It is important for me to uplift Lorde’s words for three reasons.
In touch with the erotic, I become less willing to accept powerlessness, or those other supplied states of being which are not native to me, such as resignation, despair, self-effacement, depression, self-denial.” “Our acts against oppression become integral with self, motivated and empowered from within. The fear that we cannot grow beyond whatever distortions we may find within ourselves keeps us docile and loyal and obedient, externally defined, and leads us to accept many facets of our oppression as women.
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.īuilding 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.Feeling good is not frivolous, it is a measure of freedom-not just the physical freedom of the body to pursue the pleasures of the flesh, but also the mental, emotional, and spiritual freedom to feel content, happy, and present in our brief and potent lives.Īs Audre Lorde shared in her 1978 groundbreaking essay “Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power”: “The fear of our desires keeps them suspect and indiscriminately powerful, for to suppress any truth is to give it strength beyond endurance. 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. Drawing on the black feminist tradition, she challenges us to rethink the ground rules of 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? Author and 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.
The New York Times best seller from AK Press is now an audiobook - read by Adrienne Maree Brown herself!
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