Great collection of essays, interviews, etc. I enjoyed this book very much, and would recommend for all folks to read & reflect on. ( )

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. Drawing on the black feminist tradition, she challenges us to rethink the ground rules of activism.

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. 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.

Building 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.

“And I think about Farah and how she smiles, not a forced smile of polite survival but a sincere smile of joy in the moment. How she listens to jazz music in a way that allows her to find new parts of herself to grow into. How she keeps an image of a Black girl above her desk. How as a teacher, and therefore perpetual student, she honors the part of each of us that is learning, that is young and possible, that is braver than it makes sense to be, incongruently joyful in a world that targets us. The part of each of us that could embody a poem, draw out a smile, be held. You know. The gift.”
—“The Sweetness of Salt” by Alexis Pauline Gumbs, in Pleasure Activism, curated by adrienne marie brown
If I was going to pick a book to continue to prod me back into the land of the living, it wouldn’t be this one, subtitled “The Politics of Feeling Good,” a paperback with small colorful mating animal silhouettes, a book with sections on sex, such an eclectic and inconsistent mix of work (a theme with AK press?). And yet last week I found myself reading this one and being reminded that I’m allowed to be happy. It’s a different mood than I’m used to—it’s hard to pin down exactly what happened to me over the past few years.
Feeling good isn’t something you earn, and that’s why people are so quick to tell you that it doesn’t cost money, and also something easy to envy when it doesn't seem like the work was put in. Pleasure does seem like something you earn, when you feel depressed or sad or frustrated, and you see other people who are happy and you want the recipe, you think for a while that it might be a job or a friend circle or something, but it’s not that simple. It’s hard--maybe impossible--to feel pleasure when those crucial human ingredients are missing.
Pleasure is something that you can practice, something that you can communicate your way into, something that you can investigate by feeling your own feelings a little more, maybe, thinking about things you would usually settle for. That’s what came to me from this book. And also a little frustration at the frequency with which this book seems to offer sex as the answer or the only venue for pleasure, but that’s just a human reality, I suppose. I'm glad it was only an inconvenience and not a limitation, and that this book explored non-sexual pleasure as well--a favorite instance is the quote at the beginning of this review. ( )

I started reading this using the Hoopa digital app, but the app does not hold your spot in the book from phone to browser and I can’t read it on Kindle. I may come back to it some day.

I really wanted to like this, but the author's definition of pleasure seems restricted to sex and drugs. Nothing wrong with sex and drugs, but that's not what I expected or was looking for, and after months of trying and failing to get through this one I've conceded defeat.