Today we're talking with adrienne maree brown and Amita Swadhin about adrienne’s new book, Pleasure Activism: The Politics of Feeling Good. Get your copy now from www.akpress.org with code PODCAST for 15% off!

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Welcome to Book Club!

This is our first selection for HEALING JUSTICE PODCAST BOOK CLUB: a new gathering place for our listener community to learn, explore, and practice together.

Join Book Club at any reward level $10 & up on our Patreon at http://www.patreon.com/healingjustice to get members-only access to a 30% off discount code at AK Press, a discussion guide for hosting your own gathering around this book, and be invited to a virtual hangout with adrienne, Amita, and Monique Tula this summer to talk further about Pleasure Activism.

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As adrienne says, "we have to make justice the most pleasurable experience humans can have." We learn about what pleasure has to do with our movements, pleasure after childhood sexual abuse and other experiences of harm, why we can be suspicious of pleasure, and activist culture’s “commitment to suffering.” Check out Audre Lorde's "Uses of the Erotic," an essential foundational text for this book: https://fredandfar.com/blogs/ff-blog/the-erotic-as-power-by-audre-lorde

This topic is relevant to your work if you want to build organizations and movements that are fully alive and attractive for people to join, and/or if you are on a healing journey in your own life, especially after abuse. Amita speaks in some detail about their own story (which you can also find via their essay in Pleasure Activism on page 293), so please note that themes of childhood sexual abuse are discussed.

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ABOUT OUR GUESTS

adrienne maree brown is a sci-fi/Octavia Butler scholar and author of Octavia's Brood, Emergent Strategy, and the recent New York Times Bestseller Pleasure Activism. She's a facilitator and doula living in Detroit, and you can hear her on the podcast she creates with her sister Autumn called How to Survive the End of the World.

Amita Swadhin is one of the contributing writers to Pleasure Activism and is an educator, storyteller, activist and consultant dedicated to fighting interpersonal and institutional violence against young people. Her commitments and approach to this work stem from her experiences as a genderqueer, femme queer woman of color, daughter of immigrants, and years of abuse by her parents. Check out Amita’s work at www.mirrormemoirs.com

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PRACTICE:

In the following episode (publishing next week), adrienne offers us a practice called "From #MeToo to #WeConsent," which is a practice about consent, finding our inner yes and no, and using our voices in both our sexuality and our whole lives. Subscribe to this podcast to make sure you don't miss it.

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JOIN THE CONVERSATION:

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Thank you to our volunteers: Guido Girgenti for audio editing and production, Zach Meyer at the COALROOM for music and mastering, and Josiah Werning for graphic design.