Pleasure Activism
The Politics of Feeling Good (Emergent Strategy)
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Narrated by:
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Adrienne Maree Brown
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Written by:
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Adrienne Maree Brown
About this listen
The New York Times best seller from AK Press is now an audiobook — read by Adrienne Maree Brown herself!
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.
©2019 AK Press (P)2020 AK PressYou may also enjoy...
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Emergent Strategy
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Performance
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Written by: adrienne maree brown
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Rest Is Resistance
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- Written by: Tricia Hersey
- Narrated by: Tricia Hersey
- Length: 5 hrs and 26 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
What would it be like to live in a well-rested world? Far too many of us have claimed productivity as the cornerstone of success. Brainwashed by capitalism, we subject our bodies and minds to work at an unrealistic, damaging, and machine‑level pace—feeding into the same engine that enslaved millions into brutal labor for its own relentless benefit. In Rest Is Resistance, Tricia Hersey, aka the Nap Bishop, casts an illuminating light on our troubled relationship with rest and how to imagine and dream our way to a future where rest is exalted.
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Written by: Tricia Hersey
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The Politics of Trauma
- Somatics, Healing, and Social Justice
- Written by: Staci Haines, Ai-Jen Poo - foreword, Richard Strozzi-Heckler - afterword
- Narrated by: Julie Slater
- Length: 14 hrs and 40 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
The Politics of Trauma offers somatics with a social analysis. This book is for therapists and social activists who understand that trauma healing is not just for individuals - and that social change is not just for movement builders. Just as health practitioners need to consider the societal factors underlying trauma, so too must activists understand the physical and mental impacts of trauma on their own lives and the lives of the communities with whom they organize. Trauma healing and social change are, at their best, interdependent.
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Long overdue
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Written by: Staci Haines, and others
-
Let This Radicalize You
- Organizing and the Revolution of Reciprocal Care
- Written by: Kelly Hayes, Mariame Kaba
- Narrated by: Diana Blue
- Length: 10 hrs and 42 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
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Performance
-
Story
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Written by: Kelly Hayes, and others
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- Written by: bell hooks
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- Length: 8 hrs and 55 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
-
Story
A classic work of feminist scholarship, Ain't I a Woman has become a must for all those interested in the nature of Black womanhood. Examining the impact of sexism on Black women during slavery, the devaluation of black womanhood, black male sexism, racism among feminists, and the black woman's involvement with feminism, hooks attempts to move us beyond racist and sexist assumptions. The result is nothing short of groundbreaking, giving this work a critical place in every feminist scholar's library.
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Written by: bell hooks
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- Written by: bell hooks
- Narrated by: Robin Miles
- Length: 7 hrs and 28 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
-
Story
In Teaching to Transgress, Bell Hooks - writer, teacher, and insurgent black intellectual - writes about a new kind of education, education as the practice of freedom. Teaching students to "transgress" against racial, sexual, and class boundaries in order to achieve the gift of freedom is, for Hooks, the teacher's most important goal. Bell Hooks speakes to the heart of education today: how can we rethink teaching practices in the age of multiculturalism? What do we do about teachers who do not want to teach, and students who do not want to learn? How should we deal with racism and sexism in the classroom? Full of passion and politics, Teaching to Transgress combines a practical knowledge of the classroom with a deeply felt connection to the world of emotions and feelings. This is the rare book about teachers and students that dares to raise questions about eros and rage, grief and reconciliation, and the future of teaching itself.
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A must read for every teacher at every level
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Written by: bell hooks
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The Body Is Not an Apology, Second Edition
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I already love it.
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- Unabridged
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Performance
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Story
After almost every presentation activist and writer Mia Birdsong gives to executives, think tanks, and policy makers, one of those leaders quietly confesses how much they long for the profound community she describes. They have family, friends, and colleagues, yet they still feel like they're standing alone. They're "winning" at the American Dream, but they're lonely, disconnected, and unsatisfied.
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Wow
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Embodied Activism
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Instead of thinking about social justice as a process that starts with changing people's minds, Embodied Activism understands our bodies—how we feel in them and relate to others through them—as the sites of transformation.
Written by: Rae Johnson PhD, and others
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We Do This ‘Til We Free Us
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What if social transformation and liberation isn't about waiting for someone else to come along and save us? What if ordinary people have the power to collectively free ourselves? In this timely collection of essays and interviews, Mariame Kaba reflects on the deep work of abolition and transformative political struggle.
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Octavia's Brood
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Performance
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Story
Whenever we envision a world without war, without prisons, without capitalism, we are producing speculative fiction. Organizers and activists envision and try to create such worlds all the time. Walidah Imarisha and adrienne maree brown have brought 20 of them together in the first anthology of short stories to explore the connections between radical speculative fiction and movements for social change.
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Radical Intimacy
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Performance
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Story
Capitalist ideology wants us to believe that there is an optimal way to live. "Making connections" means networking for work. Our emotional needs are to be fulfilled by a single romantic partner, and self-care equates to taking personal responsibility for our suffering. We must be productive and heteronormative; we must have babies and buy a house. But the kicker is most people cannot and do not want to achieve all or any of these life goals. Instead, we are left feeling atomized, exhausted, and disempowered. Radical Intimacy shows that it doesn't need to be this way.
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Care Work
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
In this collection of essays, Lambda Literary Award-winning writer and longtime activist and performance artist Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha explores the politics and realities of disability justice, a movement that centers the lives and leadership of sick and disabled queer, trans, Black, and brown people, with knowledge and gifts for all. Care Work is a mapping of access as radical love, a celebration of the work that sick and disabled queer/people of color are doing to find each other and to build power and community.
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Connect with caring
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Polywise
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- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
As polyamory continues to make its way into the mainstream, more and more people are exploring consensual nonmonogamy in the hope of experiencing more love, connection, sex, freedom and support. While for many, the move expands personal horizons, for others, the transition can be challenging, leaving them blindsided and overwhelmed. Beyond the initial transition to nonmonogamy, many struggle with the root issues beneath the symptoms of broken agreements, communication challenges, increased fighting and persistent jealousy.
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A great follow up
- By Mr. T on 2024-12-06
Written by: Jessica Fern, and others
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All About Love
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- Written by: bell hooks
- Narrated by: January LaVoy
- Length: 6 hrs and 10 mins
- Unabridged
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Performance
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Story
“The word ‘love’ is most often defined as a noun, yet we would all love better if we used it as a verb,” writes bell hooks as she comes out fighting and on fire in All About Love. Here, at her most provocative and intensely personal, renowned scholar, cultural critic and feminist bell hooks offers a proactive new ethic for a society bereft with lovelessness--not the lack of romance, but the lack of care, compassion, and unity. People are divided, she declares, by society’s failure to provide a model for learning to love.
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Pure genius
- By ChrisJakel on 2024-10-09
Written by: bell hooks
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Polysecure
- Attachment, Trauma and Consensual Nonmonogamy
- Written by: Jessica Fern
- Narrated by: Jessica Fern, Eve Rickert, Nora Samaran
- Length: 7 hrs and 52 mins
- Unabridged
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Polyamorous psychotherapist Jessica Fern breaks new ground by extending attachment theory into the realm of consensual nonmonogamy. Using her nested model of attachment and trauma, she expands our understanding of how emotional experiences can influence our relationships. Then, she sets out six specific strategies to help you move toward secure attachments in your multiple relationships.
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amazing, 7 STARS
- By Raven on 2020-11-15
Written by: Jessica Fern
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The Future Is Disabled
- Prophecies, Love Notes and Mourning Songs
- Written by: Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha
- Narrated by: Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha
- Length: 9 hrs and 21 mins
- Unabridged
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In The Future Is Disabled, Leah Laksmi Piepzna-Samarasinha asks some provocative questions: What if, in the near future, the majority of people will be disabled—and what if that's not a bad thing? And what if disability justice and disabled wisdom are crucial to creating a future in which it's possible to survive fascism, climate change, and pandemics and to bring about liberation?
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The Best!
- By a human on 2023-09-21
Written by: Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha
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Mutual Aid
- Building Solidarity During This Crisis (and the Next)
- Written by: Dean Spade
- Narrated by: Stephen R. Thorne
- Length: 4 hrs and 41 mins
- Unabridged
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This book is about mutual aid: why it is so important, what it looks like, and how to do it. It provides a grassroots theory of mutual aid, describes how mutual aid is a crucial part of powerful movements for social justice, and offers concrete tools for organizing, such as how to work in groups, how to foster a collective decision-making process, how to prevent and address conflict, and how to deal with burnout.
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Must read for organizers!!!
- By Andrea Parent on 2022-10-07
Written by: Dean Spade
What listeners say about Pleasure Activism
Average Customer RatingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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Overall
- Adi
- 2020-12-04
Must read/listen to
My first audio book. What I liked the most is having Adrienne Maree Brown reading her own book with her sweet voice. I'm gonna with the sound of her pleasure 💖
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- May
- 2021-01-16
Beyond incredible
I seriously cannot stop raving about how lovely and soothing Adriennes voice is, I can honestly listen to her read all day! Her book is so liberating as well, so refreshing to hear about pleasure and connect to everything she touched on. It’s so beautifully broken down into different topics, I keep coming back to saved parts when I need to feel empowered.
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- maya
- 2021-04-07
amazing, healing, nourishing
I'm so grateful to have listened through this wonderful book, and I love that Adrienne Maree Brown read her own book! it was so amazing to take it all in, and I felt so much kinship and connection and gratitude. lovely lovely lovely!
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- Jade Jackson
- 2022-11-16
excellent listen, highly recommend!
Love that the author narrates. her voice is delightful and you can feel everything she presents and discusses.
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