There's an us before the wound, there's an us before oppression. And to me pleasure is a way that we tap down into that. I'm like, when I'm having orgasms, I'm like, slammer, you know, I'm like, you might be my slave, but you know, like in a good way. It's really about like, oh, I feel very free. To me the work was about like, how do we remind people that you were free to begin with? You were always free to begin with. For me, I was like, how can I bring like the best feeling when I'm, it's like the best high or the best mushroom. Oh, you know, you know when you're on, how many maybe done mushrooms? All right, everybody else just get to it. All right, life is short, life is short, and if they're natural, okay, it's great. My name is Adrienne Marie Brown. I am the author of Pleasure Activism, the Politics of Feeling Good. Right now we are sitting in Blue Stockings bookstore, which is forever. I used to live in New York, I lived here for like 10 years. Blue Stockings has always been a beloved bookstore for me. So I'm really excited to get to be here tonight. We're doing our New York premiere event for Pleasure Activism. We have been raised to fear the yes within ourselves, our deepest cravings. But once recognized, those which do not enhance our future, lose their power and can be altered. The fear of our desires keeps them suspect and indiscriminately powerful. For to suppress any truth is to give it strength beyond endurance. Adri Lorde's text, the uses of the erotic, is a foundational text for Pleasure Activism. And I feel like what she was saying to us, what she was teaching us so much, was that pleasure and the erotic, the awakening, the erotic awakening is a way that we actually reclaim our whole selves, our real selves, our true selves. And that once we have had that awakening, we will no longer settle for a self negation, no longer settle for suffering, as our way of life is like, oh, this is just how it's got to be because we're black women. I was, you know, I started asking myself, like, how did I unlearn Pleasure, or when did I unlearn Pleasure? When I look back, it's like, oh, there's an ancestral unlearning of Pleasure, a way that black women on this country have been trained to be in service with our bodies, rather to be in pleasure in our bodies. I realize that we're not the only ones that almost every human on earth in some way has been disconnected from their natural relationship to the planet, from their natural relationship to themselves, from our natural relationships to each other. And that Pleasure is one of the ways we know, like, oh, God, I'm in nature, oh, God, I'm with my lover, oh, God, I'm connected, I'm part of something, I belong, I'm safe, Pleasure, let's us know all that, right? So for me, it's actually a measure of freedom. It's a way that we say, I have decolonized, I have returned to myself, I have been healing. Our acts against oppression become integral with self-motivated and empowered from within. In touch with the erotic, I become less willing to accept powerlessness or those other supplied states of being which are not native to me, such as resignation, despair, self-effacement, depression, and self-denial. Yeah? So Audrey is the bomb.com. That's how I feel. I'm like, yeah, let's just give it up for Audrey, yeah! I was particularly drawn to the uses of the erotic as a text because it was published August 1978 and I was born September 1978 and so I lived like my whole life, like, trying to figure out my relationship to Pleasure and I was like, oh, someone had written a text a month before I was a born that was like, boom, here it is. And I'm like, oh, just like I missed it, there might be other people who still are missing it, who are still not getting this. Part of being a survivor myself and part of being in communities with survivors is recognizing that even when we get to good, even when we're like, okay, I'm not in total trauma land, there's still a lot of our lives that are like, I have to earn Pleasure, I have to earn rest, I have to do more for my community to get something good for myself. That's to me, the unnatural mythologies of capitalism. That's what we have bought into together. I was like, I have to earn education, I have to earn home, I have to earn food, like no, like I'm a part of a community that should all be part of what I receive. I also think Pleasures to me at the same level as those things. So like when I'm like, oh, what do I need to survive? And Octavia, you know, showed that over and over again Octavia Butler in her novels and her work. It's like what do we actually need to survive? It's not enough to just have food if we're miserable and shelter if we're totally hating each other. There's something else and almost every text that she has, her characters who are surviving her apocalypse have lovers, they have symbiotic communities that are giving and taking care of each other. I think we're the same way that we have to be doing that as a part of what survival even means. And how that connects to political work for me is there's this quote from Grace Lee Boggs who is one of my mentors that's transformed yourself to transform the world. That every oppression out all these systems, they are constructed inside of us. And when we, when we often, when we start our work, when we get politicized, we're like, the bad people are like over over here and we learn, we learn how organizing by learning like who can we identify and point to as the causers of harm. And I love what Grace says is like this are our potential for some radical responsibility. It's like those front lines are inside of us. And so again, it ties in. I'm like, oh, the front line is inside of me for pleasure. Like if I want all black women to really access pleasure, it really matters that I'm experiencing pleasure. And actually, that's been an interesting thing as I've been touring this book is I keep showing up to events. And I'm just like, I'm in a deeply fully satisfied life. And it shows and you can feel it. And Pete, that's the reflection I keep getting back from people. She's like, wow, it's just amazing to be a brown black woman. And I'm like, free about her feelings. I'm like, talk about orgasms and stuff. You know, to me, that is a huge portion now of my political work is to be a satisfied black woman. For people to see that. I'm like, yes, I get angry. Yes, I'm sad. Yes, I feel the full range of emotion. But fundamentally, when you ask me, I'm good. I'm good because I made myself good. I made it good because I found the right community to be around me because I've somehow dodged the bullet of like getting my life tied in with some patriarchal like downfall of man. And I'm like, I'm just like, I'm good, right? I'm happy. And I feel like a lot of people need to witness that. And be that in their own communities. And I do, I like the idea of echo chambers of transformation. Right? That it's like, if mine sets off yours, just like mine was set off by someone else, just like someone else to help her. And like, I love that idea that's like, we just keep popping it off until it becomes the most compelling force. We are so deeply repressed that anyone experiencing even a tiny bit of pleasure, we're like, you were free, right? You know, you guys are laughing, sorry. I'm like, am I the wrong light? Am I a standard coming? I think that might be!