Including essays and conversations by brown and other pleasure activists, this collection offers up a multitude of tactics for which to embody pleasure, claim it as a central and essential liberatory practice, and a sustainable one for the long-term road trip of justice work. I find joy in that work, and I think the various voices in Pleasure Activism: The Politics of Feeling Good, are on that tip, too. As a disabled travel writer, journeys bring with them my greatest joys and the greatest pains, the dual condition of which I like to explore as I move, because sometimes, trauma, pain, and oppression can become stale when left to sit, but when it moves, we can map it, and maybe formulate medicines that can bring about healing. Writer, healer, and self-proclaimed pleasure activist adrienne maree brown’s latest book arrived in the mail just as I was packing up to leave town, which is to say, right on time.

The Autostraddle Encyclopedia of Lesbian Cinema.

LGBTQ Television Guide: What To Watch Now.Joyful Militancy, by carla bergman and Nick Montgomery, foregrounds forms of life in the cracks of Empire, revealing the ways that fierceness, tenderness, curiosity, and commitment can be intertwined. Fusing together movement-based perspectives and contemporary affect theory, Joyful Militancy traces emergent forms of trust, care and responsibility in a wide variety of radical currents today, including indigenous resurgence, anarchism, transformative justice, and youth liberation. Rather than proposing ready-made solutions, we amplify the questions that are already being asked among movements. In conversation with organizers and intellectuals from a wide variety of currents, we explore how rigid radicalism smuggles itself into radical spaces, and how it is being undone. Why do radical movements and spaces sometimes feel laden with fear, anxiety, suspicion, self-righteousness and competition? In Joyful Militancy, we call this phenomenon rigid radicalism: congealed and toxic ways of relating that have seeped into radical movements, posing as the “correct” way of being radical.

Our website also includes the book’s introduction and other excerpts. Instead we have added a short overview about the book, below, so the interview can stand alone. For that, we are deeply indebted to all our interviewees who offered new insights and shed light on areas that needed reworking.

We do not include the preamble here because as time went on in the researching, interviewing and writing of the book our ideas and articulations shifted. For this interview we (carla and Nick) sent Marina Sitrin a ‘preamble’ outlining some of the ideas behind our book Joyful Militancy (available here!), and then included a couple questions based on Sitrin’s other writings (especially Horizontalidad: Voces de Poder Popular en Argentina).

Joyful militancy