Pleasure Activism: The Politics of Feeling Good (Emergent Strategy)

by Adrienne Maree Brown

believe that all organizing is science fiction—that we are shaping the future we long for and have not yet experienced. I believe that we are in an imagination battle, and almost everything about how we orient toward our bodies is shaped by fearful imaginations. Imaginations that fear Blackness, brownness, fatness, queerness, disability, difference. Our radical imagination is a tool for decolonization, for reclaiming our right to shape our lived reality. Octavia’s Brood: Science Fiction from Social Justice Movements explores these ideas in depth.9

The personal is political, especially for Black women.”

to love what we love and explore why we love it, to increase the pleasure we feel when we are doing things that are good for the species and the planet, to cultivate our interest in radical love and pleasure, and to nourish the orgasmic yes in each of us.

Pleasure activism is the work we do to reclaim our whole, happy, and satisfiable selves from the impacts, delusions, and limitations of oppression and/or supremacy.

growing a healing abundance where we have been socialized to believe only scarcity exists.

Ultimately, pleasure activism is us learning to make justice and liberation the most pleasurable experiences we can have on this planet.

What you pay attention to grows.

We become what we practice.

The deepest pleasure comes from riding the line between commitment and detachment.

a small minority of our species hoards the excess of resources, creating a false scarcity and then trying to sell us joy, sell us back to ourselves.

Audre Lorde’s life-changing essay “Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power.”

I examined how my experiences of deep political alignment with people who wanted to collaborate had taught me more than years of battling with people who wanted to dominate me or compete against me.

How would we organize and move our communities if we shifted to focus on what we long for and love rather than what we are negatively reacting to?