May: Pleasure Activism by adrienne maree brown
Details
1:45pm - Snacks & social time!
2:00pm - Book discussion starts. Please arrive before 2pm so you don't interrupt the discussion.
Join us to discuss Pleasure Activism by adrienne maree brown!
Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/40549668-pleasure-activism
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.”
Available in print and Kindle at Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Pleasure-Activism-Politics-Emergent-Strategy/dp/1849353263
And AK Press: https://www.akpress.org/pleasure-activism-e-book.html
and on hold at the SFPL: https://sfpl.bibliocommons.com/item/show/3667845093
Facilitator: Liz