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How do we make social justice the most pleasurable human experience? How can we awaken within ourselves desires that make it impossible to settle for anything less than a fulfilling life? Editor adrienne maree brown finds the answer in something she calls "Pleasure Activism," a politics of healing and happiness that explodes the dour myth that changing the world is just another form of work. Drawing on the black feminist tradition, including Audre Lourde's invitation to use the erotic as power and Toni Cade Bambara's exhortation that we make the revolution irresistible, the contributors to this volume take up the challenge to rethink the ground rules of activism. Writers including Cara Page of the Astraea Lesbian Foundation For Justice, Sonya Renee Taylor, founder of This Body Is Not an Apology, and author Alexis Pauline Gumbs cover a wide array of subjects?from sex work to climate change, from race and gender to sex and drugs?they create new narratives about how politics can feel good and how what feels good always has a complex politics of its own. Building on the success of her popular Emergent Strategy, brown launches a new series of the same name with this volume, bringing readers books that explore experimental, expansive, and innovative ways to meet the challenges that face our world today. Books that find the opportunity in every crisis!… (more)
User reviews
—“The Sweetness of Salt” by Alexis Pauline Gumbs, in Pleasure Activism, curated by adrienne marie brown
If I was going to pick a book to continue to prod me back into the land of the living, it wouldn’t be this one, subtitled “The Politics of Feeling Good,” a paperback with small colorful mating animal silhouettes, a book with sections on sex, such an eclectic and inconsistent mix of work (a theme with AK press?). And yet last week I found myself reading this one and being reminded that I’m allowed to be happy. It’s a different mood than I’m used to—it’s hard to pin down exactly what happened to me over the past few years.
Feeling good isn’t something you earn, and that’s why people are so quick to tell you that it doesn’t cost money, and also something easy to envy when it doesn't seem like the work was put in. Pleasure does seem like something you earn, when you feel depressed or sad or frustrated, and you see other people who are happy and you want the recipe, you think for a while that it might be a job or a friend circle or something, but it’s not that simple. It’s hard--maybe impossible--to feel pleasure when those crucial human ingredients are missing.
Pleasure is something that you can practice, something that you can communicate your way into, something that you can investigate by feeling your own feelings a little more, maybe, thinking about things you would usually settle for. That’s what came to me from this book. And also a little frustration at the frequency with which this book seems to offer sex as the answer or the only venue for pleasure, but that’s just a human reality, I suppose. I'm glad it was only an inconvenience and not a limitation, and that this book explored non-sexual pleasure as well--a favorite instance is the quote at the beginning of this review.
Her mindset-altering essays are interwoven with conversations and insights from other feminist thinkers, including Audre Lorde, Joan Morgan, Cara Page, Sonya Renee Taylor, and Alexis Pauline Gumbs. Together, they cover a wide array of subjects — from sex work to climate change, from race and gender to sex and drugs — building new narratives about how politics can feel good and how what feels good always has a complex politics of its own.
Building on the success of her popular Emergent Strategy, Adrienne brings her audience experimental, expansive, and innovative ways to meet the challenges that face our world today.