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what a fitting book to start off 2021! this is a chonky read, but well worth it. there is so much to learn about how we can make room for pleasure in our lives all the time, and adrienne maree brown + all the book contributors start to open that door for us. if you felt called by audre lorde's uses of the erotic, this book will take you further along different pathways about what it means to experience pleasure and then demand no less than a pleasurable, fulfilling life. i feel particularly call...
This book was a major miss for me. I think it had a wonderful foundation of ideas, but never culminated into a fully formed text. Super scattered and many assumptions made; about sex, consent, and queer culture. I felt like it offered a skim of all of these topics- while actually leaving someone who lives these identities feeling kinda violated. It is a slice of life for this particular time- perhaps a slice that isn’t appealing or particularly thoughtful or researched. Where is the editor? What...
Enjoyed the last quarter of the book and some essays along the way but felt mostly like a missed opportunity to go deeper into nonsexual pleasures and explore the dynamic nature of pleasure in all kinds of bodies. Food in particular felt like a glaring omission in a supposedly fat positive book. Also in general lots of assumptions about the universality of sexual experiences and pleasures. Missing an understanding of asexuality, of disability, and of sexual trauma that doesn't just get immediate...
Pleasure Activism is a collection of essays, interviews, poetry, and art composed and/or collected by adrienne maree brown. The structure and organization of the book is well thought out as it spaces each of these mediums apart so that the reader is not over-saturated. The book is very Queer and trans- inclusive and most of the entries and interviews are with women, gender non conforming, and/or* trans people of color. There is one somewhat academic essay but the rest of the entries involve peop...
This was a super amazing book, more non-sexual pleasure stuff would have been nice to see, but my main issue is small but repeated food moralizing (once the literal phrase "eating clean") - what a devastating sentiment to bring to pleasure activism! A really distracting bummer to find in 3 separate places in the book, but outside of that, really really invaluable conversations, interviews, and short essays around pleasure, intent, growth, dreaming, joy, and non-capitalism-based self care.
This was such interesting reframing around pleasure and how we experience and cultivate it. It was much more academic in tone than I was expecting. It’s a mix of essays, guest essays, and interviews, some of which work better than others but I liked the variety of perspectives. This would have been particularly valuable to have read at the start of my social work career. I’d recommend it to anyone who works in a helping profession.There is a lot of compassion and grace around trauma and how peop...
So grateful for this book and its affirmation that pleasure and sexuality are important, and not frivolous, parts of life. There's a tendency in left communities to treat pleasure as something that inherently amplifies capitalist bullshit, and sexuality/eroticism as inherently traumatic and unredeemable, and the book did a good job of addressing these issues and asserting a place for pleasure and joy. I wish that there had been more transfeminine voices, though! It was amazing to have so many di...
A great book with amazing homework and points of praxis, I definitely see myself returning to this book to refresh myself and realign my desire and pursuit in living a pleasurable life.The only reason I don’t give it a 5 is because there were a few too many transmisogynist dog whistles (in one essay a contributor uses the term “womyn” rather than “woman”) in this book for my liking. I believe adrienne maree brown herself does a good job of being inclusive in her writing and placing a disclaimer
This book was written for Adrienne Maree Brown by Adrienne Maree Brown. It was an excuse to interview people she likes and admires, and and excuse to talk about how woke she is.I'm not saying that's a bad thing. On the contrary, sex positivity is something that is sorely lacked. Sex isn't something a lot of people are comfortable talking about... even with their romantic partner(s). And there were some bits in this book I enjoyed: the pole dancer who loves what they do; the unpacking of polygamy...
Every year I declare it the Year of *something* or other, and this year is the Year of Pleasure. For me, this means, mostly, being in my body for moments of wonder, awe, curiosity, and pride. Eating something delicious, watching the sun rise or set, the feeling of rain drops or wind on my face. It might be a moment of gender euphoria, of feeling utterly safe, of letting myself rest or asking for what I need without guilt or shame. It might be expressing anger, letting myself cry, showing vulnera...
This book might have been really great if the author was able to string coherent thoughts together and write in a linear, cohesive fashion which followed the rules of logic. Instead, she wrote paragraphs with broad sweeping assertions which she neglected to support with examples or arguments. Based on fact one, she would then say therefore, totally unrelated fact two. If my life experience happened to support her assertions I found myself nodding along, but if not, then I was wondering how the h...
I didn't know how much I needed to read this.
Wow wow wow. It took me almost six months to read this book because I spent so much time underlining and trying to soak up the dense goodness in little chunks. Reading this book and learning about pleasure activism has changed the way that I interact with my own desire, my body, and the communities that I am grateful to be apart of. I cried when I finished it. Everyone should read Pleasure Activism.
What are the main ideas?- liberation work must be driven by pleasure, not by avoidance of pain or harm.- many of us doing justice work have forgotten the above. we are activated by making things less bad for people (including ourselves). however, if we don’t actually know what pleasure feels like, we could fight against bad things forever and never actually know (a) what liberation feels like and (b) if we’re actually getting closer.- if it doesn’t feel good, it’s not sustainable. period.- oppre...
Wow wow wow. This book shifted something in me. Never has a book felt this essential since the first time I read This Bridge Called My Back.
I designed a course called Subversive Joy: Writing the Senses as Resistance and am teaching it for the first time this semester. I have been following adrienne maree brown now for a few years and love her work, so I was delighted to see this new book, even though it wasn’t ready for me to teach directly from this semester. The synchronicity between my syllabus and the pleasure politics outlined in the book was amazing - Uses of the Erotic and Joan Morgan’s Black Scholar essay, How We Get Off mir...
I had so many positive visceral and cognitive reactions while reading this collection of essays and conversations about pleasure. During the first chapter I was wondering aloud, "have I found my bible?" I had never before had so many of my beliefs recognized and expanded upon all in one place. Within the first pages, the author, Adrienne Maree Brown, had outlined the Pleasure Principles:-What you pay attention to grows-We become what we practice-Yes is the way-When I am happy, it is good for the...
[3.5 stars] A collection of essays on various facets of pleasure and desire, curated primarily through a Black queer feminist lens. For me, this book was a mixed reading experience. I connected with a number of points that she raised in the introduction but am not sure if what followed met that promise. A big chunk of the essays are taken from her 2017/2018 Bitch Media columns, so if you're an avid reader of the print and online content like I am, it may seem repetitive. I appreciated how often
grounding, transformative, and healing. i want everyone to read this book.honoring what she calls her political lineage from octavia butler to audre lorde — adrienne maree brown blesses us with data and knowledge around harm reduction, generative boundaries, transformative justice, and other pleasure activism methodologies.this absolutely rich text held me and asked me where it hurt, told me it's going to be okay, encouraged me to use my unbridled joy as a compass to move through the unjust worl...
Phenomenal anthology of radical and liberation-focused essays. Something I have always, always appreciated about adrienne maree brown is that she is so invested in the decentralization/despecialization of knowledge: she knows what she knows, and that’s a whole lot, but she never suggests that she is the most scholarly when it comes to Octavia E. Butler, speculative fiction, Black liberation work, or pleasure activism. She is ALWAYS thanking her teachers and naming the political legacies in which...