When you picture social movements, you probably see protest signs, tense meetings, grim determination. Serious faces doing serious work. Sacrifice as proof of commitment.
This vision is incomplete. Worse, it’s strategic malpractice.
Joy — pleasure, play, delight — makes movements work better. Oppressive systems maintain power partly through force, partly through convincing us that alternatives are impossible. They make transformation feel heavy, overwhelming, joyless.
Bringing pleasure into organizing counters this. When we experience joy in the work, we practice freedom in present tense. We build movements people want to stay in. We expand our imagination past what rational analysis allows.
adrienne maree brown, whose Pleasure Activism grounds this principle, writes: “Pleasure is a measure of freedom.” Neuroscience backs this — joy and play make brains more flexible, better at creative problem-solving. Positive emotions broaden perception of what’s possible. Pleasure creates stronger bonds than shared suffering.
Movement History Is Joy History
The Civil Rights Movement included freedom songs that created collective effervescence. Church gatherings mixed celebration with organizing. Youth movements incorporated dance and fashion. The work was deadly serious and joyful at once.
ACT UP transformed political protest through die-ins that combined urgent messages with theatrical play. Visually striking actions that made resistance irresistible, memorable, contagious.
These movements understood something fundamental: transformation requires embodying the world you want to create. If you’re fighting for a liberatory future, practice that liberation now.
Play as Strategic Tool
Incorporating joy doesn’t mean treating serious issues lightly. It means using play to imagine solutions you couldn’t think your way to. Creating spaces where people can experiment with different ways of being together. Making the path to liberation feel liberatory.
Begin strategy meetings with movement and music because it gets people thinking with their whole selves. Create beautiful organizing spaces because beauty helps us imagine beautiful futures. Incorporate celebration into actions as part of the work itself.
Crisis Demands Joy
Some argue that crisis means we can’t afford to focus on joy. Crisis is precisely when we need the regenerative power of pleasure most. Joy helps us recover from hard moments and imagine past them.
Consider how movements would shift if we centered pleasure: Meetings would incorporate bodies and movement. Actions would engage all senses. Strategy would emerge from play and experimentation.
Permission to Want More
Creating joyful movements starts with permission. Permission to want more than survival. Permission to recognize that pleasure itself is revolutionary in a system designed to deaden and disconnect us. Permission to understand that joy is practice, strategy, and preview of the world we’re building.
The future we’re fighting for is full of pleasure, play, possibility. Our movements should reflect that future now.
The revolution will be joyful, or it won’t sustain itself long enough to win.
