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A review by joanaprneves
Pleasure Activism: The Politics of Feeling Good by adrienne maree brown
challenging
emotional
funny
hopeful
informative
inspiring
medium-paced
4.25
This book covers a range of subjects around the theme of pleasure as an empowering self-accepting tool. This is a book I will continue reading as it has a lot of information from a community of people around the author who engage in activities / thoughts / paths that are new or not as familiar to me as others. For instance, there is talk about black queerness, fat shaming and fat phobia, BDSM, recreational drugs and somatic therapy which are enlightening and not treated in the two usual ways, which are ultra-capitalist consumerism and ensuing guilt trips, or with a christian backdrop of right or wrong. This is a new generation of mostly American thinkers who are looking for new ways to heal trauma and to build positive pleasure, as opposed to pleasure as a way to fill a void. It is an empowering and challenging book - the talks about drugs make me feel queazy, but they are important to pay attention to, especially now that doctors and researchers are finding healing powers in them, especially connected with therapy.
It would be difficult to list all the themes and approaches, and it is far better for the reader to find out about them, but I am especially interested in pleasure as power, and a new way to think about after hedonists and philosophers in general failed miserably to address it. Pleasure is such an interesting concept! And state! How do the authors and their guests talk about it in terms of its fleetingness? How do they experiment with it? How do they build a philosophy from it? These are the questions I asked myself, and I keep going back for more.
The writing is at times light and colloquial, but always engaging and stimulating, perhaps because of its apparent simplicity. The kind of writing is varied: there are essays, interviews, diary entries. Therefore, it makes for an exciting reading time.
It would be difficult to list all the themes and approaches, and it is far better for the reader to find out about them, but I am especially interested in pleasure as power, and a new way to think about after hedonists and philosophers in general failed miserably to address it. Pleasure is such an interesting concept! And state! How do the authors and their guests talk about it in terms of its fleetingness? How do they experiment with it? How do they build a philosophy from it? These are the questions I asked myself, and I keep going back for more.
The writing is at times light and colloquial, but always engaging and stimulating, perhaps because of its apparent simplicity. The kind of writing is varied: there are essays, interviews, diary entries. Therefore, it makes for an exciting reading time.
Content Warnings
It is hard to flag potentially harmful content because this is a book about healing, and therefore trauma must be referenced and at times described. What I found incredibly empowering was that it was mentioned in a way that combined it almost systematically with something engaging, be it a therapy, a thought or a unique perspective on it, that made it readable and not triggering. However, it is important for readers to know that there is sexual content, sexual trauma, fat shaming references, references to racism.