily storm for me. As the “due date” approached I started losing sleep. I was afraid. I was afraid my child might be born too close to the anniversary of my dad’s death, and that might make my labor even harder.
The due date, April 27th, came and went. Nearly two weeks “late” I went into labor on that exact day. May 8th, 2016. It was also Mothers’ Day. Death and life whirled in me. It was everything I hadn’t let myself feel.
Labor went on for over 30 hours.
I was holding back. When May 9th came around, I was stuck in transition, at 8.5 cm for over five hours. My blood pressure started to spike and we decided to move my homebirth to the hospital. There I decided to get an epidural. I needed to rest enough to deliver. But, the epidural failed within minutes. I was pulverized, crushed to fine powder by the waves.
When my baby was finally being born, I was blind-sided. Something happened that I can hardly describe.
Pleasure. It was a bliss, a spiritual cataclysm, a tidal wave of color, a fractal of heaven. All my little trampled pieces where reassembled in a flash of blinding love. It was beyond words. And I was left with a question: WHAT. WAS. THAT?
Somehow giving birth to this little child brought me back to life. My life changed course in so many ways in that moment. I had found a lifeline back into by body, into my heart, into my new life as a mama. That lifeline was pleasure. It was a guiding force. Now, I follow it still.
I eventually realized that a mama’s life is the dominant force of the life of her children, and that her power is all-encompassing, whether that power is acknowledged or not. A mama’s sexuality is pure force, the life-force, the storm and its eye. All of it comes from there. It’s the vortex of reality, of energy wherefrom our lives spiral outward. It can make and destroy us. Often it does both.
So here I am, doing what I now do: asking questions that serve mamas, looking for answers, and crafting solutions for the pain, grief, exhaustion too many of us mamas experience. The more I learn, and unlearn, and the more I mother my own little ones, the more I’ve come to know that the mama’s sexuality is the source of deep power in this life. And in learning that, I’m healing, growing, and becoming unstoppable.
Onward on the path
As for my life now, I’m proud to call Oakland, California my home with my incredible husband Chris, and our two rambunctious young daughters Lyla and Naomi. When I’m not absorbed in data analysis, writing, or business stuff, or geeking/freaking out on what’s going on in the world of reproductive justice, you’ll find me in a tickle-throw-down with my kids, intercepting my Kindergartener’s Kung Fu moves, being dazzled by my second grader’s ballet performances, unwinding with yoga, or dancing all over the place.
Lyla’s graduation from Preschool, with Chris, Naomi, and myself. May 2021.
SexyMama.co
I am crafting a new platform for my work - SexyMama.co. It's a blog and community that is all about mamas, and making mamahood feel good - mind, body, and heart.
The major topics I'll tackle fall into these categories:
- Sex + Relationships
- Health + Vitality
- Mama + Parent Life
As I gear up for the big launch, I'd love to hear your ideas!
- What would you want to talk about?
- What is the biggest challenge you face in sex + relationships?
- What about your health and vitality (and sexiness)?
- What questions do you have about sex, health, and mama life (maybe that only a sexuality expert can answer)?
- What is missing from other platforms that you think is an absolute must?
If you have ideas, lay them on me. Give a piece of your mind via email at contact@elisabethbolaza.com. Thank you so much! I can't wait to hear from you!