Pleasure Activism

Another important way in which the erotic connection functions is the open and fearless underlining of my capacity for joy.

metaphor she talks about, the little golden color pellet inside the margarine, and kneading it, and feeling like, oh, you’ve been spread all through with actual aliveness. You can’t go back to suffering. I just thought, oh, that’s actually what we need to be doing. That’s what our movements should be doing.

5 See the essays “Love as Political Resistance” (p. 59) and “On Nonmonogamy” (p. 409) in this book for more on relationship anarchy.

I believe that all organizing is science fiction—that we are shaping the future we long for and have not yet experienced. I believe that we are in an imagination battle, and almost everything about how we orient toward our bodies is shaped by fearful imaginations. Imaginations that fear Blackness, brownness, fatness, queerness, disability, difference. Our radical imagination is a tool for decolonization, for reclaiming our right to shape our lived reality. Octavia’s Brood: Science Fiction from Social Justice Movements explores these ideas in depth.