User:Rigatonnimacaroni/sandbox

= Pleasure Activism =

Lead Section: As coined by adrienne maree brown in her book on the subject, Pleasure Activism is the locating of pleasure being a site of resistance and transformative justice for marginalized people and bodies (2019). While the term was originated by adrienne maree brown in 2019, activism surrounding sexual sovereignty, sexual citizenship and pleasure has long been discussed in feminist circles, queer circles, and academic scholarship pertaining to a wider bodypolitic. While Brown foregrounds her research in pleasure activism as an extension to pre-existing Black feminist scholarship, Pleasure Activism is a global movement spanning across many different cultures, traditions and lived experiences.

Uses of the Erotic

Audre Lorde’s work on the erotic is an important foundational piece to the language and the understanding of what Pleasure Activism is, what it was, and what defines a Pleasure Activist today (Brown, 2019). Steeped in Black lesbian feminist scholarship, the redefining of the erotic as something that is inalienable to one’s personhood and power is an important shift in the understanding of pleasure and pleasure discourses (Lorde & brown, 2019). Lorde also delineates that the erotic is not something pornographic in that it is meant to be outwardly consumed and performed for an audience, but it is instead an embodied act of resistance for those who have been kept from these feelings of safety, of intimacy, and of sexual autonomy (Lorde & brown, 2019).

The Sovereign Erotic

Using Lorde’s erotic as a framework, the concept of the Sovereign Erotic was created to extend the idea of the erotic as resistance into the erotic also being a site of decolonization as well (Driskill, 2004). In this work, Driskill understands the erotic as an act of reclamation for queer and two-spirited Indigenous peoples and cultures that were systematically marginalized from their traditions, communities, and histories at the hands of colonialism in the Americas (2004; Driskill et al., 2011).

Care as Pleasure

The work of Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha is vitally important in the Disability Justice movement (Karoulla, 2020). In Pleasure Activism, Piepzna-Samarasinha continues to extend the erotic and the pleasure activist movement to include disabled voices by positing that it is not only sexual intimacy that can function as resistance, but care work as well (brown & Piepzna-Samarasinha, 2019). Seeing care in the framework of resistance and the erotic functions as an opportunity to expand the greater sexual politic to one of not just individual political power, but to a sense of community that extends beyond acts of individual intimacy.