adrienne maree brown on Pleasure Activism

 

Pleasure activism is the work we do to reclaim our whole, satisfiable selves from the impacts of oppression and supremacy. Pleasure activism asserts that we all need and deserve pleasure, and that our social structures must reflect this. In this moment, we must prioritize the pleasure of those most impacted by oppression.

Pleasure activists seek to understand and learn from the politics and power dynamics of everything that makes us feel good. This includes sex and the erotic, drugs, fashion, humor, passion work, connection, reading, cooking and eating, music and other arts, and so much more. Pleasure activism acts from an analysis that pleasure is a natural, safe, and liberated part of life—and that we can offer each other tools and education to make sure sex, desire, drugs, connection, and other pleasures aren’t life-threatening or harming but rather life-enriching.

Pleasure activists believe that, by tapping into the potential goodness in each of us, we can generate justice and liberation, 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.

Pleasure activism is not about generating or indulging in excess. Sometimes when I bring up this work to people, I can see a bacchanalia unfold behind their eyes, and it makes me feel tender. I think because most of us are so repressed, our fantasies go to extremes to counterbalance all that contained longing. Pleasure activism is about learning what it means to be satisfiable, to generate, from within and from between us, an abundance from which we can all have enough.

Part of the reason so few of us have a healthy relationship with pleasure is because a small minority of our species hoards the excess of resources, creating a false scarcity and then trying to sell us back our own joy. Some think it belongs to them, that it is their inheritance. Some think it a sign of their worth, their superiority. White people and men have been the primary recipients of this delusion, the belief that they deserve to have excess while the majority doesn’t have enough—and, further, that the majority exists to please them.

A central aspect of pleasure activism is tapping into the natural abundance that exists within and between us, and between our species and this planet. Pleasure is not one of the spoils of capitalism. It is what our bodies, our human systems, are structured for; it is the aliveness and awakening, the gratitude and humility, the joy and celebration of being miraculous.

So rather than encouraging moderation over and over, I want to ask you to relinquish your own longing for excess and to stay mindful of your relationship to enough. How much sex would be enough? How high would be high enough? How much love would feel like enough? Can you imagine being healed enough? Happy enough? Connected enough? Having enough space in your life to actually live it? Can you imagine being free enough?

Do you understand that you, as you are, are enough?

How many of us are trapped in a politically regressive loop of desire?

How many of us—even as we hone a feminist or womanist or post-gender or otherwise radical politics around who we are, relative to power—regress in bed into submission practices we are taught are biological, primal, even spiritual? I suspect many of the most powerful women are still convinced that in bed we need to be dragged by our hair into a cave and ravaged by a lover who plays a traditionally patriarchal role of dominance.

A key aspect of smashing the patriarchy will be examining not just rape culture but our culture of desire. Not with shame or with righteousness but with deep curiosity: What are your go-to fantasies? What turns you on, and can you change it if it doesn’t align with what you believe?

Through attraction we feel for others, media images, and healthy and unhealthy interactions with those older than us, visuals and stories groove a pathway for desire in our brains. We begin to have certain scenarios that turn us on, fantasies of what we want to do or have done to us or witness. Fantasy is often a safe space to desire things that we might never do or allow in real life.

For most of us, this desire-setting happens early, and if we aren’t both careful and creative, we can get stuck in fantasies that don’t mature and politicize with us. We can get caught in fantasies that perpetuate things so counter to our beliefs and values that we feel ashamed of what we want, even as we find ways to get it.

I had a babysitter when I was quite young who liked to watch Porky’s (1981), which I can best describe as a rape culture time capsule from the eighties. My family’s military-issue apartment was small, and I easily snuck out of bed and found a spot from which I took in sexually disempowering images I didn’t understand. I also loved musicals—Grease (1978) and Seven Brides for Seven Brothers (1954) were favorites. As a result of this kind of media, my early fantasy life was often about men taking advantage of skinny women, secretly watching them, trapping them, or women having to change for the desires of men. I thought this was how sex happens, that it centers men, and that we as women should be in a constant state of seducing, playing hard to get, and getting caught by men.

Hence, my twenties. But I learned! To see differently, to imagine differently.

I once got to swim in a body of water where saltwater met freshwater. With goggles on, I could see the subtle horizontal line between the freshwater on top and the heavier, denser seawater below. That visual comes to mind as I think of the cultures in which we swim in the United States. The heavier seawater is our much-defended rape culture, which is fed by fantasies of incest, rape, coercion, boundary transgression, force, transaction, and scenarios where the masculine wields power over the feminine. Floating above that is the culture of repression, often rooted in religious spaces. Repression fantasies focus on purity, innocence, virginity, monogamy, and youth.

These fantasies train us in the gender-normative behaviors that sustain our layered culture. We learn from parents, teachers, extended family, media, religious leaders, and basically all adults we encounter. And, of course, our early lovers, who are often fumbling in their own confusion and learning.

Men learn to be dominant, initiating penetrators: they learn that it’s in their nature to ravish women. Women learn to be coy, dishonest receptacles: we’re taught to say no until the last moment—and then say nothing but yes. Or say nothing and mean yes. Those who don’t fit into this binary construction, or who shift within it in their lifetimes, are often expected to still don these roles in sexual encounters. The lessons are sometimes very direct, other times implied: cross your legs like a lady, save that for your husband, take her like a man, it hurts a little at first, it’s just nature, who’s your Daddy.

 Layer into this our intersecting systems of hierarchy—racism, ableism, classism, etc.—and you have a plethora of fantasies that perpetuate and sustain a janky reality. These gendered fantasies shape our very sense of self. How do I fit in this world? Am I desirable? How do I become desirable? What role must I play? Do I take or give?

So few people make it to this question: What do I really want?

From our first moments, we should be encouraged to focus on how our bodies feel, what sensations and interactions awaken us, what feels wrong, what kind of touch feels right, and how to communicate a spectrum of boundaries and consent. Instead, many of us spend our formative years in our heads, learning to be something we are not, unlearning the skills of truth we’re all born with. Eventually our desires are woven so thoroughly with these social norm fantasies that we think that we desire our own disempowerment or someone else’s.

I have been intentionally working on developing new fantasies. Fantasy is where I first explored the impossible idea that I am desirable. The improbable idea that fat bodies, brown and Black bodies, scarred and dimpled bodies, bodies that hurt and lurch and roll, bodies with hair and acne, bodies that sweat and make sounds and messes—that all of our bodies—are desirable. This work has shifted my reality of lovers and my reality of how I see myself and let myself be treated.

And, and, and . . . even as I write this, I won’t tell you all of my fantasies. Some of them are rooted so deeply in my system that I’m not sure I’ll ever let them go—I’m not even sure I want to. But I do want to be able to recognize what is mine and what isn’t, what should stay in fantasy and what is aligned with the world I’m generating—one in which gender is not an indication of power in or out of the bedroom.

On this journey of liberating our desire, we have to look at our relationship to pornography. We should use a harm reduction approach, to learn to look at our practices without judgment, without shaming, but with curiosity and agency. What shapes us as we turn to pornography? How does porn, in turn, shape our real-life desires? And can we use pornography to shape our real-world desires?

I am particularly interested in what our pornographic practices do to our imaginations.

Back in the day, meaning before I was born, pornography was mostly in the form of still images. You looked at a Polaroid of people having sex, a black-and-white still of a woman splayed on a chaise lounge, or a Kama Sutra drawing, and your mind did the rest of the work. Your imagination animated the scene, imagining your fingers moving across the flesh that you never actually saw in motion, building erotic charge. Now, everything is POV, high-definition porn or amateur porn shot on peoples’ phones. You can watch badly acted porn or skip to pounding porn without any storyline. You can tune into live people who will respond to your text requests to touch themselves while you watch. The instant your mind begins to move in any direction of desire, you can type your longing into a search bar and watch your fantasy or something close to it.

Your imagination isn’t really needed.

And perhaps that would be fine if the top searches were “woman on top of someone she could never identify as a family member,” “strapped women taking tender tushes,” “grown-up legal-aged professionals of all genders in hot consensual anti-racist role play.” But we know that they aren’t. In 2016 the top pornography searches for men included “stepmom,” “stepsister,” “mom,” “teen,” and “stepmom and son.” Men also liked videos in the categories of “Japanese,” “Ebony,” and “Asian,” in that order. Women were searching for “stepdad and daughter,” as well as “gangbang” and “extreme gangbang.” They wanted to see “big Black dick,” or just “Black sex” in general, and sometimes “Japanese.” (That appears to heavily overlap with specific kinks like foot worship, breast worship, and sexual games.) And everyone wanted to see “lesbians.” These aren’t the only things people were searching for, but they were the top searches for millions of people the world over according to Pornhub, which at that time was the most visited porn site in the world.

How do we face the truth that our trending fantasies center around incest, underage lovers, racialized power dynamics, and sexual encounters in which women are objects? How do we face ourselves and what we’ve been programmed to desire, especially if it works against our sense of agency and connection and integrity in our real-life sex? How do we move beyond the things we have accidentally come to want and toward our desires to break the intersecting cycles of harm we are in? And how do we face the deeply embedded shame around what we desire? Because while we didn’t create the water we’re swimming in, it’s still poisoning us.

How do we take responsibility for the ways in which we are programming ourselves to participate in rape culture in the deepest recesses of our minds? And that our imaginations are being discarded in the process? What is the consequence of discarded erotic imagination?

I believe our imaginations—particularly the parts of our imaginations that hold what we most desire, what brings us pleasure, what makes us scream yes—are where we must seed the future, turn toward justice and liberation, and reprogram ourselves to desire sexually and erotically empowered lives.

Ideally, porn is a spark for, and an extension of, a vibrant sexual imagination. And just like with fantasy, we may choose to continue watching stuff beyond our politics, stuff we never plan to practice—but this should be an intentional, informed sexual choice.

This begins by examining our search bars, finding our collective dignity. It could also include writing ourselves into original erotica and porn scripts or trying out some new pornographic narratives that are fully feminist, so that we can experience sexy content without some built-in cost of collaborating in our own oppression.

I have begun to see pleasure activism all around me. Pleasure reminds us to enjoy being alive. Our misery only serves those who wish to control us, to have our existence be in service to their own. True pleasure—joy, happiness, and satisfaction—has been the force that helps us move beyond the constant struggle, that helps us live and generate futures beyond this dystopian present, futures worthy of our miraculous lives.

Pleasure—embodied, connected pleasure—is one of the ways we know when we are free. That we are always free. That we always have the power to cocreate the world. Pleasure helps us move through the times that are unfair, through grief and loneliness, through the terror of genocide, or days when the demands are just overwhelming. Pleasure heals the places where our hearts and spirits get wounded. Pleasure reminds us that, even in the dark, we are alive. Pleasure is a medicine for the suffering that is absolutely promised in life.

Pleasure is the point. Feeling good is not frivolous, it is freedom.

Adapted from Pleasure Activism: The Politics of Feeling Good by adrienne maree brown, published by AK Press. Copyright © 2019. Used by kind permission of the author and AK Press. All rights reserved.

Pleasure Activism. By adrienne maree brown. Boston Review, October 11, 2022.

For the past nine years, I have been learning to feel, to connect with others while feeling, and to begin to understand what is possible when a collective of humans is not afraid to feel life together.

I have always felt strong emotions, but I have never known what to do with them. When they were sad or hard emotions, I would try to contain them. For years, I would experience a shaking in my belly when I was locking my jaw tight to keep from crying or showing that I was scared or hurt. I could tell that there was tension in a room through quivering in my belly and knees.

Good feelings didn’t go much better. I would use biting humor to move through intimacy with family and friends, not aware of how sharp my teeth were, how powerful my mood could be. With lovers, I would often be in my head trying to think my way to happiness or to orgasm instead of breathing into the actual sensations of my body, especially in my heart and below the waist.

In 2009, my beloved movement comrade Malkia Cyril invited me to a course called Somatics and Social Justice being offered by a group called Generative Somatics.

“The word somatics comes from the Greek root soma, which means ‘the living organism in its wholeness.’ It is the best word we have in English to understand human beings as an integrated mind/body/spirit, and as social, relational beings. In somatic speak, we call this embodiment ‘shape,’ and the collective ‘body’ or collective psychobiology. Somatics is a path, a methodology, and a change theory by which we can embody transformation, individually and collectively. Embodied transformation is foundational change that shows in our actions, ways of being, relating, and perceiving. It is transformation that sustains over time. Somatics pragmatically supports our values and actions becoming aligned. It helps us to develop depth and the capacity to feel ourselves, each other and life around us. Somatics builds in us the ability to act from strategy and empathy, and teaches us to be able to assess conditions and “what is” clearly. Somatics is a practice-able theory of change that can move us toward individual, community and collective liberation. Somatics works through the body, engaging us in our thinking, emotions, commitments, vision and action.” (From “What Is Somatics?,” Generative Somatics)

 Sounded good to me, even though I was scared of what I might discover in the process. I knew there was trauma in my life that I hadn’t dealt with, and I knew there were big, suspicious gaps in my memory. But I felt ready for something to move in me.

I went through the course with equal parts enthusiasm and trepidation. It was a learning year for the organization, but enough of what was offered stuck with me that I said yes to another course a couple years later, Somatics and Trauma. In each course, I was learning the basic building blocks of the methodology, learning to drop in and feel myself from within, to begin to understand how I had been shaped by the circumstances of my birth, and the structures of my generation.

For a long time, I was still in my head, kind of imagining myself as a little ball of energy dropping down into my mysterious body. And then, slowly, I started to feel sensations below my head, below my neck. A lot of what I initially felt was pain—sensations in my back, hips, and legs that I had been overriding in order to keep up an overactive travel and work life. My knees hurt immensely—turns out I had early onset arthritis.

I also began to feel my true center, my center of gravity, the center of my being. It was a place inside myself that was as vast as the ocean, that gave me the resources I needed to feel all of my feelings and still be in my dignity, to make mistakes and still be in my dignity, still be connected to other people, to stay open and present. I learned new things about pain. My pain was holding onto my past for me. In an individual, pain can be a reminder of what we have not turned to face. For me, that included memories I had seemingly displaced with my survival behavior of dissociation.

I felt distinct moments of release, as I would let a memory surface in class or while being held in the hands of a somatic bodyworker. One of the reasons the Generative Somatics approach works for me is that it is concerned about somatics as a collective way of understanding trauma and pain. It isn’t about going away from the community to heal, which was the main way I had experienced healing work prior to somatics. It isn’t about being a special “healer” who is apart from community. Generative Somatics feels into how, in a collective or group, patterns of pain can indicate the mass, or intergenerational, trauma people are surviving. And how each of us has the power to help each feel more, heal, and move toward our longings for liberation and justice together.

I recall a session with Black Organizing for Leadership and Dignity, a Generative Somatics movement partner, where one man’s honesty about facing constant racist fear of his Black body every day opened up a floodgate of shared grief, pain, anger, and shame in the room. Afterward we were able to have political conversations that were so authentic and joyful, because we had gotten to the root of a shared pain together.

It is still a rare thing for most of us to sit with what we feel, how we feel, the reality that we carry memories and feelings from what our ancestors experienced, and that we carry our current continuous collective trauma together. The pain can open to other feelings, more nuanced and clear. It can begin to make authentic connection and collectivity more possible.

Every mass movement, every collective effort, is made up of relationships that exist between members of the larger group. Around friends old and new, somatics helped me begin to gauge what I truly wanted and needed from connections, from political space. I got clearer on what I could offer. I got in touch with a feeling of restlessness and wandering that let me know when I didn’t want to be somewhere or with someone or with a political project. I could also feel the distinct energy of moving toward, or forward, that let me know when I did want to be around someone, did want to join in an effort from a place of authentic alignment, rather than obligation. This awareness extended until I could begin to feel when I wanted to be in a certain place, job, political project, or even city. And when it was time to go. Yes is an embodiment. Yes is a future.

In physical connections, I was able to stay more present. I learned that I had a no, a visceral, clear “hell no.” If I listened to the no, if I honored it and set boundaries, it made more room for my yes. And the beautiful, miraculous new possibility is: I am able to stay present in my yes. I can feel the yes in person, I can feel it at a distance. I can feel my face flush, my heart pound, a smile I can’t swallow. I can feel my body get wet and warm, open. I can feel myself move toward an idea, a longing, a vision.

I am a whole system; we are whole systems. We are not just our pains, not just our fears, and not just our thoughts. We are entire systems wired for pleasure, and we can learn how to say yes from the inside out. For me, from that yes, I am learning to communicate in real time, both what I want and what I don’t want. To be with the twisting gut and pounding heart that don’t want to speak uncomfortable truths, the burrowing, masking tucked chin of shame, the circular, overthinking busyness of my brain, and with the deep breath and interconnected dignity that allow me to be more honest every day. To be with the tingling spine and warm solar plexus that hint that I am feeling love. To pull in my energy when I am in a situation where I need better boundaries. And to keep bringing my attention back to center, back to the present moment, to show up where I am.

It turns out, being present is the most important part of every single experience in my life. It turns out, every other human being is also wired in these ways, entire systems shaped by pain and pleasure. And I can grant others the same autonomy I am learning to wield on my own behalf—how I spend my life is my decision, based on all kinds of data coming from my body.

And I can grant others the same level of complexity and contradiction as I am learning to embody—we are all multitudes in process. We get to have boundaries. We get to have longings and articulate them. We can begin to imagine a society coordinated around honest, clearly articulated longings.

At the end of the Somatics and Trauma course, I was invited into teacher training, to become part of the community that brings embodiment to new students, new geographies, and social movements. I have been learning and teaching for eight years as of this writing. Last year we brought the course to Detroit for the first time, and it was an incredible experience to share this liberation technology with a place that has given me so much, with people I love and am growing with. It was also thrilling to grow skills with Detroit and Midwestern and Southern organizers who often get overlooked by efforts based in New York City or the Bay.

I can already feel the impact in the community of having more organizers who can feel themselves, who have been practicing returning to center and moving toward longing, all of us organizing ourselves around what we long for rather than what we are against. I believe somatics, in coursework and/or bodywork, is one of the most effective ways to get a group of complex, contradictory humans into alignment with a liberated collective future. Seeing, feeling ourselves, as we are, with agency to shape the future … that’s the miracle.

 

This excerpt from Pleasure Activism: The Politics of Feeling Good, written and edited by adrienne maree brown (2019 AK Press), appears here by permission of the author and publisher.

What Your Body Has to Do With Social Change. By adrienne maree brown. Yes Magazine, May 14, 2019.

Living in disconnection is hard: like everyone is against you, and that you don’t have the support that you need, and that you’re never gonna have enough. All of the sort of really stifling mindsets and dynamics that we’re already living in are really difficult, really painful, we’re really unhappy. That’s evident all over the world. So if it’s going to be hard anyway, let it be hard in service towards your freedom. Let it be part in service towards your liberation…

And that is what it is that I think this excavation, this illumination into our inner worlds offers us: is one step closer toward shattering all of those myths that our lives are built on.”

-Sonya Renee Taylor on A Public Affair

Joining on A Public Affair are two brilliant writers and thinkers to tell us about about their recent collaboration: Journal of Radical Permission. Based on the philosophies of radical self-love, emergent strategy, and pleasure activism, this journal gives you permission to love yourself, deeply, as you are.

adrienne maree brown is the bestselling author of Pleasure Activism. She grows healing ideas in public through her multi-genre writing, her music and her podcasts. She is the author–slash–editor of seven published texts and the founder of the Emergent Strategy Ideation Institute, where she is now the writer-in-residence.

Sonya Renee Taylor is a New York Times best-selling author of The Body Is No an Apology. She is also a world-renowned activist and thought leader on racial justice, body liberation and transformational change. Sonya is also an international award winning artist, and founder of The Body Is Not an Apology–a global digital media and education company.

The Power Of Journaling With Adrienne Maree Brown And Sonya Renee Taylor. By A Public Affair. Wort 89.9 FM, December 13, 2022. 

 

 

In an interview she gave a month before her passing, Octavia E. Butler said, “I think the future of humanity will be like the past — we’ll do what we’ve always done.”

Since at least 2020, Butler’s eerily prophetic warnings have become synonymous with her work, often interpreted through a dystopic lens. Comparably less attention is paid to the author’s belief in the fragile, yet enduring human project of community — the politics of its construction, the intricacies of its structure, and the life-sustaining capacities of its stewardship.

For writer and theorist adrienne maree brown, the intersection of futurity and community found in Butler’s books comprise essential ingredients of their work, including their 2017 societal self-help text Emergent Strategy. In a recent Zoom conversation with artist and organizer Syrus Marcus Ware for Trans Futures Week, brown echoed Butler’s vision of a future indelibly tied to humanity’s pre-colonial past, specifying that this (re)connection could plant the seeds for our salvation.

“It’s going to be networks of small communities, networks where people are operating at the scale that allows them to be in right relationship with each other and the land,” she said.

“I don’t know exactly what it’s going to look like,” added Ware. “But I know [these future communities] will be rooted in care, abolition, alternative responses to conflict, crisis, and harm, which are the things that I think we really need to solve.”

 Ware and brown share far more than a deep reverence for Butler. They’re both revolutionaries who know how to make joining their struggle feel irresistible. Below, the pair discuss everything from the value of unruliness in our organizing, to the importance of avoiding “fake orgasm” solutions, to the revolutionary potential of memes.

Wren Sanders : We live in a society steeped in systemic racism and where the gender binary is inscribed in so many aspects of our daily lives. As a result, for those of us whose identities lie outside the white cishetero mainstream, there is an inherent unruliness to life. How does the unruly exist in the work you do?

Syrus Marcus Ware: I’m interested in coloring outside the lines, in imagining possibilities that maybe don’t yet exist. I think that if something doesn’t exist, you need to go out and create it. As a Black person, as a trans person, as a mad person, as a disabled person, I’m often having to start things. That’s just what we do.

I’m working on a book called Irresistible Revolutions, which draws on that idea from Toni Cade Bambara that, as people who live on the margins, it’s our job to make irresistible revolutions. I take that seriously. I want to know what kind of unruly revolutions can we start from the margins that will influence the center and maybe transform the entire system. What do you think, adrienne?

adrienne maree brown: Well, Syrus, I do feel your unruliness and mine have been dancing for a while, so it’s beautiful to be in this conversation. Something that guides my work is thinking about the limitations put on our imagination for how things are done. I’m always asking myself, “Does what we’re doing work? And if not, what could?”

A lot of times, I feel like the last one to know I’m breaking the rule . People will be like, “Oh, girl, you’re already out there. You’re already showing up. You’re already giving yourself permission. You’re already being brave in your fat, Black, queer, disabled body. When you’re out beyond the boundary, it can be hard to tell exactly where you are or how you appear. This is where the non-binaryness — the post-binaryness of it all — really matters, because to me, because it’s not just a question of inside the line or outside the line; it’s a constant feeling of pulling back towards the norm and pressing out beyond that, toward life.

Sometimes what seems like unruliness is just asking the question: Is this moving us towards justice or towards comfort? Is something moving us towards recognition or resources? We can’t buy into false solutions. What pleasure activism opened up for me is [calling that] “fake orgasm.” That’s a fake orgasm of a policy, that’s a fake orgasm of a way forward, that’s actually never going to satisfy us. I keep thinking about that. I'm not being unruly for the sake of argument, I’m being unruly because I actually want the real satisfaction of authentic justice, authentic liberation, authentic connection, authentic relationship.

SMW: I love that. And we know that what we want in a future world is incredible sex.

AMB: I mean, obviously.

SMW: If unruly is the tree bark breaking up the concrete, well, then I always want to be the tree bark. And I want to be the vines that somehow find a way to break through the brick and mortar and eventually decompose some of the structures that humans have created so that they can go back to a more wild nature. So if unruliness is wildness, then I want it.

AMB: I’m on the side of life. I always feel like that. And right now, humans are not quite on the side of life, at a collective scale. So I feel like a lot of the unruliness is also [breaking] all the rules we have created that put us at odds with our home, with the planet that wants to help us survive. We have to let go of the death cult and all the rules that it takes to uphold the death cult way of being. And I think being an artist is a great way to do that.

WS :  I’m really interested in the rubric of “post-binary” as a way into the future. Keeping this lens in mind, I’m curious how our understanding or experience of “community” might shift in the process of reaching this future?

SMW: I don’t know exactly what it’s going to look like, but I know they will be rooted in care, abolition, alternative responses to conflict, crisis, and harm, which are the things that I think we really need to solve. And then I think that there are going to be futures were trans people live long enough to become elders — something that is not currently guaranteed. The Combahee River Collective was saying in the ’70s, “If we made the world safer for Black women, we’d necessarily be making the world for everyone.” And that means the insects and the plants and the trees and the flyers and the swimmers. And I think if we made the world safer in a future community for Black trans women with disabilities, we’d necessarily be saving the Earth. We would literally be saving the Earth. So I don’t know if it means that we’re going to live in an apartment or a house or if we’re going to live in a field or a city, but I know that it’s going to have these values if we’re going to make it. I’m so curious, adrienne, what are you dreaming into?

AMB: I’m not just post-binary; I’m post-nationalist and post-capitalist. We need to take control over these nation states that we’re all part of, which never had us in mind when they were created. When I imagine into [these post-binary communities], it’s going to be really small compared to what we see now. It’s going to be networks of small communities, networks where people are operating at the scale that allows them to be in right relationship with each other and the land. It’s going to be a network of people who are like, “I’m willing to care for this land. I’m willing to get to know it, to understand the rhythms, to see its needs and how it meets ours.”

I also really hope that part of whatever future community we are creating is keeping our children safe. That children are not sexually harmed, that children are not abused, that children are not punished for being themselves, that children are not told they are wrong before they have a sense of who they are. I would hope that the “C” in community stands for children and that they are the center of what it means to have a community. To me, that is the problem I’m trying to solve with all of this ideation: How do we create a future in which every new life that comes in is sacred. I think so many of the cycles of harm in these oppressive systems are adults who grow up not having felt sacred, and building systems around that, being like, “Well, then I will dominate. I create my safety some other way.”

 WS : It’s interesting hearing you envision these communities, adrienne, as for some reason I’m picturing a world that’s post-Internet as well, which is funny because of course both you and Syrus are very online.

AMB: Because of the way colonization has happened, I think there’s this false binary that’s like, “Oh, technology is over here and living in alignment with nature is over there.” And I’m like, “But all the ways we communicate are technology." And I think there’s many ways to do this. It might be telepathy Internet at some point. I’m down for it. It might be astral-projected internet. There might be mycelial networks that also carry other kinds of messages. I love the idea that the trees have an internet and so do we. That turns me on. That’s exciting to me. I’m like, “Everything is trying to figure out how to communicate.”

It turns me on that songs that whales sing go viral and travel around the globe. We’re not the only ones who are up to this practice of trying to pass ourselves along in a global telephone game. And so, when I imagine this future, I think one of the ways we will be able to be in these smaller land-based orientations is that we will still have some of this technology that allows us to be in these larger networks of communication. I don’t quite know how it's going to work yet, but I do think we will figure it out. Maybe aliens will help us with some dope organic satellites.

Speaking of the internet, Syrus, we’re both meme queens. I see you doing carousels or threads. I want to hear what you call it. I want to hear your whole process, as, for me, it’s become an art form [through which] I’m touching into some collective sense of where I am and where we are. And I love doing it in community with you. You’re hilarious. So I wanted to ask you: How do you see yourself serving — if you see yourself serving — a radical purpose through your memes?

SMW: To me, it's been very much like an artistic practice, but also a meditative personal practice of, as you say, tapping into what we’re experiencing. Posting funny things or making funny things that kind of help us to just talk about where we're at seems so important and so useful. But at the same time, it's also this personal thing for me because I get to sit and spend the time of putting them together.

And I am a Curator, like a capital-C Curator, and it's not unlike [curating exhibitions] because you’re still doing research, you’re still putting together a collection, you’re still putting things in a particular order. I’ve chosen to always intersperse the memes that I’ve put with political content. So there'll be stories about what's happening with Brittney Griner, about what’s happening with SARS COVID-19, about what's happening with abolitionist movements. So it’s “come for the funny and stay for the political education.”

AMB: And you insert yourself…

SMW: Yes.

AMB: Tell me about that.

SMW: I’m so thankful to be friends with and learn from Raven Wings, who’s a Black trans woman, artist, organizer, and really, really brilliant dancer. And she had this practice of taking photographs of herself. At first, her Instagram was just all self-portraits. She was talking about the process of rendering yourself visible, of finding your own beauty, of seeing yourself reflected in a world that doesn’t showcase our bodies. And so I was moved by that, and it made me, in 2016 or 2017, pick up my phone and start documenting myself almost every day as this way of presencing myself in the world.

I live in a big busy city, but not all trans people do. So your selfie of yourself might be the only other trans person that you’ve seen that day. And so I insert little moments of trans magic into the thread so that you get to go on a bit of a journey. And sometimes I include little videos of myself out in the world, little things like that, just to also [share] this experience of being all that I am.

So I’m curious for you, adrienne, because you also are putting together these beautiful compilations, mood boards, you often call them. What is behind your process?

AMB: Years ago, I started to feel that the trend on the internet was that everyone comes into this space to complain or to tell people stuff they already know about. It was becoming kind of a crotchety, grumpy, old place. And I was like, “Why? There's so much to be in wonder about. There’s so much that's funny. There’s so much that’s great." So I started noticing for myself that I was much more drawn to memes. I’m not ready to give up on the comments. I’m like, “This can be a space of joy and laughter and connection and tenderness.” And actually, this is what I see when I look at the internet because I have curated that space as well. I really curate so much of what is coming into me. I want to know about radical things that are going well. I want to know about solutions. I want to know about awe and wonder in nature. I want to know about love. What you pay attention to grows. I want to grow a sense of togetherness and a sense of joy.

W S :  Thank you both for such an imaginative and joyful conversation. I have just one more question: When will we know when we are free?

SMW: First of all, it'll be a collective “we.” So when we know we are free, it will literally be we and not me individually being free. That’s important. This individualistic thing is part of the problem. We will know that we are free when we can wake up in the morning and have everything that we need in order to survive and thrive in the day. And when we can wake up in the morning and be supported to live our fullest selves, all of ourselves in every part of the day that we have. You won’t have to hide parts of yourself, or cut off parts of yourself; you’ll be able to come fortified by your community in all that you are, to live your full day in a way that is careful, that doesn’t harm others. And you’ll go to sleep at night and have a quiet, comfortable, safe place to rest, take care of yourself, and be in peace. We will know that we’re free when all of us have access to that.

So when you wake up, you won’t have to hide part of yourself or cut off part of yourself or remove anything. You’ll be able to come fortified by your community in all that you are, to live your full day in a way that is careful, that doesn’t harm others, in your fullest dreams, and then go to sleep at night and have a quiet, comfortable, safe place where you can rest and take care of yourself and be in peace. I think we will know that we’re free because all of us will have access to that.

AMB: I love that. I co-sign.

SMW: Adrienne, how will we know that we’re free?

 AMB: There's this little voice inside me that’s like, “Well, freedom’s not a destination. Freedom’s not a destination. Freedom’s not a destination.” Right now, I keep having moments of freedom with myself and others where I’m realizing, like, “Oh, I'm one of the freest people to ever live.” That’s already true right now, and that’s because I keep jail-breaking these systems that try to contain me. And then when I’m in relationship right now with you, I feel very free to be my whole self. I feel a warm, vibrant energy that’s flowing from you toward me. I feel your freedom in you. Do you feel that?

SMW: Mmhmm.

AMB: This is how it feels to be free. It’s happening right now. I think what we have to do is expand this feeling. Let’s grow it. Let’s keep trying to bring this feeling into relationships, especially with people we want to change. I’ll come to a family member and be like, “I can see what I would like to fix and change and rearrange about you.” And I’m like, “What would it look like for me to set that free in myself?” The image of myself that I’m holding for this person — can I set that free? Can I be present with the person who’s actually in front of me and the freedom that they have already right now?

We just got the news today that Dr. Mutulu Shakur will be liberated. And I think about all these political prisoners who have told us, “the freedom is here.” The freedom is here. Harriet Tubman said, “My people are already free.” I feel like we’ll know we’re free when we know we’re free, when we really accept that we’re free and act accordingly.

This conversation has been edited and condensed.

Syrus Marcus Ware & adrienne maree brown: The Pleasures of “Post-Binary” Community. By Wren Sanders. Them, November 18, 2022. 

For some of us, simply living in our bodies is a daily act against oppression, against marginalization, criminalization and hate. This work is exhausting…most justice work is. That’s why finding what brings us joy is so central to both our individual and our collective liberation. While seemingly simple, when put in practice, pleasure can be revolutionary.

This is the idea that Adrienne Maree Brown puts forth in her book, “Pleasure Activism: The Politics of Feeling Good.” Taking inspiration from Black feminist writers like Audre Lorde and Octavia Butler, the author, activist and doula demonstrates how we can tap into our desire to organize against oppression. Adrienne’s work is a gift for so many who don’t feel that pleasure is an accessible reality including: women, people of color, trans and non binary folks, queer folks, disabled folks, and survivors of sexual violence.

Adrienne joins us today to share why finding pleasure should be centered in our justice work.

The Politics of Pleasure. Interview Elizabeth Watson. At Liberty Podcast, American Civil Liberties Union, March 3, 2022

At the beginning of her second book, Pleasure Activism: The Politics of Feeling Good (released in March 2019), adrienne maree brown suggests that readers should orgasm before diving into the book’s pages. It’s her way of building on Audre Lorde’s idea that “revolution is not a one-time event,” and encouraging people within freedom and justice movements to prioritize joy and pleasure.

brown is a social-justice facilitator whose 2017 book Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds and her Emergent Strategy Ideation Institute helps activists home in on the importance of care and imagination. Pleasure Activism is a complementary guide that uses interviews, personal essays written by brown and other activists, and an annotated version of Audre Lorde’s seminal essay “The Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power” to help us all shift from surviving to thriving. Pleasure Activism also asks readers to locate pleasure beyond what the book offers. Capitalism often tricks us into functioning from a place of scarcity, where longing for pleasure is the most we can aspire to. But what if we could tap into our desires in small ways every day? “Longing might be easier to come by,” brown says. “We are trained to long for what we can’t attain, [so] isn’t that capitalism?”

When I reached out to interview brown, I asked if we could discuss how her approaches book desire, longing, and connection. When brown and I started this interview we paused first to touch base with our senses, share what we were seeing, and what we were feeling below our necks. Since Pleasure Activism helps us imagine a collective future that’s full of joy and desire, let’s be real for a moment: I am writing this sentence on a red couch in Seattle, and you are somewhere reading it, so take a moment to feel texture against your skin and notice where the light is coming in. In the spirit of brown’s advice, maybe you should pause and masturbate before reading this interview about pleasure, transformative justice, and tapping into the joy of making human errors.

Where are you feeling the most sensation below your neck right now? Where is the light coming from?

I’m sitting on a couch in a room that used to be my bedroom. I just opened [it] up to be a freeform writing and healing room—no desk, just spaces to sit and write or move and be. The south-facing window is thick with post-storm morning light, gray and muted. I feel the rightness of temperature on my skin, which is naked as it often is at home. And I’m in a fit of sneezes, so the waves of magic that follow those are present in me.

Sneezes and post-sneezes have their very own kind of orgasmic force. When did you start specifically locating the moments of your orgasmic power and applying them?

I think I started to have days of orgasm in my early 20s. [Those were] days where I didn’t make plans with others, but just gave myself over completely to my own pleasure. I would then reenter the world feeling deeply rooted in myself, in my joy. I noticed I started to receive a different response in the world, and it occurred to me that I could shift my state, my energy, toward pleasure.

What were the transformative moments in your life that made you realize pleasure was the key to saving ourselves and our political movements?

Feeling suicidal ideation in my 20s was very clarifying. I had to get clear inside myself about what I had to have, what was worth living for. Reading Audre Lorde was a game changer—the idea that my erotic life and longings were not distraction but signs of life and freedom? Whew. Now it’s the affirmations I get from other radical Black women saying that my turned-on life force is an invitation to [find] theirs. Those conversations are very raw and strike down into the root system of what has shifted in me, which is much larger than me. I feel aligned with life.

In Pleasure Activism you write, “Prioritizing ourselves in love is political strategy, it is survival.” You specify that we need to attempt transformative justice in order to someday achieve it. In many cases we attempt to enact this in community where there has been sexual assault or intimate-partner violence. The level of connection that we both tap into and share while building accountable communities is terrifying. How do you attend to that shaky moment of “before,” of both choosing community and individual connection?

It’s scary because we’re often trying transformative justice processes for the first time when there’s been a big harm. It helps so much to notice small ways you can shift. When a friend hurts your feelings, can you get curious? When you read news about someone causing harm, can you wish they’d get support/healing for what’s broken in them, rather than hoping they get jail time—which, in most cases, will further break them? Do you have an abolitionist vision to work toward? We are responsible for imagining beyond our oppressors rather than continuously turning on each other for being oppressed.

In the conversation you have with Cara Page in the book, titled “The Legacy of ‘uses of the erotic,’” you say, “Suffering is not liberatory.” I wonder if we’re addicted to it. Cara poses the question, “How do we center creation and desire as central to liberation?” I pose that same question to you.

I’m a big fan of somatics: Most of us need to learn how to feel because we live in such numbing and distracting times. I’m [also] a fan of old-school time tracking. Track the time you spend on intentionally pleasurable activities. Make a commitment to [focusing] on collective pleasure.

 

In both Emergent Strategy and Pleasure Activism you offer deep insight about our relationship to scarcity—an effect of capitalist longing and maybe familiarity of suffering. If we can achieve a future where scarcity doesn’t rule our imagination or our desires, what will shift about pleasure?

I think pleasure will be normal and abundant in a post-scarcity scenario. We will find creative ways to keep the heat of the forbidden, new religions of kink and power as only a way of playing, not a way of denying each other’s life needs.

Octavia Butler comes up throughout the book. You even have a chapter titled, “a spoilerific gush on how Octavia Butler turns me on.” You write, “I think many of us would be nourished by the sort of symbiotic communities that Octavia envisioned, where connection wasn’t necessarily based on visual attraction but other kinds of longing and need.” Where does your own imagination and transformation fall within the millions of unknown encounters you are creating through writing books that call, for instance, to have an orgasm before we start reading?

I was actually thinking [about] Octavia [Butler] [when I wrote] that instruction. I’ve heard a rumor that she used masturbation to move through writer’s block, which means that some portion, possibly a very high percentage of her content, was offered from a postcoital state. I worked to uphold that as I was creating, and I feel certain the book is better because of it. So it’s really about shifting the state in which we engage ideas from that tight deconstructionist approach to a more open, generous-to-the-self mode. Being attracted to yourself is generally good for your future. Ask Lizzo.

Your work is in the tradition of Grace Lee Boggs. You call out to her, particularly around the idea that we need our performed selves to meet our embodied selves. I often think about this with social media: Our Facebook wall may look radical AF but, as Shannon Perez-Darby says, no one in their shared housing or office spaces can figure out how to not fight about the dishes. Where is the pleasure in being imperfect?

There is a pleasure [in] being human, [and] not [being] above the ridiculousness of being human. There is pleasure in having people I completely trust to hear every misstep and lesson and let me know if I’m really messing up. That feels more reliable than the uninformed trending of cancel culture. I am in deep community with people who would never throw me away, and whom I would never throw away. I can rest in that.

 Pleasure as Praxis :  adrienne maree brown on Human Error, Longing, and the Power of Prioritizing Love. by Corinne Manning. Bitch Media, July 25, 2019.

  

 

Fighting multiple forms of state violence is exhausting, especially when considering the decay of our environment. But author, activist and doula adrienne maree brown says that we can still find hope and love amid the despair that surrounds us every day. In her new book, “Pleasure Activism: The Politics of Feeling Good,” released today (February 26) by AK Press, she draws from Black feminist luminaries to teach us how embracing what brings us joy is central in organizing against oppression.

"Pleasure Activism," which builds on brown's earlier book, "Emergent Strategy," includes essays, reflections, excerpts and poems from writers and activists such as Audre Lorde, Octavia Butler, Joan Morgan, Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha and Sonya Renee Taylor. A self-proclaimed "pleasure activist," brown also channels her own journey, from her time as an organizer with the Harm Reduction Coalition, a sex columnist for Bitch Media, and as a queer Black woman discovering the joys of intimacy, sex and what she calls "radical drug use."

Throughout the book, "hot and heavy homework" assignments invite the reader to tap into the full spectrum of our erotic and emotional needs. For example, there are exercises in masturbating, taking nude selfies and consenting to sex with another person. She also highlights the many ways that people of color, sex workers, disabled people and queer, trans and nonbinary people have been denied joy—and why we must center their pleasure as an organizing principle. "Feeling good is not frivolous," brown writes. "It is freedom." Colorlines spoke with brown about why self-love, healing and harm reduction are neccesary for collective liberation.

How do you define pleasure?

The definition of pleasure, as I use it, is about happiness, joy, contentment and satisfaction. I definitely have people look at me when I start talking about the idea like, “So just pure debauchery, that’s what you’re saying. It's just pure escapism.” And I’m like, "No, it's about pure aliveness and actually being present for the world around you." I often quote the Zapatistas who say, “We’re trying to build a world in which many worlds fit.” In order to do that, we need to feel what our goals and needs are inside of that world on an individual level and on a collective level. I don’t think we can really feel for the collective if we can’t feel ourselves.

How can we use pleasure as a strategy?

 The first thing is to read Audre Lorde’s “Uses of the Erotic.” She makes a really strong case for how pleasure can help us heal from oppression. Reclaiming our full erotic aliveness is a core piece in recovering from acts of oppression and marginalization. If you don’t make that initial connection, it’s really hard to not see pleasure as a guilty thing [you're] doing on the side.

You had a sex column for Bitch Media and you included a few of those essays in the book. What has it been like to be so candid with the public?

There’s tons of people of color who are thinking about pleasure, but a lot of it stays out of the public sphere. After I started talking about these things publicly people would slip up to me and be like, “Hey, I really want to talk about that,” in these very private conversations. Then, when we do get to experience pleasure, a lot of times it rides the same line as capitalism. If you are super successful and fall within norms and certain privileged areas, only then you get to experience pleasure. That’s been a big thing I’ve been trying to push back on.

How do you convey pleasure for people of color?

It’s not an accident that on this land, Black people have been told, “You’re 3/5 of a person." If you don’t feel like you’re fully human, then where in that are you supposed to believe you have access? When your people are [living with the effects of genocide], as Indigenous people are, where are you supposed to find pleasure? For me it’s about reclaiming what I believe is our birthright. And it’s not enough to do it on a personal level. What does it look like on the collective level for us to feel like we all have access to lives that are fulfilling and satisfying?

What does pleasure look like when you’re a survivor of sexual violence and trauma?

A lot of it is realizing that it’s not your fault and what happened to you [is] not the purpose of your body on this earth. Your purpose is not to please others—to please a man or to please someone who is older than you. You have a purpose unto yourself to find and reclaim.

[It’s also] having community, having other people around who you can [join in] ongoing, powerful and honest conversations about the healing process. You don't have to be ashamed to say, “I was with a lover yesterday and I felt triggered by something that happened years ago. And it’s not their fault.” It helps so much to not be in your head going through the experience of being a survivor. It takes community to figure that stuff out. When we isolate ourselves, it leads to poor decision-making, repression, self-harm cycles and abusive relationship cycles. There’s also a lot of healing that has to happen at the level of the body. I’m a teacher in somatics and I feel like that’s one of the main places that I have been able to drop in and be like, “How do I feel?”

How do somatics relate to healing and finding pleasure?

Somatics means the body in its wholeness. It’s an act of studying what helps the body move through trauma, recover from harm and actually feel in an authentic way. It's about being an authentic person that’s actually congruent, which means the face you show to the world is actually congruent to who you are inside. Much of what we get trained to do in the wake of trauma is to hide our feelings and deny that we’re feeling. A lot of it is really retraining and giving yourself permission to be the most intact version of yourself that’s available.

 What I got is that being in tune with yourself allows you to know what your body actually wants in certain moments, like when you’re consenting or when something actually brings you joy.

The core of somatics is a practice that says you have a center that lives inside of you and is a sacred space. It’s a place that you can return to. And the goal of your life is not to get to a place where you feel calm all the time. It’s getting yourself to where you can feel whatever is actually happening in real time and then define how you want to organize yourself around it. That’s the part I hope a lot of people are able to practice.

You spent some time working at the Harm Reduction Coalition as an organizer, and you dedicate a whole section of the book to what you call "radical drug use." What can a harm reduction approach teach us about pleasure activism?

There are two major aspects of it that are crucial. One, rather than aiming for abstinence, we aim to reduce the harm that comes from engaging in whatever substances or sexual practices that we enjoy doing with our bodies. The other aspect is not denying the impact of living in a harmful, traumatizing world. We judge [people who use drugs]. We persecute them and lock them away instead of just saying that the world is really difficult to navigate, that it's hard to keep your head above water, to feel powerful, to feel like you know yourself. Instead of judging when people find some substance or some way to get there, my thing is, "How do we make that as safe a journey as possible?"

[In the book] I talk about my use of ecstasy for a period of time. Using ecstasy really helped me get in touch with a part of myself that I hadn’t been able to access up until that point. I knew also that I was going through some depression and I was really struggling with finding happiness on my own. That medicine really helped me move through it. Now, therapists are actually using [ecstasy] more intentionally with clients to help them have those experiences of joy, pleasure and release. I love that [in] harm reduction everything is set up by the person who is using. There’s a ton of self-determination and community determination, as opposed to telling someone what is the right path for them. When we talk about the kind of liberation we want in the liberated world of the future, I want a space where there’s a ton of agency. Harm reduction is one of the ways we get there.

What advice would you give to someone who is starting to form an intimate relationship with themselves and discovering what brings them pleasure?

First I would say, “Yay! I’m glad you’re beginning this path.” A couple of basic practices are getting really in touch with your body, literally feeling your body more, masturbating more, learning what gives you pleasure just from your own touch. I’m a huge fan of documenting yourself in certain ways, not for the public, not for posting anywhere, but just documenting, “Here’s what I look like.” There’s a lot to be said about learning how to turn yourself on and training yourself on the [decolonizing] aspects of pleasure. If most of the pornography and the media images [tell us that] what’s desirable is a skinny White woman, then you have to really learn how to see yourself. Maybe you fit that image, but the majority of people don’t. So it’s figuring out, "Well how do I fall in love with the body that I was given? How do I understand that it’s a place for pleasure and it’s a place for power?" I think journaling is also a good go-to. Throughout the book there’s a lot of “hot and heavy homework” that’s stuff like, write about yourself being naked, explore it a little bit.

 How can pleasure help us build what you describe as “communities of care”?

One of the [essays] that speaks to this is from Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha. She talks a lot about the pleasure of intimacy where you don’t have to hide your needs if you’re not feeling well or if you need some kind of support. I think about that echoing back to what Octavia Butler constructed in almost every one of her books, how these various communities basically were communities of care. People were coming in, usually in a sort of apocalyptic situation, and having to figure out, “How do we attend to someone’s needs? How do we make whatever we have enough? How do we know if we’re free or not free?” To me, that’s a big piece of it.

In order to feel pleasure, you have to feel the whole breadth of your emotional spectrum and how to communicate [your] needs. There’s an aspect of it that’s also about surrender. If you orient [the world] around a collective community of care, then there’s plenty of stuff [available] if we know how to share it. A lot of pleasure activism is also leaning into the simple pleasures of existing, right here, right now. I think communities of care are the future for our species. And I just hope that we don’t have to go down the most apocalyptic world to get us there. Although, that’s what history seems to indicate. But, we’ll see.

The interview has been edited for length and clarity.

In ‘Pleasure Activism,’ Adrienne Maree Brown Dares Us to Get In Touch With Our Needs. By Catherine Lizette Gonzalez. Colorlines, February 26, 2019.

As a queer transnonbinary female-assigned person living in the Deep South, my body is the object of both fascination and legislation. It’s also where I experience pleasure — from the fleeting aroma of jasmine to the soul-quaking connection of orgasm. As the sole inhabitant of the absurdly contested territory that is my own human form — land I consider autonomous, but which is considered by the state as subject to decree — my experience of pleasure is always a rebellion, and as such, a form of political action.

The idea that an individual’s sensual experience is inseparable from politics isn’t new. Even the most stalwart porn-burning, second-wave feminist will tell you the personal has always been political. “It is simple math to connect the political inhibition of pleasure in individuals with the weakening of the individual,” Dulcinea Pitagora, an NYC-based psychotherapist, tells me. “To remain in power, it is in the best interest of those in power to weaken those not in power.” In other words, stealing joy — whether through anti-LGBTQ+ legislation, restrictions on sex work, or abortion bans that make some of us second-guess or fear sex — is an effective way to control and oppress people, and it always has been.

For some, this feels more true now, in post-Roe America, than ever. If they didn’t before, everyone with a uterus is beginning to feel the weight of what it means to live in a body over which the state is asserting control. Experiencing physical pleasure may once have felt like a natural right for us as living beings, but now it feels like a reclamation. Since the Supreme Court decided we don’t have the right to bodily autonomy, every moment of non-procreative sexual pleasure we take is a small act of rebellion. Using our bodies — which have been repurposed as political tools — for personal pleasure makes every orgasm a small protest.

Of course, pleasure isn’t limited to sex, but sex nonetheless plays an important role. In that sense, we can’t forget that what we’re fighting for in this moment is more than abortion rights — it’s also the right to feel pleasure in our bodies in the ways that we choose. “Pleasure is an important, and I would even say crucial, aspect of being alive,” Pitagora says. “[We need to] make a decision to intentionally and consistently cultivate pleasure in [our] lives as a form of self-care, in whatever form that looks like to [us].”

 Legislating away our pleasure centers

“Our ability to feel [sexual] pleasure is built in; it’s part of our anatomy and neurology,” Carol Queen, co-founder of the Center for Sex and Culture in San Francisco, tells me. The powers that be can’t technically prevent us from finding or feeling pleasure — but living in a world where our bodily autonomy is so fraught can make it more difficult. In fact, many people’s ability to experience physical pleasure is contingent on the ability to feel their body as an autonomous zone — in essence, being the one in control of their body.

“Pleasure is connected to empowerment via consent,” Pitagora says. “Experiencing pleasure requires a stable foundation that sets the stage for the brain and the rest of the nervous system to experience release.” In other words, consent is a necessary element of pleasure — and in this terrible political moment, the government is effectively minimizing our ability to consent.

Every yes we utter in service to our own pleasure is simultaneously a reclamation of our own autonomy and a gamble with the government over that autonomy. To wit: Given my legally contested body, I am aware every time I have sex, it could result in further legislation — or even prosecution. I choose allegiance to my autonomy every time, but I know that decision could come with consequences. When we consent to the pleasure we take, but resist the legitimacy of the legal consequences of that pleasure, consent becomes a very gray zone. And because our nervous systems know the difference between consent and coercion, that gray zone can lessen the joy of our sexual experiences.

For many people — particularly the most privileged among us — the recent abortion bans may be the first time in their lives that they’ve really had to question how much control they have over their own bodies. Of course, regardless of the laws passed, the wealthy still have access to safe abortion care, at least for now. But people who have never before had to think about or fight for their rights are spending a lot more mental energy engaging in what has become an unavoidable conversation, and their pleasure centers are no longer safely enshrined.

As usual, though, the most marginalized communities are still the most likely to feel the greatest impact of the recent Roe ruling on their sex lives. “The impact of sex-negative legislation that’s been enacted consistently for so many years shows up first and most severely [among] the most intersectionally marginalized, particularly Black and brown people,” Pitagora says.

Future generations are likely to feel the impact even more. So much of pleasure comes from knowing who you are and how your body works, and part of the right wing agenda is cutting funding for all kinds of education — especially related to bodies, queerness, history, and identity. We’re currently facing both a rash of “Don’t Say Gay” bills that have dangerous consequences for LGBTQ+ teens and a dearth of inclusive sex ed programs. The combination effectively denies queer teens access to knowledge about pleasure at the same time as it seeks to erase even the possibility of that pleasure.

 The power of “pleasure activism”

The irony in all of this is that, as Queen notes, feeling pleasure is more important now than ever. “Pleasure is one way to process stress and challenging times,” she says. But if our ability to feel pleasure is being mediated by politics, and we’re all going to experience the effects at some point or another, what can we even do about it? Will life in post-Roe America decimate our libidos? Not likely — and certainly not if pleasure activists have any say.

For privileged, white cis-het women who were spoon-fed the presumption of autonomy and have now suddenly had it stolen, the whole idea of pleasure as a political act may feel both archaic and novel. “I can’t believe we’re still protesting this shit,” is the familiar refrain of boomers who find their feminism reactivated. But there are a lot of folks — namely queer Black women — who never had the luxury of taking a break, and we can learn a lot from them.

People who live in marginalized bodies have been talking about the relationship between pleasure and power for so long that there’s already an extensive erotic political lexicon and a long, unbroken history of Black feminist erotic philosophy — even if it is largely unacknowledged by white feminists. Following in the footsteps of Audre Lorde, who educated folks about pleasure as political action in the 1970s, writer adrienne maree brown outlined the idea of pleasure as activism in her 2019 book, Pleasure Activism: The Politics of Feeling Good. “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,” she wrote.

But what does pleasure activism mean in practical terms? For Emme Witt, a dominatrix in Los Angeles, it includes making a career out of rejecting social norms and dismissing legal attempts to control her. Witt is a femme domme and a mom, a woman publicly exclaiming her sexual pleasure, and a middle-aged person who is “supposed” to keep her desire under wraps by some people’s standards. “I ‘do’ pleasure activism by actively dismissing social beliefs that I’m not supposed to experience my body in certain ways,” she tells me. “As a pro-domme, I could have criminal charges brought against me because my work isn’t totally legal. If simply doing my job can ultimately impact my rights, then seeking pleasure through that line of work is definitely political.”

Reclaiming pleasure in the face of control

Unlocking our collective erotic and political power does not mean we all have to quit our day jobs to become full time pleasure activists. It can begin with simple self-inquiry. “The considered phrase, ‘It feels right to me,’ acknowledges the strength of the erotic into a true knowledge, for what that means is the first and most powerful guiding light toward any understanding,” Lorde wrote in Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power. Reclaiming pleasure as power, then, begins the moment you allow yourself to wonder what feels right to you instead of looking to external powers to dictate your desires.

“The antidote would be in accessing consensual pleasure with ourselves and within our communities, and reminding ourselves that the formation of social constructs like power and pleasure begins on the individual and community level,” Pitagora says. Pleasure, not just as an individual experience but also as a communal one, can help us move forward.

 We can’t control what happens next politically, but we can support ourselves and each other through the uncertainty by giving and receiving pleasure — freely and with enthusiastic consent. As Pitagora points out, marginalized people have always found ways to survive and thrive during desperate times. We’re certainly not going to stop now. “Pleasure is one of the deepest human drives, so we will always do what we need to do to pursue it,” Pitagora says. “We have always been finding creative ways to experience pleasure, and we will continue to do so.”

How Pleasure Became Political. By Tracey Anne Duncan. Mic, August 16, 2022. 

Writer, healer, and self-proclaimed pleasure activist adrienne maree brown’s latest book arrived in the mail just as I was packing up to leave town, which is to say, right on time. As a disabled travel writer, journeys bring with them my greatest joys and the greatest pains, the dual condition of which I like to explore as I move, because sometimes, trauma, pain, and oppression can become stale when left to sit, but when it moves, we can map it, and maybe formulate medicines that can bring about healing. I find joy in that work, and I think the various voices in Pleasure Activism: The Politics of Feeling Good, are on that tip, too.

Including essays and conversations by brown and other pleasure activists, this collection offers up a multitude of tactics for which to embody pleasure, claim it as a central and essential liberatory practice, and a sustainable one for the long-term road trip of justice work. I wasn’t familiar with the term or what it meant for social movements, but I did have to assume it had something to do with sex and hoped that it would give me something beyond that assumption. I wasn’t disappointed.

Brown, author of Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds, defines pleasure itself as a satisfying feeling and/or the act of giving sexual satisfaction to another person, and says, “in a nutshell, pleasure activism is learning from what pleases us about how to make justice and liberation the most pleasurable experiences we can have.” It is more focused on those individual and collective experiences and how they can inform movements for justice rather than on offering a structural overhaul of those movements themselves. Most of what is written by brown herself does center on sex, touching on topics like fantasies, porn, period sex, polyamory, and masturbating, while the other pieces in the book engage with pleasure from various entry points, all in some way responding to Audre Lorde’s 1978 essay “Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power.”

 For instance, writer and scholar Alexis Pauline Gumbs writes letters to her friends who create joy in the tradition of author and activist Toni Cade Bambara. In it, she spoke of watching a documentary on rape at school and realizing that the silence she had experienced as the result of assault was one “that other people had moved through,” that she lived in the “legacies of women who have been shaped and strengthened by burn.” There is a continuing thread in this book of Black women, usually queer fat femmes, learning of the power of this shift from other Black women. Of this, Gumbs says, “let’s call it: you will not move through this room and not know that there is a Black femme in here who loves herself at least as diligently as oppression denies her.”

While Gumbs expressed her joy through letters, Joan Morgan, author of When Chickenheads Come Home to Roost: A Hip-Hop Feminist Breaks It Down, wrote one of the more academic pieces in this collection, and maybe the heart of this book. In “Why We Get Off: Moving Toward a Black Feminist Politics of Pleasure,” she hopes to “articulate a politics of pleasure that positions [it] not only as desirable and a social and political imperative, but also an under-theorized resistance strategy for Black women in the U.S. and Caribbean.”

In Two-Spirit Black and Indigenous organizer Holiday Simmons’s diary entries addressed to GoD (the D standing for “dick”) about hooking up on dating apps while transitioning and trying to get pregnant, he offers us the gift of, “hurt people hurt people, but healing people heal people!” And in a conversation on fashion with BlackStar Film Festival founder Maori Holmes, she gives us Marie Kondo-esque guidelines for constructing a wardrobe that can thrill the wearer in a way that can better facilitate them to take on the world.

As a chronically pained (and chronically single) queer, I was hoping for more voices to complicate ideas of who gets to access pleasure, especially in bodies not deemed normative. I wondered how my asexual, aromantic, and agender accomplices would be able to complement these takes, as well as disabled, Deaf/HoH, mentally or chronically ill folks. Alana Devich Cyril did briefly touch on this in a talk on late-stage cancer, and how the depression that she fell into on her first chemo cocktail made pleasure inaccessible to her. Ultimately it was Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha’s entry, Care As Pleasure, where she said, “Care isn’t always orgasmically pleasurable: people need to be able to get what we need and go to the bathroom whether or not it feels like a dance party,” that made me feel a little more ‘seen,’ or validated.

One section that brown wrote that didn’t focus much on sex and that gave me tons of pleasure was one entirely dedicated to Beyoncé. My pleasure icon, a feminist icon, all the icons, and the “queen my anarchic heart continues to choose,” as brown puts it, Beyoncé is ultimately a regular-ass person, a Black woman artist mother-of-three from Houston, Texas who feels pain and fucks up and through the alchemy of her work transforms the natural into something supernatural. As the title of brown’s chapter states, The Pleasure of Living at the Same Time as Beyoncé Giselle Knowles-Carter is something I specifically focus on when I’m struggling to think up reasons to go on living in 2019. And just as brown alerts at the beginning of that section, if you take issue with our love for this woman, feel free to skip ahead, because much of her body of work echoes the messages in Pleasure Activism — and to paraphrase author Kiese Laymon who is quoted in this book, we have to hold fast to joy wherever we can find it in this world, by any means necessary.

 This is driven home particularly when brown writes on Beyoncé’s 2017 Grammys performance, where she was pregnant with her twins. At the time, Aquarius season was giving way to Pisces season, and Bey’s performance was an oceanic ode to the worship of water gods and goddesses in African diasporic spiritualities and their powers of cyclic growth. While performing “Love Drought,” a painful but almost radically optimistic song about joining together to bring about a desperately-needed reckoning, Beyoncé says, “if we’re going to heal, let it be glorious.” It’s moving through pain and trauma that makes space for pleasure to be possible, for peace.

It’s true that in conversations around social justice, we often talk about what sucks, what we don’t want, and what needs to be torn down. In order to build a better world, to move towards the goals of decolonization, abolition, and liberation, Pleasure Activism tells us, we need to “practice for the world we want,” as sister burlesque performers Michi and Una Osato put it in one piece. What I got from this book is that all bodies have the potential to develop this practice of using the intelligence of what makes us feel good and apply it to movements for justice. We don’t have to just give our blood, sweat, and tears to this project, but share our pleasure, too. We can — we must — bring all of all of us.

“Pleasure Activism: The Politics of Feeling Good” Asks Us to Practice for the World We Want. By Bani Amor, Autostraddle, March 6, 2019