Pleasure Activism: The Politics of Feeling Good: Summary & Key Insights

To understand pleasure as political, we must begin with Black feminist thought — the intellectual and emotional home of this work. I stand on the shoulders of Audre Lorde, who taught us that the erotic is not about sex alone but about a deep, yes-centered engagement with life. The erotic is knowledge, energy, and power. In her essay 'Uses of the Erotic,' Lorde reframed the erotic as an antidote to oppression, affirming that our capacity for joy is a source of revolution. Following her, I listen to thinkers like bell hooks and Octavia Butler, who remind us that liberation requires imagination, that pleasure can be a speculative act — a vision of worlds where all people can thrive.

Pleasure activism grows from that soil. It calls us to integrate the politics of feeling into our theories of change. If patriarchal, racist, and capitalist systems depend on the control of pleasure — on convincing us that our bodies are shameful, that joy must be earned, that rest is laziness — then reclaiming pleasure becomes an act of defiance. Pleasure, in this sense, is not only a feeling; it is a practice of redistributing power. It means saying: my body belongs to me; my boundaries matter; I deserve joy even now, especially now.

I see this as both memory work and creation. Our ancestors found joy even in bondage, sang freedom songs even in chains, loved each other into survival. That inheritance is our proof: pleasure has always been political, and it has always been possible.

Traditional activism often carries a tone of urgency, anger, and depletion. I know this because I’ve lived it — running from meeting to meeting, organizing with no sleep, feeling righteous but also exhausted. For too long, activism has been framed as sacrifice. Pleasure activism asks: what if we built movements that made us feel good to be alive? What if joy and justice were not separate paths but one?

This reframing does not mean ignoring pain or abandoning struggle. Rather, it insists that the work of transformation must be sustainable. Joy and rest are renewable energies that allow us to persist. Without them, our movements cannot last. So I invite activists to imagine meetings that begin with check-ins about what feels good, projects that celebrate small victories, organizing spaces where humor and music and sensuality are welcomed as tools of connection.

When we prioritize pleasure, we expand the realm of what resistance can look like. Protest becomes dance. Healing becomes strategy. Rest becomes revolution. Activism that feels good is not less serious; it’s more effective because it is rooted in aliveness rather than martyrdom. This is the new paradigm we need if we want our freedom work to be joyful, interdependent, and enduring.