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Pleasure Activism: Reclaiming Joy as a Revolutionary Act
Are you tired of the relentless pressure to be productive, performative, and perpetually "on"? Do you feel a disconnect between societal expectations and your own inherent need for joy, pleasure, and self-care? Then you might be ready to explore the burgeoning movement of pleasure activism. This isn't about hedonism or selfishness; it's about recognizing the radical potential of pleasure as a powerful force for social change and personal liberation. This blog post will delve into the core principles of pleasure activism, exploring its historical context, its intersection with various social justice movements, and how you can incorporate its principles into your own life.
What is Pleasure Activism?
Pleasure activism is the practice of prioritizing and celebrating pleasure as a form of resistance and self-care, especially within marginalized communities facing systemic oppression. It challenges the societal norms that equate productivity with worth and shame pleasure as frivolous or even immoral. Instead, it asserts that joy, intimacy, and self-love are essential components of a healthy and fulfilling life, and that access to these experiences should be a fundamental human right. This isn't about indulging in fleeting pleasures; it's about cultivating sustainable practices that nurture well-being and challenge oppressive power structures.
The Historical Roots of Pleasure Activism
While the term "pleasure activism" is relatively new, the concept itself has deep historical roots. Think of the Black Panther Party's emphasis on community programs focused on health and wellness, or the early feminist movement's challenging of patriarchal norms around sexuality and female pleasure. These movements, in their own ways, recognized the importance of joy and self-determination as crucial elements of liberation. Similarly, many indigenous cultures have long incorporated ritual, ceremony, and celebration into their resistance against colonial forces. Pleasure activism builds upon this legacy, recognizing the interconnectedness of physical, emotional, and spiritual well-being in the struggle for justice.
Pleasure Activism and Social Justice
Pleasure activism isn't just about personal liberation; it's intrinsically linked to social justice. For marginalized communities, access to pleasure is often severely restricted by systemic inequalities. Poverty, racism, sexism, homophobia, and transphobia all contribute to limiting access to resources, environments, and social support networks that foster joy and well-being. Pleasure activism, therefore, demands a critical examination of these power structures and a commitment to dismantling them. This involves advocating for policies that ensure everyone has access to safe and supportive communities, adequate healthcare, affordable housing, and equitable opportunities for self-expression and enjoyment.
How to Practice Pleasure Activism
Incorporating pleasure activism into your life can begin with small, intentional actions. This could include:
Prioritizing Self-Care:
Make time for activities that bring you joy, whether it's taking a long bath, spending time in nature, engaging in creative pursuits, or connecting with loved ones.
Challenging Societal Norms:
Actively push back against societal expectations that shame or restrict pleasure. This might involve speaking out against harmful stereotypes, advocating for inclusive policies, or simply choosing to prioritize your own well-being over external pressures.
Building Community:
Connect with others who share your values and create supportive spaces where you can explore pleasure and celebrate each other's strengths. This could involve joining a group, attending workshops, or simply sharing your experiences with trusted friends and family.
Actively Resisting Oppression:
Recognize how systemic oppression impacts access to pleasure and actively work to dismantle those systems. This could involve supporting organizations working towards social justice, volunteering your time, or donating to relevant causes.
The Revolutionary Potential of Pleasure
Ultimately, pleasure activism is a radical act of defiance. By prioritizing joy and self-care, we challenge the dominant narratives that equate worth with productivity and shame pleasure as frivolous. We reclaim our agency, our bodies, and our right to experience the full spectrum of human emotions. This isn't about selfish indulgence; it's about recognizing that our well-being is essential to our ability to fight for justice and create a more equitable world for all. The pursuit of pleasure is not a distraction from activism; it is activism itself.
Conclusion
Pleasure activism offers a powerful framework for understanding and addressing the interconnectedness of personal well-being and social justice. By centering pleasure as a vital component of liberation, we can challenge oppressive systems and create a more just and joyful world for everyone. Embracing the principles of pleasure activism is not just a personal choice; it's a revolutionary act.
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)
1. Isn't pleasure activism just selfish? No, pleasure activism recognizes that self-care is essential for effective activism. Prioritizing your well-being doesn't negate your commitment to social justice; it strengthens it.
2. How can I incorporate pleasure activism into my daily life if I'm constantly stressed? Start small. Identify one thing that brings you even a small amount of joy, and make time for it each day. Gradually add more self-care practices as you build capacity.
3. Is pleasure activism relevant to all social justice movements? Absolutely. All social justice movements benefit from prioritizing the well-being of those involved. Burnout is a real threat, and pleasure activism offers tools for sustaining the fight for justice.
4. How can I find a pleasure activism community? Search online for local or virtual groups focused on self-care, social justice, or related topics. Many organizations integrate principles of pleasure activism into their work.
5. What if my culture doesn't prioritize pleasure or self-care? Pleasure activism is about reclaiming your own right to joy and well-being, regardless of cultural norms. It's about creating space for your own needs, even if it means challenging traditional expectations.
| pleasure activism: Pleasure Activism Adrienne Maree Brown, 2019 No more self-denial. Politics should be a resounding, erotic yes, not another deadening no. |
| pleasure activism: Pleasure Activism adrienne maree brown, 2019-03-19 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! |
| pleasure activism: Miss Vera's Finishing School for Boys Who Want to Be Girls Veronica Vera, 2016-09-07 It is estimated that three to five percent of the adult male population of the United States feels the need, at least occasionally, to dress in women's clothing. Judging from enrollment at her academy, Miss Vera would say that figure is low. Veronica Vera founded Miss Vera's Finishing School for Boys Who Want to Be Girls in 1992 and started a gender revolution. Working from the pink palace of the Academy's intimate Manhattan campus, she has helped hundreds of students embrace and master Venus Envy through her expert instruction in the arts of dressing up, making up, going out, and acting like a lady. In her new book, she shares her priceless wisdom with the world. With sparkling wit and dazzling insight, Miss V gives us the 411 on body hair, foundation garments, make-up, and dressing, as well as offering invaluable advice on Creating a Herstory (finding the real life story of the femmeself within) speech, manners, walking in high heels, and--that biggest step of all--going out in the real world all dressed up. Amply illustrated and filled with the real stories of students and graduates, Miss Vera's Finishing School also offers a fascinating history of how the Academy came to be, as well as Miss Vera's own incisive gender manifesto. As we step boldly toward the new millennium, many more of us will be doing it in high heels, says Veronica Vera. In Miss Vera's Finishing School for Boys Who Want to Be Girls, she proves conclusively that, after a long day in wingtips, there's nothing like slipping into a pair of spiked heels. |
| pleasure activism: Emergent Strategy Adrienne M. Brown, 2017 Emergence is the way complex systems and patterns arise out of a multiplicity of relatively simple interactions. In the framework of emergence, the whole is a mirror of the parts. Existence is fractal - the health of the cell is the health of the species and the planet. Change is constant. This book is about how we can shape the changes we experience to match our intentions using strategic methods that are as adaptive, resilient decentralised, and interdependent as the patterns of flocking birds or differentiating cells. A secular spirituality based equally on science and science fiction. |
| pleasure activism: Holding Change adrienne maree brown, 2021-04-22 Facilitation and mediation are important skills in our highly organized world. Holding Change is a guide for attending to both in ways that align with nature, with pleasure, with our best imaginings of our future. It provides lessons for generating the ease necessary to move through life’s inevitable struggles and for practicing the art of holding others without losing ourselves. Black feminists have evolved this wisdom, but it can serve anyone working to create change, individually, interpersonally, and within our organizations. The majority of the book is sourced from brown’s twenty-plus years of facilitation and mediation work, with additional wisdom from a selection of living Black feminist facilitators and mediators. |
| pleasure activism: We Will Not Cancel Us adrienne maree brown, 2020-11-20 Cancel culture addresses real harm...and sometimes causes more. It’s time to think this through. “Cancel” or “call-out” culture is a source of much tension and debate in American society. The infamous “Harper’s Letter,” signed by public intellectuals of both the left and right, sought to settle the matter and only caused greater division. Originating as a way for marginalized and disempowered people to take down more powerful abusers, often with the help of social media, cancel culture is seen by some as having gone “too far.” Adrienne maree brown, a respected cultural voice and a professional mediator, reframes the discussion for us, in a way that points to possible ways beyond the impasse. Most critiques of cancel culture come from outside the milieus that produce it, sometimes from even from its targets. Brown explores the question from a Black, queer, and feminist viewpoint that gently asks, how well does this practice serve us? Does it prefigure the sort of world we want to live in? And, if it doesn’t, how do we seek accountability and redress for harm in a way that reflects our values? |
| pleasure activism: Bodyminds Reimagined Sami Schalk, 2018-03-15 In Bodyminds Reimagined Sami Schalk traces how black women's speculative fiction complicates the understanding of bodyminds—the intertwinement of the mental and the physical—in the context of race, gender, and (dis)ability. Bridging black feminist theory with disability studies, Schalk demonstrates that this genre's political potential lies in the authors' creation of bodyminds that transcend reality's limitations. She reads (dis)ability in neo-slave narratives by Octavia Butler (Kindred) and Phyllis Alesia Perry (Stigmata) not only as representing the literal injuries suffered under slavery, but also as a metaphor for the legacy of racial violence. The fantasy worlds in works by N. K. Jemisin, Shawntelle Madison, and Nalo Hopkinson—where werewolves have obsessive-compulsive-disorder and blind demons can see magic—destabilize social categories and definitions of the human, calling into question the very nature of identity. In these texts, as well as in Butler’s Parable series, able-mindedness and able-bodiedness are socially constructed and upheld through racial and gendered norms. Outlining (dis)ability's centrality to speculative fiction, Schalk shows how these works open new social possibilities while changing conceptualizations of identity and oppression through nonrealist contexts. |
| pleasure activism: Octavia's Brood Walidah Imarisha, adrienne maree brown, 2015-03-23 Whenever we envision a world without war, without prisons, without capitalism, we are producing speculative fiction. Organizers and activists envision, and try to create, such worlds all the time. Walidah Imarisha and adrienne maree brown have brought twenty of them together in the first anthology of short stories to explore the connections between radical speculative fiction and movements for social change. The visionary tales of Octavia’s Brood span genres—sci-fi, fantasy, horror, magical realism—but all are united by an attempt to inject a healthy dose of imagination and innovation into our political practice and to try on new ways of understanding ourselves, the world around us, and all the selves and worlds that could be. The collection is rounded off with essays by Tananarive Due and Mumia Abu-Jamal, and a preface by Sheree Renée Thomas. PRAISE FOR OCTAVIA'S BROOD: Those concerned with justice and liberation must always persuade the mass of people that a better world is possible. Our job begins with speculative fictions that fire society's imagination and its desire for change. In adrienne maree brown and Walidah Imarisha's visionary conception, and by its activist-artists' often stunning acts of creative inception, Octavia's Brood makes for great thinking and damn good reading. The rest will be up to us. —Jeff Chang, author of Who We Be: The Colorization of America “Conventional exclamatory phrases don’t come close to capturing the essence of what we have here in Octavia’s Brood. One part sacred text, one part social movement manual, one part diary of our future selves telling us, ‘It’s going to be okay, keep working, keep loving.’ Our radical imaginations are under siege and this text is the rescue mission. It is the new cornerstone of every class I teach on inequality, justice, and social change....This is the text we’ve been waiting for.” —Ruha Benjamin, professor of African American Studies at Princeton University and author of People’s Science: Bodies and Rights on the Stem Cell Frontier Octavia once told me that two things worried her about the future of humanity: The tendency to think hierarchically, and the tendency to place ourselves higher on the hierarchy than others. I think she would be humbled beyond words that the fine, thoughtful writers in this volume have honored her with their hearts and minds. And that in calling for us to consider that hierarchical structure, they are not walking in her shadow, nor standing on her shoulders, but marching at her side. —Steven Barnes, author of Lion’s Blood “Never has one book so thoroughly realized the dream of its namesake. Octavia's Brood is the progeny of two lovers of Octavia Butler and their belief in her dream that science fiction is for everybody.... Butler could not wish for better evidence of her touch changing our literary and living landscapes. Play with these children, read these works, and find the children in you waiting to take root under the stars!” —Moya Bailey and Ayana Jamieson, Octavia E. Butler Legacy “Like [Octavia] Butler's fiction, this collection is cartography, a map to freedom.” —dream hampton, filmmaker and Visiting Artist at Stanford University’s Institute for Diversity in the Arts Walidah Imarisha is a writer, organizer, educator, and spoken word artist. She is the author of the poetry collectionScars/Stars and facilitates writing workshops at schools, community centers, youth detention facilities, and women's prisons. adrienne maree brown is a 2013 Kresge Literary Arts Fellow writing science fiction in Detroit, Michigan. She received a 2013 Detroit Knight Arts Challenge Award to run a series of Octavia Butler–based writing workshops. |
| pleasure activism: Journal of Radical Permission Adrienne Maree Brown, Sonya Renee Taylor, 2022-08-02 Bestselling authors adrienne maree brown and Sonya Renee Taylor create an unforgettable and transformational experience of journaling your way into your most authentic self. This journal (born from the Institute for Radical Permission) will help you claim permission to live your purpose. As you enjoy your journal, go to radicalpermission.org and hear straight from Sonya & adrienne about how they came to each of the journal's revelations. Be part of the journey they took to deepen their practice and watch videos from the many people who inspired them. Based on the bestselling philosophies of radical self-love, emergent strategy, and pleasure activism, this journal gives you permission to love yourself deeply as you are. Journaling to these prompts will help you surrender to your body's needs instead of forcing yourself into cramped disciplines. It will encourage you to become awed by the natural beauty of your divine self instead of being rampantly self-critical. It will aid you in embracing your shadows and accepting responsibility for your impact all while liberating you to just be. This structured journal provides six key practices, with prompts for each practice that center on curiosity, surrender, grace, and satisfaction. The daily prompts for self-inquiry can be used as part of your journey toward healing, or in tandem with the self-paced online learning course at radicalpermission.org. |
| pleasure activism: Acts of Gaiety Sara Warner, 2012-10-26 Against queer theory's long-suffering romance with mourning and melancholia and a national agenda that urges homosexuals to renounce pleasure if they want to be taken seriously, Acts of Gaiety seeks to reanimate notions of gaiety as a political value for LGBT activism by recovering earlier mirthful modes of political performance. The book mines the archives of lesbian-feminist activism of the 1960s–70s, highlighting the outrageous gaiety—including camp, kitsch, drag, guerrilla theater, zap actions, rallies, manifestos, pageants, and parades alongside legitimate theater”-- at the center of the social and theatrical performances of the era. Juxtaposing figures such as Valerie Solanas and Jill Johnston with more recent performers and activists including Hothead Paisan, Bitch and Animal, and the Five Lesbian Brothers, Sara Warner shows how reclaiming this largely discarded and disavowed past elucidates possibilities for being and belonging. Acts of Gaiety explores the mutually informing histories of gayness as politics and as joie de vivre, along with the centrality of liveliness to queer performance and protest. |
| pleasure activism: The Book of (More) Delights Ross Gay, 2023-09-19 From bestselling author of The Book of Delights and award-winning poet, a book of lyrical mini-essays celebrating the everyday that will inspire readers to rediscover the joys in the world around us. In Ross Gay’s new collection of small, daily wonders, again written over the course of a year, one of America’s most original voices continues his ongoing investigation of delight. For Gay, what delights us is what connects us, what gives us meaning, from the joy of hearing a nostalgic song blasting from a passing car to the pleasure of refusing the “nefarious” scannable QR code menus, from the tiny dog he fell hard for to his mother baking a dozen kinds of cookies for her grandchildren. As always, Gay revels in the natural world—sweet potatoes being harvested, a hummingbird carousing in the beebalm, a sunflower growing out of a wall around the cemetery, the shared bounty from a neighbor’s fig tree—and the trillion mysterious ways this glorious earth delights us. The Book of (More) Delights is a volume to savor and share. |
| pleasure activism: Block, Delete, Move On LalalaLetMeExplain, 2022-02-10 The perfect Christmas gift for the spectacular buff tings in your life. *One of Cosmopolitan's 2022 hot new releases* 'This book will change lives' - Tracey Cox 'Possibly the best book on relationships I have ever read' - Jess Megan _____________________________________________________________ Have you ever been on a disastrous date and vowed never to use apps again? Are you blaming yourself for the things going wrong in your love life? Do you always seem to become attached to people who treat you badly? The sad truth is that when it comes to modern dating, there are a whole host of challenges and hurdles to overcome. From ghosting and negging to gaslighting and abuse, this book teaches you what to look out for, to make sure that you're not accidentally dating men with toxic traits who secretly hate women, or who just want to have sex and run. It will empower you to use your voice and walk away if you spot warning signs in relationships, by highlighting the red flags and the types of fuckboy that you might run into when dating, as well as the green flags and signs that indicate a healthy partnership. This is not a dating book that promises to find you a person to love; instead, it will help you spot the troublesome ones before it is too late. It will help you to recognise that you possess spectacular buff ting energy and that it's perfectly possible to be contentedly single. Most importantly, this book will give you the power to BLOCK, DELETE and MOVE ON with living your best life. |
| pleasure activism: My First Little Book of Intersectional Activism Titania McGrath, 2020-09-03 'Fabulously smart and entertaining . . . If virtue-signalling wokery drives you as nuts as it drives me, you will love it' Piers Morgan 'Required reading for anyone needing an antidote to the mass hysteria of humanity's latest religion' Entertainment Focus After the success of her debut Woke: A Guide to Social Justice, radical slam poet and intersectional feminist Titania McGrath has turned her talents to the realm of children's non-fiction. Aimed at activists from the age of six months to six years, Titania's book will help cultivate a new progressive generation. In a series of groundbreaking and poignant chapters, she will take you on a journey with some of the most inspiring individuals in history, such as Emmeline Pankhurst, Meghan Markle, Nelson Mandela, Hillary Clinton and Joseph Stalin. Praise for Woke: 'Beautiful classic satire' Ricky Gervais 'The latest genius twist in Britain's long tradition of satirical spoof' Daily Express 'Titania McGrath mercilessly satirises the Left's online umbrage brigade, the permanently offended, those who have taken on the role of policing thoughts and words to the point of absurdity' The Herald 'Hilarious' Evening Standard 'Hilarious' Spectator 'Hilarious' The Times 'Utterly unfunny' Peter Hitchens |
| pleasure activism: Diary of a Young Naturalist Dara McAnulty, 2021-06-08 A BuzzFeed Best Book of June 2021 From sixteen-year-old Dara McAnulty, a globally renowned figure in the youth climate activist movement, comes a memoir about loving the natural world and fighting to save it. Diary of a Young Naturalist chronicles the turning of a year in Dara’s Northern Ireland home patch. Beginning in spring?when “the sparrows dig the moss from the guttering and the air is as puffed out as the robin’s chest?these diary entries about his connection to wildlife and the way he sees the world are vivid, evocative, and moving. As well as Dara’s intense connection to the natural world, Diary of a Young Naturalist captures his perspective as a teenager juggling exams, friendships, and a life of campaigning. We see his close-knit family, the disruptions of moving and changing schools, and the complexities of living with autism. “In writing this book,” writes Dara, “I have experienced challenges but also felt incredible joy, wonder, curiosity and excitement. In sharing this journey my hope is that people of all generations will not only understand autism a little more but also appreciate a child’s eye view on our delicate and changing biosphere.” Winner of the Wainwright Prize for UK nature writing and already sold into more than a dozen territories, Diary of a Young Naturalist is a triumphant debut from an important new voice. |
| pleasure activism: Undrowned Alexis Pauline Gumbs, 2020-11-17 Undrowned is a book-length meditation for social movements and our whole species based on the subversive and transformative guidance of marine mammals. Our aquatic cousins are queer, fierce, protective of each other, complex, shaped by conflict, and struggling to survive the extractive and militarized conditions our species has imposed on the ocean. Gumbs employs a brilliant mix of poetic sensibility and naturalist observation to show what they might teach us, producing not a specific agenda but an unfolding space for wondering and questioning. From the relationship between the endangered North Atlantic Right Whale and Gumbs’s Shinnecock and enslaved ancestors to the ways echolocation changes our understandings of “vision” and visionary action, this is a masterful use of metaphor and natural models in the service of social justice. |
| pleasure activism: Gender, Pleasure, and Violence Agnieszka Kościańska, 2021-01-01 Behind the Iron Curtain, the politics of sexuality and gender were, in many ways, more progressive than the West. While Polish citizens undoubtedly suffered under the oppressive totalitarianism of socialism, abortion was legal, clear laws protected victims of rape, and it was relatively easy to legally change one's gender. In Gender, Pleasure, and Violence, Agnieszka Kościańska reveals that sexologists—experts such as physicians, therapists, and educators—not only treated patients but also held sex education classes at school, published regular columns in the press, and authored highly popular sex manuals that sold millions of copies. Yet strict gender roles within the home meant that true equality was never fully within reach. Drawing on interviews, participant observation, and archival work, Kościańska shares how professions like sexologists defined the notions of sexual pleasure and sexual violence under these sweeping cultural changes. By tracing the study of sexual human behavior as it was developed and professionalized in Poland since the 1960s, Gender, Pleasure, and Violence explores how the collapse of socialism brought both restrictions in gender rights and new opportunities. |
| pleasure activism: The Lightmaker's Manifesto Karen Walrond, 2021-11-02 Karen Walrond shines her light so we can find our own. —Brené Brown Many of us have strong convictions. We want to advocate for causes we care about--but which ones? We want to work for change--but will the emotional toll lead to burn out? Leadership coach, lawyer, photographer, and activist Karen Walrond knows that when you care deeply about the world, light can seem hard to find. But when your activism grows out of your joy--and vice versa--you begin to see light everywhere. In The Lightmaker's Manifesto, Walrond helps us name the skills, values, and actions that bring us joy; identify the causes that spark our empathy and concern; and then put it all together to change the world. Creative and practical exercises, including journaling, daily intention-setting, and mindful self-compassion, are complemented by lively conversations with activists and thought leaders such as Valarie Kaur, Brené Brown, Tarana Burke, and Zuri Adele. With stories from around the world and wisdom from those leading movements for change, Walrond beckons readers toward lives of integrity, advocacy, conviction, and joy. By unearthing our passions and gifts, we learn how to joyfully advocate for justice, peace, and liberation. We learn how to become makers of light. |
| pleasure activism: Embodied Social Justice Rae Johnson, 2022-11-25 Embodied Social Justice introduces an embodied approach to working with oppression. Grounded in current research, the book integrates key findings from education, psychology, sociology, and somatic studies while addressing critical gaps in how these fields have addressed pervasive patterns of social injustice. At the heart of the book, a series of embodied narratives bring to life everyday experiences of oppression through evocative descriptions of how power implicitly shapes body image, interpersonal space, eye contact, gestures, and the use of touch. This second edition includes two new body stories from research participants living and working in the global South. Supplemental guidelines for practice, updated references, and new community resources have also been added. Designed for social workers, counselors, educators, and other human service professionals working with members of disenfranchised and marginalized communities, Embodied Social Justice offers a conceptual framework and model of practice to assist in identifying, unpacking, and transforming embodied experiences of oppression from the inside out. |
| pleasure activism: Work's Intimacy Melissa Gregg, 2013-04-23 This book provides a long-overdue account of online technology and its impact on the work and lifestyles of professional employees. It moves between the offices and homes of workers in the knew knowledge economy to provide intimate insight into the personal, family, and wider social tensions emerging in today’s rapidly changing work environment. Drawing on her extensive research, Gregg shows that new media technologies encourage and exacerbate an older tendency among salaried professionals to put work at the heart of daily concerns, often at the expense of other sources of intimacy and fulfillment. New media technologies from mobile phones to laptops and tablet computers, have been marketed as devices that give us the freedom to work where we want, when we want, but little attention has been paid to the consequences of this shift, which has seen work move out of the office and into cafés, trains, living rooms, dining rooms, and bedrooms. This professional presence bleed leads to work concerns impinging on the personal lives of employees in new and unforseen ways. This groundbreaking book explores how aspiring and established professionals each try to cope with the unprecedented intimacy of technologically-mediated work, and how its seductions seem poised to triumph over the few remaining relationships that may stand in its way. |
| pleasure activism: On The Pleasure Principle In Culture Robert Pfaller, 2014-07-15 For many illusions it is easy to find owners—people who proudly declare their belief in things such as life after death, human reason, or the self-regulation of financial markets. Yet there are also different kinds of illusions, too, for example, in art: trompe l'oeil painting pleases its observers with anonymous illusions—illusions where it is not entirely clear who should be deceived. Anonymous illusions offer a universal pleasure principle within culture. They are present in games, sports, design, eroticism, manners, charm, beauty, and so on. However, it seems that this pleasure principle is increasingly misinterpreted. The proud proprietors of certain illusions are no longer capable of recognizing that they also follow anonymous illusions. As a consequence, they mistake happy, polite others for naïve idiots or savages—the possessors of stupid illusions whose happiness is an obscene intrusion into the lives of more rational creatures. The misrecognition of anonymous illusions thus becomes a crucial ideological bedrock for contemporary neoliberal policy. Hatred of the other's happiness leads to the destruction of the public sphere and to a state that, rather than fostering and stimulating its citizens' capacities, interpellates them as victims and limits itself to providing protective or repressive measures directed against them. |
| pleasure activism: Slow Pleasure Euphemia Russell, 2022-03-30 A modern guide to sex and pleasure, showing you how slowing down will help you tune into your body so you can heighten your sense of pleasure and connection. |
| pleasure activism: Blog Theory Jodi Dean, 2013-04-17 Blog Theory offers a critical theory of contemporary media. Furthering her account of communicative capitalism, Jodi Dean explores the ways new media practices like blogging and texting capture their users in intensive networks of enjoyment, production, and surveillance. Her wide-ranging and theoretically rich analysis extends from her personal experiences as a blogger, through media histories, to newly emerging social network platforms and applications. Set against the background of the economic crisis wrought by neoliberalism, the book engages with recent work in contemporary media theory as well as with thinkers such as Giorgio Agamben, Jean Baudrillard, Guy Debord, Jacques Lacan, and Slavoj ?i?ek. Through these engagements, Dean defends the provocative thesis that reflexivity in complex networks is best understood via the psychoanalytic notion of the drives. She contends, moreover, that reading networks in terms of the drives enables us to grasp their real, human dimension, that is, the feelings and affects that embed us in the system. In remarkably clear and lucid prose, Dean links seemingly trivial and transitory updates from the new mass culture of the internet to more fundamental changes in subjectivity and politics. Everyday communicative exchangesÑfrom blog posts to text messagesÑhave widespread effects, effects that not only undermine capacities for democracy but also entrap us in circuits of domination. |
| pleasure activism: Activism! Tim Jordan, 2002 From Europe to the USA, from Australia to South America, from the hard left to the extreme right, Tim Jordan introduces us to the partisan citizens who want to change the world. |
| pleasure activism: Mutual Aid Dean Spade, 2020-10-27 Mutual aid is the radical act of caring for each other while working to change the world. Around the globe, people are faced with a spiralling succession of crises, from the Covid-19 pandemic and climate change-induced fires, floods, and storms to the ongoing horrors of mass incarceration, racist policing, brutal immigration enforcement, endemic gender violence, and severe wealth inequality. As governments fail to respond to—or actively engineer—each crisis, ordinary people are finding bold and innovative ways to share resources and support the vulnerable. Survival work, when done alongside social movement demands for transformative change, is called mutual aid. This book is about mutual aid: why it is so important, what it looks like, and how to do it. It provides a grassroots theory of mutual aid, describes how mutual aid is a crucial part of powerful movements for social justice, and offers concrete tools for organizing, such as how to work in groups, how to foster a collective decision-making process, how to prevent and address conflict, and how to deal with burnout. Writing for those new to activism as well as those who have been in social movements for a long time, Dean Spade draws on years of organizing to offer a radical vision of community mobilization, social transformation, compassionate activism, and solidarity. |
| pleasure activism: Selected Poems and Related Prose Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, Luce Marinetti, 2002-01-01 In which Marinetti used the language of machines and explosions to express his view of poetry as reportage from the front: Words in Freedom, in which he declared war on poetry by destroying syntax and spelling and by experimenting with typography; and finally love poems to his wife, Benedetta, in which he returned in part to subjects and forms that he had previously rejected. |
| pleasure activism: Client Earth James Thornton, Martin Goodman, 2017-05-11 Environmentally, our planet lacks the laws to keep it safe and those laws we do have are feebly enforced. Every new year is the hottest in human history, while forest, reef, ice, tundra, and species are disappearing forever. It is easy to lose all hope. Who will stop the planet from committing ecological suicide? The UN? Governments? Activists? Corporations? Engineers? Scientists? Whoever, environmental laws need to be enforceable and enforced. Step forward a fresh breed of passionately purposeful environmental lawyers. They provide new rules to legislatures, see that they are enforced, and keep us informed. They tackle big business to ensure money flows into cultural change, because money is the grammar of business just as science is the grammar of nature. At the head of this new legal army stands James Thornton, who takes governments to court, and wins. And his client is the Earth. With Client Earth, we travel from Poland to Ghana, from Alaska to China, to see how citizens can use public interest law to protect their planet. Foundations and philanthropists support the law group ClientEarth because they see, plainly and brightly, that the law is a force all parties recognize. Lawyers who take the Earth as their client are exceptional and inspirational. They give us back our hope. PRAISE FOR JAMES THORNTON AND MARTIN GOODMAN ‘Humanity's grace and dignity are restored each time a case is successfully brought and won … by these exceptional environmental lawyers.’ Sculpture |
| pleasure activism: Rose Suzanne Falkiner, 2022-03-01 The voyage of Rose de Freycinet, the stowaway who defied the French for love. In 1814, in the aftermath of the French Revolution, nineteen-year-old Rose Pinon married handsome naval officer Louis de Freycinet, fifteen years her senior. Three years later, unable to bear parting from her husband, she dressed in men's clothing and slipped secretly aboard his ship the day before it sailed on a voyage of scientific discovery to the South Seas. Living for three years as the sole female among 120 men, Rose de Freycinet defied not only bourgeois society's expectations of a woman in 1817, but also a strict prohibition against women sailing on French naval ships. Whether dancing at governors' balls in distant colonies, or evading pirates and meeting armed Indigenous warriors on remote Australian shores, or surviving shipwreck in the wintry Falkland Islands, Rose used her quick pen to record her daily experiences, becoming the first woman to circumnavigate the world and leave a record of her journey. Suzanne Falkiner tells this story of courage, enduring love, curiosity and a spirit of adventure - and of the pivotal voyages that led to it - while revealing a uniquely female view into the hitherto largely male world of 19th-century life at sea. PRAISE 'A beautifully written, heart-lifting saga of adventure and romance' Grantlee Kieza 'A leisurely, thoughtful work, richly and broadly detailed, quietly absorbing' Helen Garner |
| pleasure activism: Orwell's Roses Rebecca Solnit, 2021-10-21 Roses, pleasure and politics: a fresh take on Orwell as an avid gardener, whose political writing was grounded in his passion for the natural world. 'I loved this book... An exhilarating romp through Orwell's life and times' Margaret Atwood 'Expansive and thought-provoking' Independent Outside my work the thing I care most about is gardening - George Orwell Inspired by her encounter with the surviving roses that Orwell is said to have planted in his cottage in Hertfordshire, Rebecca Solnit explores how his involvement with plants, particularly flowers, illuminates his other commitments as a writer and antifascist, and the intertwined politics of nature and power. Following his journey from the coal mines of England to taking up arms in the Spanish Civil War; from his prescient critique of Stalin to his analysis of the relationship between lies and authoritarianism, Solnit finds a more hopeful Orwell, whose love of nature pulses through his work and actions. And in her dialogue with the author, she makes fascinating forays into colonial legacies in the flower garden, discovers photographer Tina Modotti's roses, reveals Stalin's obsession with growing lemons in impossibly cold conditions, and exposes the brutal rose industry in Colombia. A fresh reading of a towering figure of the 20th century which finds solace and solutions for the political and environmental challenges we face today, Orwell's Roses is a remarkable reflection on pleasure, beauty, and joy as acts of resistance. 'Luminous...It is efflorescent, a study that seeds and blooms, propagates thoughts, and tends to historical associations' New Statesman 'A genuinely extraordinary mind, whose curiosity, intelligence and willingness to learn seem unbounded' Irish Times |
| pleasure activism: Alter-Globalization Geoffrey Pleyers, 2013-04-23 Contrary to the common view that globalization undermines social agency, ‘alter-globalization activists', that is, those who contest globalization in its neo-liberal form, have developed new ways to become actors in the global age. They propose alternatives to Washington Consensus policies, implement horizontal and participatory organization models and promote a nascent global public space. Rather than being anti-globalization, these activists have built a truly global movement that has gathered citizens, committed intellectuals, indigenous, farmers, dalits and NGOs against neoliberal policies in street demonstrations and Social Forums all over the world, from Bangalore to Seattle and from Porto Alegre to Nairobi. This book analyses this worldwide movement on the bases of extensive field research conducted since 1999. Alter-Globalization provides a comprehensive account of these critical global forces and their attempts to answer one of the major challenges of our time: How can citizens and civil society contribute to the building of a fairer, sustainable and more democratic co-existence of human beings in a global world? |
| pleasure activism: Trauma-Sensitive Mindfulness: Practices for Safe and Transformative Healing David A. Treleaven, 2018-02-13 [A] rare combination of solid scholarship, clinically useful methods, and passionate advocacy for those who have suffered trauma. —Rick Hanson, PhD, author of Buddha's Brain: The Practical Neuroscience of Happiness, Love, and Wisdom From elementary schools to psychotherapy offices, mindfulness meditation is an increasingly mainstream practice. At the same time, trauma remains a fact of life: the majority of us will experience a traumatic event in our lifetime, and up to 20% of us will develop posttraumatic stress. This means that anywhere mindfulness is being practiced, someone in the room is likely to be struggling with trauma. At first glance, this appears to be a good thing: trauma creates stress, and mindfulness is a proven tool for reducing it. But the reality is not so simple. Drawing on a decade of research and clinical experience, psychotherapist and educator David Treleaven shows that mindfulness meditation—practiced without an awareness of trauma—can exacerbate symptoms of traumatic stress. Instructed to pay close, sustained attention to their inner world, survivors can experience flashbacks, dissociation, and even retraumatization. This raises a crucial question for mindfulness teachers, trauma professionals, and survivors everywhere: How can we minimize the potential dangers of mindfulness for survivors while leveraging its powerful benefits? Trauma-Sensitive Mindfulness offers answers to this question. Part I provides an insightful and concise review of the histories of mindfulness and trauma, including the way modern neuroscience is shaping our understanding of both. Through grounded scholarship and wide-ranging case examples, Treleaven illustrates the ways mindfulness can help—or hinder—trauma recovery. Part II distills these insights into five key principles for trauma-sensitive mindfulness. Covering the role of attention, arousal, relationship, dissociation, and social context within trauma-informed practice, Treleaven offers 36 specific modifications designed to support survivors’ safety and stability. The result is a groundbreaking and practical approach that empowers those looking to practice mindfulness in a safe, transformative way. |
| pleasure activism: The Ministry of Utmost Happiness Arundhati Roy, 2017-06-06 LONGLISTED FOR THE WOMEN'S PRIZE FOR FICTION 2018 AND THE MAN BOOKER PRIZE 2017 'A sprawling kaleidoscopic fable' Guardian, Book of the Year * 'A dazzling return to form' Independent THE SUNDAY TIMES #1 BESTSELLER FROM THE BOOKER-WINNING AUTHOR OF THE GOD OF SMALL THINGS 'An astonishing intimate epic. This is the novel one hoped Arundhati Roy would write about India' Daily Telegraph 'At magic hour; when the sun has gone but the light has not, armies of flying foxes unhinge themselves from the Banyan trees in the old graveyard and drift across the city like smoke . . .' So begins The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, Arundhati Roy's incredible follow-up to The God of Small Things. We meet Anjum, who used to be Aftab, who runs a guesthouse in an Old Delhi graveyard and gathers around her the lost, the broken and the cast out. We meet Tilo, an architect, who, although she is loved by three men, lives in a 'country of her own skin'. When Tilo claims an abandoned baby as her own, her destiny and that of Anjum become entangled as a tale that sweeps across the years and a teeming continent takes flight . . . 'Glorious, colourful and compelling. Roy's second novel proves as remarkable as her first' Financial Times 'The book filled me with awe. Propulsive, playful, gorgeous' New York Times Book Review 'The unmissable literary read of the summer. With its insights into human nature, its memorable characters and its luscious prose, Ministry is well worth the wait' Time 'Staggeringly beautiful - a fierce, fabulously disobedient novel. Roy is writing at the height of her powers. Urgent, intimate ecstatic' Boston Globe 'A searing portrait of modern India' Tatler 'This vast novel will leave you awed by the heat of its anger and the depth of its compassion' Washington Post |
| pleasure activism: Like a Love Story Abdi Nazemian, 2019-06-04 Stonewall Honor Book * A Time Magazine Best YA Book of All Time A book for warriors, divas, artists, queens, individuals, activists, trend setters, and anyone searching for the courage to be themselves.”—Mackenzi Lee, New York Times bestselling author of The Gentleman’s Guide to Vice and Virtue It’s 1989 in New York City, and for three teens, the world is changing. Reza is an Iranian boy who has just moved to the city with his mother to live with his stepfather and stepbrother. He’s terrified that someone will guess the truth he can barely acknowledge about himself. Reza knows he’s gay, but all he knows of gay life are the media’s images of men dying of AIDS. Judy is an aspiring fashion designer who worships her uncle Stephen, a gay man with AIDS who devotes his time to activism as a member of ACT UP. Judy has never imagined finding romance...until she falls for Reza and they start dating. Art is Judy’s best friend, their school’s only out and proud teen. He’ll never be who his conservative parents want him to be, so he rebels by documenting the AIDS crisis through his photographs. As Reza and Art grow closer, Reza struggles to find a way out of his deception that won’t break Judy’s heart—and destroy the most meaningful friendship he’s ever known. This is a bighearted, sprawling epic about friendship and love and the revolutionary act of living life to the fullest in the face of impossible odds. |
| pleasure activism: This Chair Rocks Ashton Applewhite, 2019-03-05 Author, activist, and TED speaker Ashton Applewhite has written a rousing manifesto calling for an end to discrimination and prejudice on the basis of age. In our youth obsessed culture, we’re bombarded by media images and messages about the despairs and declines of our later years. Beauty and pharmaceutical companies work overtime to convince people to purchase products that will retain their youthful appearance and vitality. Wrinkles are embarrassing. Gray hair should be colored and bald heads covered with implants. Older minds and bodies are too frail to keep up with the pace of the modern working world and olders should just step aside for the new generation. Ashton Applewhite once held these beliefs too until she realized where this prejudice comes from and the damage it does. Lively, funny, and deeply researched, This Chair Rocks traces her journey from apprehensive boomer to pro-aging radical, and in the process debunks myth after myth about late life. Explaining the roots of ageism in history and how it divides and debases, Applewhite examines how ageist stereotypes cripple the way our brains and bodies function, looks at ageism in the workplace and the bedroom, exposes the cost of the all-American myth of independence, critiques the portrayal of elders as burdens to society, describes what an all-age-friendly world would look like, and offers a rousing call to action. It’s time to create a world of age equality by making discrimination on the basis of age as unacceptable as any other kind of bias. Whether you’re older or hoping to get there, this book will shake you by the shoulders, cheer you up, make you mad, and change the way you see the rest of your life. Age pride! “Wow. This book totally rocks. It arrived on a day when I was in deep confusion and sadness about my age. Everything about it, from my invisibility to my neck. Within four or five wise, passionate pages, I had found insight, illumination, and inspiration. I never use the word empower, but this book has empowered me.” —Anne Lamott, New York Times bestselling author |
| pleasure activism: The Revolution That Wasn’t Jen Schradie, 2019-05-01 This surprising study of online political mobilization shows that money and organizational sophistication influence politics online as much as off, and casts doubt on the democratizing power of digital activism. The internet has been hailed as a leveling force that is reshaping activism. From the Arab Spring and Occupy Wall Street to Black Lives Matter and #MeToo, digital activism seemed cheap, fast, and open to all. Now this celebratory narrative finds itself competing with an increasingly sinister story as platforms like Facebook and Twitter—once the darlings of digital democracy—are on the defensive for their role in promoting fake news. While hashtag activism captures headlines, conservative digital activism is proving more effective on the ground. In this sharp-eyed and counterintuitive study, Jen Schradie shows how the web has become another weapon in the arsenal of the powerful. She zeroes in on workers’ rights advocacy in North Carolina and finds a case study with broad implications. North Carolina’s hard-right turn in the early 2010s should have alerted political analysts to the web’s antidemocratic potential: amid booming online organizing, one of the country’s most closely contested states elected the most conservative government in North Carolina’s history. The Revolution That Wasn’t identifies the reasons behind this previously undiagnosed digital-activism gap. Large hierarchical political organizations with professional staff can amplify their digital impact, while horizontally organized volunteer groups tend to be less effective at translating online goodwill into meaningful action. Not only does technology fail to level the playing field, it tilts it further, so that only the most sophisticated and well-funded players can compete. |
| pleasure activism: Summary of adrienne maree brown's Pleasure Activism Everest Media,, 2022-09-09T22:59:00Z Please note: This is a companion version & not the original book. Sample Book Insights: #1 I’m going to read you a story by Octavia Butler, then we’re going to talk about how the power of the erotic makes us give up, of necessity, being satisfied with suffering and self-negation. #2 Octavia Butler’s story about giving up and being satisfied with suffering and self-negation is a myth. We’re going to prove it to you. -> I began to make decisions about whether I wanted to do things in my life and in the movements I was part of by checking for my orgasmic yes. I began to faciliate these movements for social and environmental transformation, with a focus on Black liberation. #3 I learned to check for my orgasmic yes, and in doing so, I began to faciliate social and environmental transformation movements with a focus on Black liberation. |
| pleasure activism: Beloved Economies Jess Rimington, Joanna Levitt Cea, 2022-08-30 What if changing how we work could make our economies work for us? For many of us today, work feels like a fever dream. We battle our way through overwhelm, stress, and an impossible to-do list--and remain financially strapped. All the content we consume seems to be telling us: we are the problem. If we just used the right time-blocking app, or managed our finances better, or learned to meditate, or... But what if work feels this way because it's a direct result of how our current economy is designed, going back to the very roots of our current society itself? And what if work could be profoundly different? What if we told you that there are teams, businesses, organizations, and individuals who are transforming their work to co-create life-affirming innovation and success? What if we told you those involved in these breakout cases describe their work with words like lightness, liberation, momentum, self-knowledge, calm, meaningful, community, and even joy - all while outperforming their mainstream counterparts? Based on seven years of research and co-learning with dozens of these breakout individuals, teams, and organizations, Beloved Economies: Transforming How We Work offers readers an imagination-expanding vision of what work can be. The book outlines seven practices that any individual, team, or enterprise can embark on now, to transform how we work and build economies that are healing, just, and wise. Beloved Economies reveals that it is not what we do, but how we do it that can be our most powerful lever for building economies that we can all love. |
| pleasure activism: Sick to Fit Josh LaJaunie, Howard Jacobson, 2018-12-10 If you're overweight or obese...If you're constantly tired, bloated, constipated, achy, sluggish, depressed, or anxious...If you're diabetic or pre-diabetic...If your doctor keeps warning you about the risk of cancer, heart disease, or other lifestyle- reversible calamity...If you're constantly worried about your blood pressure, weight, insomnia, eating habits... But you still find it next to impossible to stick to a healthy diet, exercise, and lifestyle plan... Then you might be going about things the wrong way.Let's face it - despite a flood of information and advice, we're getting sicker and fatter all the time. That's because the vast majority of conventional advice is outdated, wrong-headed, and just plain ineffective.Within this storm of bad news and bad advice, there's a growing tribe of outliers who have managed to lose hundreds of pounds, reverse impossible to cure diseases, and even - to their own shock and delight - become fit and high-performing athletes.Their stories don't get a lot of media attention, because they aren't selling anything. No pills, powders, or potions. No expensive workout gadgets. No late night informercial magic formulas.They simply rediscovered some basic, natural truths about the human animal. What we're designed to eat. How we're designed to move. And how we're meant to think and feel.When we get away from our natural heritage, we suffer. When we return to it, we thrive.Read Sick To Fit to discover how Josh LaJaunie went from a 420-pound food addict to the cover of Runner's World magazine, as well as live appearances on Good Morning America and The Today Show.Discover the simple secrets for a healthy life that have transformed dozens of members of the Missing Chins Run Club and clients of WellStart Health from sick and sad to fit and fulfilled.In Sick To Fit, you'll learn: - the one food rule that banishes confusion, eliminates the need to count calories or restrict portion size, and makes you impervious to the marketing and clickbait BS perpetrated by the food industry- how to honor your culture and heritage without suffering from the diseases that are killing your people (coming from the Bayou of South Louisiana, Josh knows a thing or two about being a foodie)- how to use social and family pressure to get stronger and more committed- how to prevent self-sabotage after initial success- how to start exercising safely if you're overweight (by 20 or 200 pounds)- the four-question FAST Assessment (the Swiss Army Knife of sustainable behavior change)- how to master life's stressors so they don't turn into binges- how to never fall off the wagon again - even if you've failed at dozens of diets before- and much more...Written with behavioral health expert Howard Jacobson, PhD, Sick To Fit combines Josh's journey with cutting edge nutritional, exercise, neurological, and habit science.Sick To Fit is your roadmap to better health and a more joyful life.Sick To Fit is a captivating, inspiring and practical story of an epic transformation. And don't be deceived by how entertaining this page-turner of a book is. What you're about to have fun reading is scientifically proven, and it just might change your life.Ocean Robbins, Author, 31-Day Food Revolution CEO, Food Revolution Network http: //foodrevolution.orgA diet book with lots of information leaves you with lots of information. But a book that teaches you how to change your dietary and lifestyle habits - and do it in a way that is compelling, engaging, and eminently practical - a book like that can change your life.Sick to Fit takes everything that we know about what makes people change in business and life, and applies it to eating and lifestyle habits. I've read a tremendous number of books on diet, fitness, and health - and this one is the best.Peter Bregman, Author, Leading with Emotional Courage, CEO, Bregman Partners http: //peterbregman.com |
| pleasure activism: Women, Sexuality and the Political Power of Pleasure Susie Jolly, Andrea Cornwall, Kate Hawkins, 2013-06-13 This pioneering collection explores the ways in which positive, pleasure-focused approaches to sexuality can empower women. Gender and development has tended to engage with sexuality only in relation to violence and ill-health. Although this has been hugely important in challenging violence against women, over-emphasizing these negative aspects has dovetailed with conservative ideologies that associate women’s sexualities with danger and fear. On the other hand, the media, the pharmaceutical industry, and pornography more broadly celebrate the pleasures of sex in ways that can be just as oppressive, often implying that only certain types of people - young, heterosexual, able-bodied, HIV-negative - are eligible for sexual pleasure. Women, Sexuality and the Political Power of Pleasure brings together challenges to these strictures and exclusions from both the South and North of the globe, with examples of activism, advocacy and programming which use pleasure as an entry point. It shows how positive approaches to pleasure and sexuality can enhance equality and empowerment for all. |
| pleasure activism: The Body Is Not an Apology Sonya Renee Taylor, 2018-02-13 The Body Is Not an Apology The Power of Radical Self-Love Against a global backdrop of war, social upheaval, and personal despair, there is a growing sense of urgency to challenge the systems of oppression that dehumanize bodies and strip us of our shared humanity. Rather than feel helpless in the face of oppression, world-renowned activist, performance poet, and author Sonya Renee Taylor teaches us how to turn to the power of radical self-love in her new book, The Body Is Not an Apology. Radical self-love is the guiding framework that transforms the learned self-hatred of our bodies and the prejudices we have about other people's bodies into a vision of compassion, equity, and justice. In a revolutionary departure from the corporate self-help and body-positivity movement, Taylor forges the inextricable bond between radical self-love and social justice. The first step is recognizing that we have all been indoctrinated into a system of body shame that profits off of our self-hatred. When we ask ourselves, Who benefits from our collective shame? we can begin to make the distinction between the messages we are receiving about our bodies or other bodies and the truth. This book moves us beyond our all-too-often hidden lives, where we are easily encouraged to forget that we are whole humans having whole human experiences in our bodies alongside others. Radical self-love encourages us to embark on a personal journey of transformation with thoughtful reflection on the origins of our minds and bodies as a source of strength. In doing this, we not only learn to reject negative messages about ourselves but begin to thwart the very power structures that uphold them. Systems of oppression thrive off of our inability to make peace with bodies and difference. Radical self-love not only dismantles shame and self-loathing in us but has the power to dismantle global systems of injustice-because when we make peace with our bodies, only then do we have the capacity to truly make peace with the bodies of others |
| pleasure activism: The Care We Dream Of Zena Sharman, 2021-10-05 What if you could trust in getting the health care you need in ways that felt good and helped you thrive? What if the health system honored and valued queer and trans people’s lives, bodies and expertise? What if LGBTQ+ communities led and organized our own health care as a form of mutual aid? What if every aspect of our health care was rooted in a commitment to our healing, pleasure and liberation? LGBTQ+ health care doesn’t look like this today, but it could. This is the care we dream of. Through a series of essays (by the author and others) and interviews, this book by the editor of the Lambda Literary Award-winning anthology The Remedy offers possibilities—grounded in historical examples, present-day experiments, and dreams of the future – for more liberatory and transformative approaches to LGBTQ+ health and healing. It challenges readers to think differently about LGBTQ+ health and asks what it would look if our health care was rooted in a commitment to the flourishing and liberation of all LGBTQ+ people. This book is a calling out, a calling in and a call to action. It is a spell of healing and transformation, rooted in love. |
Pleasure Activism - Adrienne Maree Brown
adrienne’s first NY Times Bestseller, adrienne wrote and gathered these essays and interviews as a way to continue studying Audre Lorde’s luminous text The Uses of the Erotic as Power, and …
Pleasure Activism: The Politics of Feeling Good (Emergent …
Mar 19, 2019 · 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 …
Pleasure Activism: The Politics of Feeling Good - Goodreads
Feb 26, 2019 · 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 …
Pleasure Activism The Politics of Feeling Good - AK Press
Feb 26, 2019 · "Pleasure Activism is at heart a deeply personal collection of poems, interviews, artwork, and reflections curated and written by Brown to maximize pleasure and joy within our …
Pleasure Activism: The Politics of Feeling Good (Emergent Strategy)
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 …
Pleasure Activism: The Politics of Feeling Good
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 …
Pleasure activism : the politics of feeling good : Brown, Adrienne …
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 …
Pleasure Activism: The Politics of Feeling Good - Google Books
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...
Pleasure Activism: The Politics of Feeling Good|Paperback
Mar 19, 2019 · 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 …
adrienne maree brown – awe. liberation. pleasure.
Oct 17, 2024 · Informed by 27 years of movement facilitation, somatics, science fiction scholarship and doula work, adrienne has nurtured Emergent Strategy, Pleasure Activism, Radical …
Pleasure Activism - Adrienne Maree Brown
adrienne’s first NY Times Bestseller, adrienne wrote and gathered these essays and interviews as a way to continue studying Audre Lorde’s luminous text The Uses of the Erotic as Power, and …
Pleasure Activism: The Politics of Feeling Good (Emergent …
Mar 19, 2019 · 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 …
Pleasure Activism: The Politics of Feeling Good - Goodreads
Feb 26, 2019 · 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 …
Pleasure Activism The Politics of Feeling Good - AK Press
Feb 26, 2019 · "Pleasure Activism is at heart a deeply personal collection of poems, interviews, artwork, and reflections curated and written by Brown to maximize pleasure and joy within our …
Pleasure Activism: The Politics of Feeling Good (Emergent Strategy)
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 …
Pleasure Activism: The Politics of Feeling Good
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 …
Pleasure activism : the politics of feeling good : Brown, Adrienne …
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 …
Pleasure Activism: The Politics of Feeling Good - Google Books
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...
Pleasure Activism: The Politics of Feeling Good|Paperback
Mar 19, 2019 · 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 …
adrienne maree brown – awe. liberation. pleasure.
Oct 17, 2024 · Informed by 27 years of movement facilitation, somatics, science fiction scholarship and doula work, adrienne has nurtured Emergent Strategy, Pleasure Activism, …
