Pleasure Activism

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!

adrienne maree brown is the author of Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds and co-editor of Octavia's Brood: Science Fiction from Social Justice Movements. She is a social justice facilitator focused on black liberation, a doula/healer, and a pleasure activist. adrienne lives in Detroit

I. Introduction: What Is Included in Pleasure Activism?

personal pleasure relational pleasure collective pleasure pleasure as a pathway to liberation II. Pleasure Principles III. Essays and Interviews

[Title TK] Interview with Joan Morgan Fuck you, Pay Me: The Pleasures of Sex Work, by Chanelle Gallant Pleasure Activism and the Legacy of "Uses of the Erotic": A Conversation with Cara Page The Sweetness of Salt: Toni Cade Bambara and the Practice of Pleasure (in 5 tributes), by Alexis Pauline Gumbs [Title TK] Interview with Sonya Renee Taylor [Title TK] Interview with Dallas Goldtooth Pussy Power and Visual Gaze, by Favianna Rodriguez (photo essay) Pleasure Through Gender Transition Part One, by Micha Cardenas 13 Erotics of Care, by Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha Pleasure Through Gender Transition Part Two, Holiday Simmons Pleasure after Surviving Sexual Assault, Amita Swadhin [Title TK] A Conversation between ZiZi and the Rocca Family The Black Burlesque Artist, Taja Lindley Sex in Public, by Rashida KhanBey and Suguey Hernandez Legalize it, by Chaney Turner [Title TK], by brASS burlesque IV. Tools for Pleasure Activists