Ife's Reviews > Pleasure Activism: The Politics of Feeling Good

2.5/5

When I came into Black feminist thought I was pulled to sayings like “pleasure is radical”, “rest is revolutionary”, “community will save us” and a lot of other phrases that populate the Black feminist rhetorical wealth. The more time I spent in these spaces the more I become disillusioned by these phrases and the way they were typically invoked. I found that too often they served not as a serious praxis but to work on a sort of feeling politics of affirmation which was often belied by the fact that there was little critical interrogation into the nuances of the expressions. In this light I was excited by the prospect of 'Pleasure Activism': a full text treating the idea of the politics of pleasure. I had read We Will Not Cancel Us: And Other Dreams of Transformative Justice by adrienne marie brown earlier and though it is a work that I think has its own issues it at least to me had an interesting enough thesis for me to feel like brown could utter something new into the Black feminist echo chamber on pleasure. It’s press description says:

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?

These are lofty questions that in actuality the book comes nowhere close to answering.

My faith waned at the beginning of the book when she talked about the book taking as its foundation Audre Lorde’s ‘Uses of the Erotic’: an essay which has seemingly become de rigueur to cite in all Black feminist work on pleasure regardless of how relevant it is to the argument that is being made. In reproducing the entire essay at the beginning of the book she footnotes Lorde’s use of the term ‘women-identified women’ with:

I am not able to ask Audre Lorde her intended distinctions here, but I can ask that you as readers consider the text through the lens of her time rather than ours—in this day and age, when I hear “women-identified women,” I can bristle in search of transphobia. This book will in no way support any identity of woman that does not include cis and trans women. The way I want to explore pleasure includes everyone of any gender and all genders who is looking for a different way to be in power with each other and willing to experiment with a feminine, erotic use of power.

The term ‘women-identified women’ was popular with radical lesbian feminists throughout the 70s as a way to identify women who centred their life around community with other women, which was imagined to have some potentially sapphic slippage. In other words, I can say without a shadow of a doubt that Lorde was not thinking about trans women when she uses that term, which should be obvious to anyone who has any considerable engagement with Lorde’s work or even simply does a close reading of that essay. That brown is not aware of this raises questions about her engagement with the material that she purports to be the wellspring of her work.

Though well-intentioned, brown and the people she brings on to interview in this collection evacuate the pleasure from most of the things they talk about; most especially sex – and sex takes up a lot of the book (which maybe should be expected from its pop art cover of animals copulating). Sex begins to sound like a homily through the suffusive buzzy tone of an anti-septic sex-ed substitute teacher who loves crystals strung across all the essays. Where they were not predictable they were often Procrustean, cruising on assumptions they felt no need to justify. This is where I can acknowledge my bias. Vague spiritual rhetoric grates me, and in this book it animates so many overestimations of the ‘healing’ or ‘radical’ nature of things that are basic and mundane to me. In this vein the book struck me more as self-help than political writing.

A lot of the essays, through no fault of their own, are overly self-contemplative – brown invites these types of contributions as it is effectively structured as a series of interviews between her and people whose voice she admires on pleasure (most of whom the reader has no clue they are). I don’t think this is inherently a problem – I think there is something potentially radical about getting readers to take seriously voices they are unfamiliar with. However, if there is a case to be made for a politics of pleasure, I am not going to be convinced that we will locate it through excessive self-regard. brown’s church of self-contemplative politicized pleasure is a popular one. Movements like Soft Life exemplify how easy it is for marginalized people’s pleasure to be coopted into capitalistic and consumerist logics especially when coupled with uncritical ideas of self-care. Yet brown refuses to interrogate the most necessary questions such as “which pleasures are revolutionary?”, “how might our pleasures be coerced by the very systems she perceives pleasure is liberating us from?”. There is no structural analysis here beyond vague nominal nods that her and her clerks make to the isms and phobias that are conspiratorially imagined to have a vested interest in stopping our pleasure.

This is part of a broader issue of the modern non-academic anthology – those easily producible publishing Frankensteins in which different authors are tapped on to submit work. There is, of course, nothing inherently wrong with the anthology, but so often the social anthology claims to have some sort of thesis that is supposed to be produced from the reader gleaning the connections between the texts. Very rarely do they say something cohesive – often they are just scattered ramblings from different people who might have similar thoughts, but are most certainly not advancing a thesis. In other words, I wish brown called this book something like ‘Musings on Pleasure: Reflections and Conversations With My Friends’ and claimed the book for what it is rather grandiosely trying to pass the text off as something more: from its tagline, blurb, introduction and title – all of which produce a sense of a bigger scope than what is actually offered. I might have been more empathetic to the outcome were this the case. However for what it strives to be this text fell flat for me.

The only essays I personally enjoyed from this collection were Joan Morgan’s 'Why We Get Off: Moving Towards a Black Feminist Politics of Pleasure', 'Fuck You, Pay Me: The Pleasures of Sex Work' by Chanelle Gallant and 'On Fear, Shame, Death and Humour: A Conversation Between the Rocca Family and Zizi'. But from seeing a bunch of other reviews it seems that people were helped in some ways by the ideas in the book and that I think is worth noting.

I expected to be invited into a world of rethinking the potential of pleasure with this one. Instead I found this book itself deeply unpleasurable to read.