The Year of Joyful Resistance

Hell is no match for collective joy. Welcome to the golden age of protest partying.

- ADRIENNE MAREE BROWN

How can we think of celebrating right now when so much of the past year has pointed us toward despair? The regressive battles for bodily sovereignty; the wave of patriarchal, homophobic, and transphobic policymaking; law enforcement trying to hold us in obedience with escalating violence; so-called global leaders who would have us deny the realities of climate change and pandemic vulnerability. In light of all that, well, where is the light? Some days, numbness and hopelessness can feel like our only available options.

This overwhelm isn't accidental-it's straight out of the oppression playbook. One way to control people-to keep them in a scarcity mindset of desperation is to deny them the power of pleasure and the erotic. Freedom fighter and poet Audre Lorde once defined eroticism as a bridge between the political and the spiritual-a "provocative force," marked by an open and fearless capacity for joy, that awakens our refusal to accept the current systems.

"Recognizing the power of the erotic within our lives can give us the energy to pursue genuine change within our world rather than merely settling for a shift of characters in the same weary drama," Lorde wrote. Once we reclaim our right to satisfaction, in other words, justice and Old institutions can disintegrate and crumble. This is a lens of possibility and of profound delight liberation can be among our most pleasurable experiences.

In 2019, I published a book called Pleasure Activism: The Politics of Feeling Good, a series of conversations between myself and other movement leaders who have found and generated our own celebratory practices aimed at making our necessary revolutions feel irresistible. And that is the lens I encourage us to hold up to this difficult moment. When we peer through it, we can feel our aliveness begin to pour through. Old institutions can disintegrate and crumble. This is a lens of possibility and of profound delight.