“Pleasure Activism” with Adrienne Maree Brown

“Everyone wants to experience pleasure, why is society so shameful for wanting that?”

– Adrienne Maree Brown

Earlier this month I attended the first-ever JMU hosted, Queer Teach-in. This campus event provided an all-day long event with speakers, activities, and insight into the LGBTQ+ curriculum that is missing from our campus. I attended the virtual event hosted by Adrienne Maree Brown, this was an empowering and exciting conversation. Adrienne is a feminist, writer, musician, podcaster, and poet. She brings all of her experience and knowledge to this conversation by diving in deeper into the topic of pleasure activism, which is one of her main topics of discussion in her own work. Adrienne broke down what pleasure activism is and how we as women and members of the queer community can explore that aspect of our lives without the stigma behind it.

This conversation gave a lot of insight into what pleasure is. Pleasure is more than just what comes to mind in a “sexual” sense, but more of pleasure in a way of finding your true desires and fulfillment. Everyone experiences pleasure and it is a staple feeling to act and feel on.

Adrienne first speaks on what pleasure activism is to her. She begins to say as a queer woman she feels like society placed her in a box where her desires and fantasies are criticized and reprimanded. Pleasure activism is releasing those societal expectations and strains on marginalized individuals. We see strong societal influence on where these boundaries are drawn, that being mostly by straight white men. Western societies put strains on “acceptable & “non-acceptable” pleasures. We can see this most prevalently in women and how women are negatively viewed for indulging in pleasure or desires. Although pleasure is very human and normal, society constantly uses shame as a way to control and uphold these expectations. Along with women, the queer community is also put on strains as it falls not under the status quo. She then dives into how peoples’ identities can conflict with what society deems as acceptable. Marginalized individuals can face many crossroads at once while trying to find a sense of themselves. So movements to fight for basic human fulfillment is a must for peoples voices to be heard.

Adrienne then leans into her idol and the main cause for this conversation, Audre Lorde. A black feminist and psychologist who helped shape a lot of Feminist and LGBTQ+ ideas we use today. Adrienne uses Lorde’s book Use of the Erotic to connect to her ideas. Adrienne states that this book brought her a sense of “erotic aliveness”. Meaning in the sense of doing things to pleasure her body and soul. She felt that the 9-5-day job and overwhelming sense of responsibility stripped us of our sense of identity. We use pleasure and our desires to bring us back into our sense of self and give us individualism. There should be no shame in connecting with your desires that fulfill you. Adrienne makes a point that everyone’s “pleasures” are different.

I think as a young woman in college, I could relate to this conversation. We see a lot of societal strains on what pleasure is “allowed” to be for young women. Women who want to be sexually free and experiment are deemed as less than, called “whores, sluts”. But on the contrary, we see the gender inequality of pleasure when it comes to men. Men who experiment sexually, are almost congratulated for taking part in pleasure. These gender inequalities and society’s expectations of women being submissive and private about pleasure are what hit the closest home for me. Conversations about pleasure activism can hopefully spike the movement of perceiving pleasure as “normal and natural”.

I absolutely loved this conversation; I believe pleasure activism is a huge step in the feminist movement. Releasing the strains of what we should be doing as women but doing things to serve ourselves. Adrienne Maree Brown has her own blog and list of posts relating to this very subject. Hopefully, our campus will be doing another queer teach-in in the future because conversations like start the change societal attitudes.