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In her StyleLikeU: What’s Underneath Pride Series feature, adrienne maree brown asks, “How would I be with my body if there was nothing to fix? Like, there is nothing to fix except the lens that I’m looking through.” Adorned in a floral dress, bracelets that stack up along her forearm, and shoes gifted to her by Beyoncé, brown unveils herself both literally and figuratively as she tells us of her ethos, politics, and life as writer, editor, scholar, doula, and activist while taking off her clothes one item at a time.

In an interview with The Laura Flanders Show, brown tells us that “pleasure is how we reclaim our full selves, and once we have that, we will no longer settle for suffering as our way of life.” She attributes the ways that she had unlearned the power and necessity of pleasure to the way that “Black women have been trained to be in service with our bodies rather than in pleasure in our bodies” and that now, for her, “pleasure is actually a measure of freedom. It’s a way that we say, ‘I have decolonized, I have returned to myself, I have been healing.’”

brown’s praxis is largely influenced by Octavia Butler and Audre Lorde and is located in the desire for pleasure and joy for Black people and people of color. In her book, Pleasure Activism: The Politics of Feeling Good, she quotes from Audre Lorde’s Uses of the Erotic, “In touch with the erotic, I become less willing to accept powerlessness, or those other supplied states of being which are not native to me such as resignation, despair, self-effacement, depression, and self-denial.”

Having begun her work at the Harm Reduction Coalition, she has become an essential figure in the restorative justice movement as well as fostered the development of organizations such as BYP100, the Rising Majority, and Black Lives Matter Her other books include Holding Change: The Way of Emergent Strategy Facilitation and Mediation and Fables and Spells: Collected and New Short Stories and Poems.

At the end of the StyleLikeU interview, brown is in her swimsuit. As she wipes off her lipstick, the interviewer asks her the last question, “Why in your body, in your skin, in your journey, why is it a good place to be.” brown replies,

“I’m one of the freest people to ever live. And not only am I alive, but I’m alive in all of the best identities, you know…I’m fat, I’m queer, I’m Black, I’m multiracial. All of these places where oppression has been the experience for so long are now coming into freedom and coming into agency. And I’m like, in the intersection of all.”