Rosie Hancock  0:04  
Hi, I'm Rosie Hancock in Sydney, Australia.

Alexis Hieu Truong  0:07 
And I'm Alexis Hieu Truong in Gatineau/Ottawa, Canada. And welcome back to Uncommon sense from The Sociological Review. It's where we take everyday terms that seem straightforward enough, things we might drop into everyday speech – like say, success, anxiety, taste – and pause to look at them more critically and to give them a sociological twist. And we mean that in the broadest sense: geographers, anthropologists, cultural studies scholars, you're more than welcome here.

Rosie Hancock  0:32 
Today we're looking at joy. And despite the social and personal profundity of joyous experiences, it's a concept that's received scant attention from scholars, something we are looking to put right with our conversation today. Now, joy might not be something that we intuitively or instinctively associate with inequalities, but some – including the existential psychologist Rollo May – have argued that while happiness is finding a system of rules which solve our problems, joy is taking the risk that's necessary to break new frontiers. The African American poet Toi Derricotte also talked of joy as an act of resistance.

Alexis Hieu Truong  1:12 
There's so much more to unpick here, and it's fair to say that we're overjoyed to talk all things joy with someone whose work focuses on racial, gender and class inequalities, and who has been mapping grassroots organising and activism of women of colour for more than 15 years. I guess we're looking to find out whether and how joy manifests itself in this sort of work, and what that really looks like in the real world and in sociology. Our guest is Akwugo Emejulu, Chair in Sociological Studies at the University of Sheffield. As part of her research, Akwugo has been investigating the relationship between black feminist joy, ambivalence and futures, asking how black feminists are remixing political media, meanings and messages to co-create manifestos for change.

Rosie Hancock  1:57 
So, how exactly does joy fit into all that? Let's find out, as we're joined by Akwugo on this episode of the podcast. Hello and welcome.

Akwugo Emejulu  2:05 
Hi there. Thank you for having me.

Rosie Hancock  2:06 
We're so delighted. And I want to kick off by asking you what led you to start mapping the organising and activism of women of colour, like talk us through how this became your focus, because – as I understand – it has its roots in your life before academia.

Akwugo Emejulu  2:22 
Oh sure, although I think only now I'm realising those connections, so just to be clear. So, before I was an academic, I worked for several years as a community organiser in the United States and in Scotland, and then I was also a trade union organiser in Texas. And I was a trade union organiser in Texas before it was trendy, before trade unionism was kind of in the upswing that it is now. So this is well before Fight for $15, this is well before Amazon organising, the union and stuff. So, so I was like a trade union organiser in the dark days in a right-to-work state, as we say, where it's illegal for workers to go on strike and to collectively bargain. My time as an organiser was probably one of the most important political experiences of my life, because it really made me understand the nature of failure and the limitations of political demands and claims. Because I look back on a lot of my time, and I don't know if I necessarily made a difference, but I think there were these kind of moments of joy or happiness in some of the solidarity work and community building.

Rosie Hancock  3:38  
Your description of the organising doesn't sound like it was an environment that's conducive to joy, but you know, you're just saying that there was joy in that work despite, or, you know, maybe because of the challenges it presented.

Akwugo Emejulu  3:49  
I felt – but I know my fellow organisers maybe felt differently, but no – I felt very demoralised after my time, because it was really an understanding of the forces that were arrayed against workers, the power of the state, the power of capitalism to kind of undermine political demands. And so that was something that I've kind of taken with me, of never to underestimate that in a lot of my academic work. And I don't know if it's something about my looking backwards trying to find these moments of joy and happiness, and certainly with my fellow organisers part of the political education for us was when we met to discuss how things were going, we were, we would always go out drinking, go out dancing. There's a whole group of like, this was like in the upswing of salsa dancing – when salsa dancing was like very mainstream in the States at that time, at least amongst like people who were like non-Latinos – and so we would always go out salsa dancing. So I remember that. So that's something that's very important. But in terms of when I'm looking at my own research, my starting point was always not necessarily my own experience, but there were two things. I was particularly interested in exploring women of colour's activism, particularly in a European context because still, at this moment, we don't necessarily see women of colour, racialised women and black women in particular as political agents, as knowing agents who organise and make complex, nuanced demands to fellow activists, to the state, to bosses, to everyone else. And this is a long standing gap in research, both in Britain and on the continent, and so that's one of the things I'm particularly interested in. And then connected to that is always to think about the complex inequalities women of colour experience, but then always to understand that women of colour aren't always subjected to inequalities, right? It's like there's agency here, and part of understanding women of colour's agency is to take seriously their activism, but also take seriously those moments of community building, joy, but also exhaustion and frustration and demoralisation. So really trying to understand the broad emotional landscape of activists is something that's very important to understand the nature of their politics.

Alexis Hieu Truong  6:14 
You're making a lot of connections between the kind of experiences you're interested in, the research you were doing, the activism you were doing, and also outside of that work. Traditionally, we might think of emotions as being the domain of psychologists, and maybe before we start digging deeper into some of your academic work, and joy specifically, I wanted to ask you more broadly about emotions, something we've talked about in an earlier podcast and ask that why sociologists are interested in them?

Akwugo Emejulu  6:45 
Well, emotions are fascinating, right? Because absolutely, they are the domain of psychology and psychiatry but emotions are a form of knowing the world. They're a form of meaning making. They're the ways in which people are bound together. That's how we know and understand ourselves, each other and the social world. And so emotions are essential to understanding, as a different way of understanding knowledge beyond this Cartesian idea of logos and logic and rationality, and thinking about ideas connected to embodiment, enfleshment and somatic knowledge. I think emotions are essential to understanding this.

Rosie Hancock  7:30  
I'm wondering, like, what about joy specifically? Like, what do you think joy might add to our understanding of the social world?

Akwugo Emejulu  7:36 
Well, joy is interesting because, in some ways, we have to separate it out from a lot of the, some of the trends, the fashionable aspects of thinking about joy, because now everyone – you know – so joy is an act of resistance. Poor Toi Derricotte, I wonder if anyone has actually read her entire poem, because the way that that's just been kind of lifted out from a line from her poem is, I think, a little problematic. And I think we kind of wish to escape into joy without kind of understanding that joy is always interconnected with a lot of grief and sadness about the nature of the social world, and joy is always connected to a particular kind of radical politics of insisting on not being demoralised and insisting on not being defeated or being defeated and but not being broken by that. And so I would, you know, I'd like for us to not think about joy in just this kind of banal way that we kind of throw out to activists going, “oh, but be joyful”. So we're speaking the week after Donald Trump's re-election to the presidency and, if you've noticed, a lot of the commentary is about, yes, yes, we should grieve, but we need to get to work. We need to kind of work hard, to do things. And I don't want us to think about joy as this palliative in a way, right? That, you know, the world is crumbling around us and then, you know, if we kind of have a little dance party, or if we're doing, you know, we're cooking for each other that that is somehow going to keep the wolves from the door. And so I want us to understand joy as this temporary, ephemeral state of pleasure, of desire, but by the very nature of it is always fleeting and will always come to an end, and is always a path to something else.

Rosie Hancock  9:27 
So we're going to come back to Trump a little bit later, so I want to kind of put a pin in Trump for a second, and I'll also return to joy in like, specifically, in just a second. But before we do, in sociology affect theory is this big thing and I know that that's popular in other disciplines as well, and I'm curious whether it comes into your thinking or not? In fact, it would be helpful before you even answer that, if you can explain to us a little bit about what affect theory is.

Akwugo Emejulu  9:56 
So with apologies to the late Lauren Berlant and to Sara Ahmed, I'm so sorry I do not use affect theory. I don't understand it, I'm a bad sociologist, especially like and I'm in Britain as well and this is like, the home of like affect theory. I mean, there's some work that I co-wrote with Francesca Sobande, who's at Cardiff, and she wrote that section on affect theory because I was like, I don't understand and you can write that, because I'm not engaged with that. And my other work with Leah Bassel, who's now at Coventry, so we're very clear about saying that we do not use affect theory. We understand that there is like, some sort of like connection between our interest in the politics and sociology of emotions and affect theory. I am interested in, particularly the ways in which the American sociologists think about the sociology of emotion. So that's Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, that's Adia Wingfield, that's Louwanda, Louwanda Evans and of course, Arlie Hochschild, who – you know – coined the term famously, emotional labour. I find that framework far more helpful and kind of somehow less theoretically – I don't – like a cul de sac. I just find that these frameworks are far more helpful, at least to me and my work and understanding what's going on with women of colour activists. I think a framework of understanding Arlie Hochschild's famous framework of feeling rules is something that's deeply helpful to us. So when she talks about feeling rules, she talks about the enforcement of, this collective enforcement that teaches us how to emote and to feel in particular ways in particular scenarios. So we have feeling rules, say around funerals. We know we're not supposed to necessarily laugh at a funeral. We learn through our social relations that funerals are sad, are sombre, or all of these things, right? Or we learn how to sit in a classroom, right? That we shouldn't be talking, we shouldn't be doing this. That's a power relation, right? Sometimes it's for the best, sometimes it isn't, and when you complicate that – because that's also the problem of both affect theory and a lot of the sociology of emotions, that we're actually talking about white emotions – that, when you complicate this to think about racialised emotions and gendered emotions – and this is where the work of Adia Wingfield and Louwanda Evans is so and Eduardo, Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, is so important – is that we think about that these feeling rules happen, of course, in a social and political context, that black people, for example, are forced to repress many of our feelings about things, right? So I have to do a lot of performance so I'm not seen as the angry black woman, right? Those are the feeling rules of my institution of the University of Sheffield, or when I'm kind of in a grocery store, right? And the work that I do with Leah Bassel looks at how women of colour activists are forced into these contexts of emotional domination with their so called revolutionary white comrades because they have to be seen as non-threatening and affable in order to make their political claims. And so I find that when we look at, when we use these frameworks from, I'm calling it the American School, who knows whether they think of themselves like that, I find that that takes us much further down the road, at least for me, who does empirical work, I'm not a social theorist so my apologies to the social theorists who are listening.

Rosie Hancock  13:23 
I mean, I'm so glad that you brought up how the sort of emotional rules are about, you know, effectively white emotions, right, and how then that plays out for non-white people. Because I really wanted to ask about, you know, if emotions are important in the context of activism, you know how, how is it that joy can kind of fit in, and how you think joy fits into minoritised lives in these spaces and like, what is it about joy that's political and essential in that context? I know that you in your writing have said that it's both a mirror and a shield, and as being about refusing narratives and reconstructing others, and I wondered if you could tell us a little bit more about that.

Akwugo Emejulu  14:08 
This is taken directly from my empirical work with activists, so this is what activists are telling me, right? So, I mostly study women of colour activists who are working, who are doing anti-fascist organising, migrants rights, a lot of anti anti-border, anti-deportation work, as well as long standing anti-austerity work. So a lot of housing rights, housing struggles, anti-gentrification struggles. And so as you can imagine, this is really difficult work in which the left is in retreat, right, across Europe, and so this is a moment of, of consistent defeats, alongside a very difficult moment – especially post-2020 and the global Black Lives Matter protests – of white revolutionary activists being more, I wouldn't say open, but at least more attuned to anti-racist and intersectional organising, but still unwilling to work in solidarity with racialised women, racialised women activists. And so joy becomes this kind of pressure valve, like an opportunity that, as activists have told me and Leah, an opportunity to try to, a moment of emotional regulation, right? So I'm thinking of some of the Spanish activists, the Afro-Spaniards who organise club nights, right? That are both like fundraising nights for them, for their own survival, but also this opportunity to kind of to dance, to drink, to do all of these kinds of things outside and against this very difficult context of their anti-borders, anti-deportation work, you know. Or I'm thinking of activists in Berlin and in London who are organising these self-organised spaces for creative arts and music and all the rest of it. And so joy is political in the sense that no good activist is only kind of like against the state and against capitalism. There have to be these community building, these community bonding activities, where you step out of yourself and try to be not someone else, but you put on a different mask for this short moment in time. And so joy is deeply political, in a way, right? Joy is an opportunity – when we talk about a mirror and the shield – it's a way of you finding yourself and others, right? So if you're on that dance floor because you've just been involved in some migrants, some hardcore migrant survival work, then you're seeing yourself in in another but then also it becomes a shield, right? Because, as I always say to folks, that you can't be in resistance mode all the time. You have to take it, you have to rest, you have to take a break. And so it becomes this shield, this kind of this space for recovery and for recuperation, to go out and do it all again the next day. And some other work that Francesca and I have done, we talk about this idea of the bitter sweetness of so many of these emotions, right? This joy is never pure, but none of these emotions are right. They're always interconnected with a deep well of grief and sadness and melancholy because of the work that's required and the need for how these kind of joyous spaces operate as a space for recuperation until we kind of, until we're like going, you know, once more, into the breach.

Alexis Hieu Truong  17:40 
By focusing or by investing like these theories of emotions, I feel that you're really kind of pointing to the collective aspects or the power relations, the togetherness of it, instead of a just very individual kind of experience of those, let's say, emotions and affects. And I'm thinking that the kind of activism also you're describing, of the type you're interested in, is kind of synonymous with struggle and resistance, maybe refusal even. And you've certainly pointed to those things with, with the question of the shield, but you've also mentioned that the duration of these, these moments of joy, right, and it's temporality. So I was wondering if you could expand maybe a bit more on how, how joy manifests itself as or in, or maybe after, right? These questions of refusal, like it provides a moment of respite, maybe of a kind of just a breathing room.

Akwugo Emejulu  18:44  
Yeah and I think connecting joy and refusal is, is really important. That's a central concept from my book Fugitive Feminism, is to think about when you reject or refuse the human you also refuse a whole politics of domination and hierarchical relations with that. And through that refusal, you create different spaces for possibility, you create all these– you hopefully create – all of these alternatives for different ways of being. And one of those opportunities or possibilities could perhaps be joy. But of course, nothing is guaranteed, right? And I think that's all, that's always what's, I find, fascinating about it. It's not just the temporality of it, but I think it's also the, how precarious it is. It's never certain, right, that you might do, you might undertake these acts, and it might not be feel particularly joyous. You know, I often think about a long standing conversation I had with, with, with a colleague, was about how she wanted to think of her comrades as her friends. And I'm like, oh, my God, they're not your friends. What do you, I mean they might be. But like, the relationships you have with folks under these moments of deep strain and tension and conflict really do undermine quite a lot of intentions for friendship. And frankly, you want to sometimes get away from some of these people, right? It's like you're doing all this work, and sometimes you just need to not be with these people. And I think that's a really important moment of refusal, like it's a number of different things about refusing the usual kind of politics, refusing the labels and positions people put you in, but also kind of refusing particular kinds of emotions, refusing to be demoralised, or refusing to always put on a happy face for things, right? And so I think that idea of thinking about joy is deeply precarious, that it is not guaranteed, and things that you might do that you think might bring joy and in fact, maybe won't. Or the temporary relief is really never enough, isn't the sucker that you think it is in order to kind of balance out a lot of the other hard work that's taking place. And so I guess I'm, I'm very – well this is maybe we'll go on to talk about this as well – ambivalent about this, right? Because joy is in no way like a solution to anything, right? It is simply just another step on the road, right? But it's not that it's a final end point.

Rosie Hancock  21:23  
You've already mentioned, like a paper that you wrote with Francesca Sabande. And in that paper, you're talking about intersectional vulnerabilities, or like a broad set of emotions that women of colour activists in Europe experience and have to make sense of. And I'm gonna, I want to quote you from that paper.

Akwugo Emejulu  21:23 
Oh good, I haven't read that for a long time, so great thank God.

Rosie Hancock  21:47 
Here's the refresher, right? So you're writing, you say, “we remain conscious of the potential for the emotional experiences of women of colour to be fetishised in ways that are at odds with their liberationist goals”. And I was really hoping that you could speak to this a bit. I'm curious about, you know, challenges like this associated with the, perhaps racialisation and politicisation of emotions like joy.

Akwugo Emejulu  22:11 
When we think about issues of fetishisation, you'll, you'll see very clearly that's why I'm quite tentative in this conversation about joy, right? Because I think there is this need for it to be a solution or an end point, and then that becomes a fetishisation. And we see that most clearly in now – to become an unfashionable but – you know, like three years ago, everyone was talking about self care, right? You know, taken, bastardised from Audre Lorde, you know, self care is political warfare, right, where she's talking about self care and what it means to be a black woman in America, and also, importantly, she's struggling with breast cancer at this moment, so the layers by which she is discussing ideas of self care is actually deeply nuanced and complex. But of course, that then gets bastardised into an idea of like taking a bubble bath, lighting candles, all of these kinds of things, right? And so this is a kind of fetishisation, but also I think it's – if we want to go back to Arlie Hochschild and her feeling rules – this is, I find, another way of keeping black women from their emotions, from our emotions, right? So this focus on joy, right, rather than a deep anger, disgust, sadnessabout the nature of the social world. You know, we're in the middle of a far right emergency, who's talking about joy in this moment, right? And why would that be our starting point rather than a deep anger, which is, which is also a very important and catalysing emotion, and actually gets quite a lot of work done, as we've seen on the far right. So, so I guess I'm worried about this focus on these important but softer emotions of joy and happiness, which are essential – and pleasure – which are essential to any kind of activism and must be part of the activist repertoire, but cannot be, cannot overwhelm or be out of balance with other key emotions, of sadness, of grief, of anger, all of our so-called ugly feelings. Those ugly feelings are just as important as the more socially acceptable feelings of joy and happiness.

Alexis Hieu Truong  24:23 
We had a discussion on self care I feel in a prior episode, but your, the way you look critically at, at joy – and maybe because you understand that something that's fleeting, that's precarious – also speaks to the importance and the power of joy alongside these other emotions. But certainly that, as you mentioned, it's essential so not to be taken for granted. And talking about joy and how it's alongside these other emotions also makes me think about something you've talked about, like exhaustion, which you describe as co-constitutive for women of colour activists. I was wondering, can you give us an example of what that looks like in reality and why it's kind of important here?

Akwugo Emejulu  25:11 
Yes, so the politics of exhaustion. That's a paper I wrote with Leah Bassel, who's at Coventry for, I think that was for the relaunch of City, the City journal. One of the patterns in our early analysis of one of our research projects exploring women of colour's activism in Europe is how folks said consistently across languages, cultural contexts, activist milieu,  how tired they are and how exhausted they are. And exhausted for a number of different reasons, right? Firstly, because of the unrelenting crisis. So I've been thinking about the rollback of the welfare state for like, 20 years, and I forget that my students are 20, so they don't know anything but crisis, right? And so that's an important point of the exhaustion, right? That you have this, the disappearance of the social welfare state makes everything far worse, even though women of colour were already in precarious circumstances, right? Things have nevertheless gotten worse. So that's one part of the exhaustion, but the other part of the exhaustion is working with ostensibly radical and revolutionary white comrades who reject intersectional analyses of the problem. And so when we think about austerity, austerity is not only about class, because the working class is also black and brown. Patriarchy is not just about white cis women, right? Because we have someone who's run on the presidency, and leaders of the opposition here, who have run based on anti-trans hatred, right? And so we have to have this complex, nuanced understanding of the problem. But what activists confront in their activist spaces, networks and organisations, is a lack of nuance and a deep hostility to these intersectional analyses, demands and organising strategies. And this sparks exhaustion, because if the space that you build for yourself, which is supposed to be radical, it's supposed to be pre-figurative, right, that you know we live our values now and then that will impact the world that we live in in the future, right? That's all that prefiguration means, you make the road by walking it effectively. But if you can't even convince the people who are perhaps closest to you that race matters and that you can't separate race, class and gender, then that sparks exhaustion and, of course, demoralisation. And so that's what this paper is about, is about having to fight on two fronts and how that becomes a cul de sac for folks, right? And so people start to, they decide what they want to do next, and more often than not, they exit the space, right? They leave the space for pastures anew and unfortunately, they kind of replay similar dynamics. And so there's kind of no home, like in that way, there's no home but the struggle. But that's really what exhaustion is connected to, and also exhaustion, and you can see then how exhaustion is connected to refusal, because you refuse, activists refuse to be focused on these kind of single issue struggles. They refuse to be talked down to. They refuse the feeling rules that are imposed on them of not to be so-called aggressive and angry, not to keep bringing up divisive issues such as race, all of those things are interconnected. And you then understand the importance of joy as this kind of pressure valve in these kind of deeply conflictual activist situations.

Alexis Hieu Truong  28:51
Is this connected to ambivalence? Like you, you also write that “if joy is a practice, then it's teacher is ambivalence”. What do you mean and like, how does ambivalence fit into this work?

Akwugo Emejulu  29:04
Joy is always tinged by sadness, but grief is also always tinged by joy, right? There's always this possibility of acting otherwise, thinking otherwise, being otherwise, but none of it is guaranteed. It is all deeply precarious, and that's the kind of the nature of the of the world we live in now, of these deeply precarious lives and circumstances. And so this is what, this was what for me, what I'm, what ambivalence means. And so ambivalence just, you know, broadly speaking just means feeling contradictory, feeling two things at once, and and I'm particularly interested in not seeking to necessarily resolve those contradictions, because guess what, that's life. But saying, what do those contradictions teach us, and how can we bring those contradictions into our work? And for activists, how do activists negotiate those contradictions in their work?

Rosie Hancock  29:59 
I wanted to turn to talking a little bit about some of the actual research projects that you've been doing, because in our introduction we talked about you mapping women of colour's activism over 15 years, and I wondered if you could tell us, tell us what that actually has looked like, in terms of like the projects that you've developed and undertaken?

Akwugo Emejulu  30:17  
So with my long standing friend and co-author, Leah Basel, we've undertaken kind of three iterations of this work, mostly first starting out with a very early project exploring women of colour activists in both Britain and France in the early days of austerity measures and so how folks were organising and mobilising in that first wave of cuts from the, if we remember way back, the 2011 Conservative-Liberal Democrat Coalition Government, and then also the governments under – let's see if I can even remember – Hollande, so a bit of Sarkozy and Hollande. I don't know if we've ever escaped from that first project because I am, surprised, is maybe not the right word, but I'm maybe horrified about how these patterns persist across time and space. So even though we didn't talk about it in those terms almost 20 years ago, – about exhaustion, ambivalence, joy, refusal – in the early days this is what we found, that women of colour activists felt compelled to leave their large, multi-class, multi-racial, multi-ethnic, multi-gender coalitions to organise by and for themselves, because their intersectional demands about the nature of austerity and also the coming far right threat were not being taken seriously by their radical white comrades. And so that is something that we've mapped now across, what, eight countries since that time, and we see the same dynamics. Whenever I present this work, whenever I'm kind of writing, and get reviews and stuff, everyone's always fine about the gender stuff, mostly about the sexuality stuff, but it's interesting about race. No matter what, there's always someone, but where's the class in this? And it's like, does the, does a, does a racial hierarchy really exist? You know, and I guess I'm very interested in how both academics, activists and policy makers, think that any kind of conversation about race in Europe always is understood as importing North American race politics to a European context, which is, you know, and so it's, for me, it's interesting to experience on, in a different way of course, this denial and erasure, you know, at this fancy level amongst professors and stuff that activists, everyday activists, also experience in their, in their networks, of just being disbelieved that these things are happening. And I think that's why we keep doing the work. But of course, we're also jaded and exhausted by this as well, right? That people kind of question – so it's not like critical friends going, you should sharpen this argument – people were saying, is this actually happening? And it's like, yes, it is and here's all the evidence when people are still not listening. So yeah, so that's just a little bit of the work. So you know a project from Open Societies Foundation, which is a six nation research project exploring similar themes, but focused on women of colour's, anti-fascist resistance, migrants rights work, as well as anti-austerity work. So those are, broadly speaking, the three areas we mostly study.

Rosie Hancock  33:29  
I mean, some of what you were saying there around like, I guess, like defensive white people in activist spaces – which I guess, is fairly common – but even the way that the work is received, I mean, it seems like, least on the face of it, some of it is quite deeply disheartening, maybe or depressing. And yet you talk about it being, and I'm going to quote you again, “particularly struck by how an expanded emotional lexicon has been adopted by activists across the continent”. Activists are discussing things like fear, anger and hope, but they've also started talking more about – as we've been speaking about – exhaustion, trauma, joy and pleasure. And so in the context of, you know your research in these activist spaces, what's going on here that we can learn about? And you know, if you like, to tell us a little bit more about the people themselves that you're researching?

Akwugo Emejulu  34:22  
Yeah, so I should qualify this a little bit to say that both Leah and I were not necessarily attuned to thinking about emotions in some of our early work. And so this work, this, these feelings and the articulation of these feelings may well have already and always been there, but that wasn't necessarily something that we were particularly interested in, right? And so some of this is maybe us not seeing what was there and then once we found a way to, once we found a good framework for thinking about emotions, maybe then that, then that was highlighted to us. So that's just one thing to say, so there might, there may well be some researcher effects with some of this stuff. But of course, there's no denying that the therapisation of popular culture matters, right? And so the ways in which people talk, use therapy speak in everyday life, of course, then has a real impact in the way that activists think about themselves and think and speak to each other, right? And so that's at least some of what's going on, as well as the de-stigmatisation of mental health. So being able to speak publicly about mental health challenges, and particularly in activist spaces, has been something that's incredibly important. And of course, if we're like, if we're doing good work, then I would have, I would expect that we would pick up on some of this stuff. And so some of the stuff about exhaustion is also tinged with broader issues of mental distress, about anxiety, and all the rest of it, right, that activists also have to negotiate because, of course, living in these precarious circumstances is, of course, deeply psychically disruptive to folks, right? And this amount of pressure that people are under and then not being able to find a home in various activist spaces, of course, is going to put people in acute mental distress, and that is to be expected. And so at least part of what's going on here is we're seeing some of the emotional, somatic and psychic effects of austerity, the rise of the normalisation of the far right, all of these kinds of things, alongside a broader acceptance of talking about mental ill health and people wanting to take that seriously in activist spaces.

Alexis Hieu Truong  36:39 
Well jumping on that, like you've given us a lot of tools to think about joy critically. As you mentioned, as we record this episode, it's a few days after the re-election of Donald Trump as president in the US, and we were kind of interested to note that, like a comment of Kamala Harris in the feed, where she said “we finish as we started: with optimism, with energy, and with joy”. And I wonder what you make of that in the context of our discussion today or, or maybe the kind of role that you'd like to see joy play in this particular situation.

Akwugo Emejulu  37:19 
Well, first of all, Harris has no choice but to say that, right? You know, you have to be the happy warrior in the face of, it's too dramatic to say destruction, but certainly rejection and defeat. So she has to say that. And I think it landed as hollow as it sounded, right? That I'm sure some people were like, let's get to work. But I think most people say, well, Trump has won the popular vote. You see some of the early analysis of some of the polling, right that you see this, is this a realignment of the American electorate, particularly amongst Latino voters? You know, certainly some generational alignment with young people who were voting, mostly white young people, so-called radical Gen Z, right, voting for Trump. So I don't know what joy means in that circumstance, and certainly for the Democratic Party and party officials, they have no choice but to say, we have to get to work. But I think for activists, folks are divided, right? Some people say, let's, let's go to work. Some people are exhausted, and some people are refusing this, right, because for black women who are activists within the Democratic Party or in and around the Democratic Party, this is an absolute rejection of them and their work, right? And we can have a debate about whether Harris was the right candidate, her politics around Gaza, her politics, all of these kinds of things, right? But when we're looking at it from an activist perspective, I'm not sure a call to joy at this moment is really very helpful, but I also think it's fairly meaningless, right? Like what joy is, is available at this moment? I think it's too early to say. And this is, and I think her call for that hard work and joy and blah blah, get to work and stuff shows the fetishisation of these emotions. And I wonder if it had been more powerful – but of course, the feeling rules mean that she's not able to articulate this in these ways, right – how much more powerful would it have been for her to express her anger, her frustration, her sadness, right? Which Trump is able to do, right? We forget that his inaugural speech was called American Carnage, which is actually an incredible speech, because it is just this dark view of humanity and the American and American society at that moment in 2017 when he gave that speech. I would urge people to go back and listen to it, because it really is something. So what would it mean in these public displays of emotion to actually, to truly capture the mood of defeat and sadness and grief and say, well, how can we mobilise those emotions to, first of all, sit with them and feel them and experience them, say they are very real and they are very valid and legitimate and say, well, what kinds of politics are present within these, as we say, ugly feelings. And so I, here's where I think this is maybe the death of joy, as it were, as a concept dies in the mouth of Kamala Harris, yeah.

Rosie Hancock  40:25 
Now that we've killed joy, it would be remiss of us not to ask you to speak just a little bit briefly about your, your most excellent book, Fugitive feminism, which has been described as an audacious manifesto – and I really hope one day I write something that gets called audacious – which, in which you argue that it's only through embracing the status of the fugitive that black women can determine their own liberation. And can we ask you just to reflect a bit about what you mean by that, and also tell us if and how joy, if it still has any life left, features here?

Akwugo Emejulu  41:01 
Yes, well, yes, I'm sure the last chapter is actually about joy, and I quote all of Toi Derricotte's great poem of joy as an act of resistance. So the book is really a thought experiment about what it would mean to refuse the human and to refuse humanity. About what would it mean for black women to embrace the subjecthood of the fugitive and thinking about the fugitive as one who flees, and in this case, one who flees humanity. And what would it mean for black women to refuse to seek inclusion in community, into this concept of the human and understanding that the human has always been an exclusive and excluding category bounded by whiteness that contains within it these genocidal, hierarchical relations – despite what the humanists tell us, or the post-humanists, or any of these other folks – that unfortunately, based on when we read directly the Enlightenment thinkers, they're very clear about who's allowed to think and to reason, who is outside of the category of the human and is contained within the status of a beast of burden. I take these thinkers seriously when they were not thinking of most of humanity, most of the people on this planet, as knowers and as agents. And I think rather than pleading for our inclusion in this category, this degraded category, what would it mean for us to consider ourselves something else. But in that considering of something else that has no guarantees, right? It is merely possibility for thinking and being together in community and all the problems that community holds for many people, to think collectively about who we might be and where we might go.

Rosie Hancock  43:01 
That's so interesting. So it's like it's both simultaneously a refusal, but also in refusing, allowing you to build, ideally, to build something new and something potentially more powerful and certainly more inclusive.

Akwugo Emejulu  43:16 
Which is where the feminist politics comes from, where drawing on especially bell hooks and Audre Lorde, thinking with them has been essential for thinking through this concept.

Rosie Hancock  43:28 
Well, we're going to be back in a moment to talk about a thinker who has inspired you, after just mentioning Audre Lorde and bell hooks. So first, a word from our producer, Chris.

Christine Garrington  43:41 
Hi, I'm Chris Garrington, producer of this episode of Uncommon Sense. Thanks for joining us to hear Akwugo Emejulu from the University of Sheffield talk about joy. We've been bringing you Uncommon Sense for a few years now, and hope it's a valuable resource, whether you listen for pleasure, work or study. If you've had the chance to head to thesociologicalreview.org – perhaps to check out our show notes or our other podcasts – you might have noticed that the Sociological Review Foundation is a charity. We're all about advancing public understanding of sociology, and you could say that in 2025 we need it more than ever. So, we want to ask a favour, if you can please consider making a contribution to help the Foundation keep bringing this podcast to you. Just head to donorbox.org/uncommon-sense. You can find and click on that link in our show notes. There you can make a one off or repeat donations and directly support the making of Uncommon Sense, all gratefully received. And of course, we're also very glad to have you simply for your listening. Any feedback or suggestions, find us at Uncommon Sense, at thesociologicalreview.org.

Alexis Hieu Truong  44:51  
Okay, so here's where we want to turn to hear about a thinker that gave, or perhaps gives, you some uncommon sense, who makes you think differently and perhaps, has challenged your own assumptions around our theme today, that of joy.

Rosie Hancock  45:05  
And I think, you know, you hinted at who this might be just before. So could you tell us who you've chosen and why?

Akwugo Emejulu  45:13  
It's the great thinker bell hooks. hooks is always, well, she's everywhere that I am, right. So every time I think I'm kind of thinking up something new or, oh, this is a hot new take on something, there she is. Been there, already there, like, but also, like, 25 years ahead of time, right? And so you name it, whether it's feminist politics, whether it's aesthetics, theories of cinema and looking relations, you name it, she's everywhere like. And so I admire her, just the breadth of her wonder and curiosity is truly incredible. You know, even though I was talking about rejection of the human but the deep humanity of her work, but also her work comes with an edge. And I think that's something I've always appreciated, that it is not warm and cozy, it is deeply uncomfortable for lots of people. I love that, that contrast in her work, it is so sharp, but also it is so inviting.

Rosie Hancock  46:09 
And could you tell us, like, where, perhaps, give some examples about like, where and how you've drawn on bell hooks' work and you know whether that – in fact, would be interesting to know whether her work has helped you to consider joy differently.

Akwugo Emejulu  46:24 
For a long time, I did not think of myself as a feminist. So not that I didn't believe in, you know, equality and all that kind of stuff, but just the terms by which feminist politics – particularly in the US and some, and bits of what happens in the UK – I just, it just didn't resonate with me. I just, I was like, I don't get it. Like, I don't, you know, abortion rights, yes, of course, but I don't know why I should be organising with you people, you people. And, and I remember reading bell hooks' “Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center”, and that was what really did it. Because I guess part of, you know, the story that's often told particularly for a second wave feminist is that, like, you know, you have, like, white women losing their minds in the suburbs, right? They're women, they're isolated, they're like not working, and then they, you know, then they fought, then there's this epiphany of when they, kind of, are in community or back in the labour force and they discover inequality, you know, gender inequality, and they're horrified. And here's feminist politics, whatever. And I'm like, that doesn't, I was like my mom and grandmother always worked. We were always in community. We were in the suburbs, but not isolated. So, like, just the terms that, you know, reproductive justice was something that was very important, so I guess, you know, the sexual politics were different. And so I guess from a black woman's perspective, I just didn't really understand, like, mainstream feminism, right, which was, you know, mostly concerned – now I understand, of course – it's mostly concerned with, like, white middle class women. So, of course, it wouldn't be for me or speak to me, right? And so, but when reading bell hooks' “Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center” that really reset the scene for me and set out the terrain of struggle, which I found really important. You know, her definition of feminism about, you know, feminism is the movement to end sexist oppression. But, like, I think what's very important that – and hooks, for me, was the first person who said this and insisted on this – feminism has to be about the liberation of everyone, because she was always concerned about how men also experience deep inequality and are also experience inequalities as a result of the patriarchy. And so that focus on not abandoning – in her case, particularly abandoning black men –  was something that's very important. And she paid a big cost in the 90s about this focus on black men, as well as as black women. And so I think that's important but I think particularly in terms of her, her work on feminist theory, this focus on this, the power and marginality, I think, is so important, because when you're on the margins, you're also in this space of, you're in a free space of possibility, of experimentation, because you're outside of the mainstream, you're outside of the white gaze, you're outside of the male gaze. And so you can do lots of different kinds of things. And so, and of course, when I'm working with activists, oftentimes women of colour activists are also on the margins, and many of them say being undercover, underground, particularly outside of the white gaze or their comrades, means that they're able to do the kind of work they wish to do, and are not hindered by being at, in the spotlight, caught within the white gaze. And so for me, that that book has been – and her kind of theorisation on the importance of being at the margins – was very influential when I'm thinking about ideas of fugitivity. And some of her other work, I just, I always want to discuss her, her book, “Black Looks: Race and Representation”. She has this famous chapter on the oppositional gaze, which is her response to both the male gaze and the white gaze, and the importance of, of, of looking back, of this defiant look in order to impose meaning on yourself and the world, in opposition to the male gaze and the white gaze. And so that work, in terms of her work on black women's cinema-going and black women's looking relations, is absolutely fantastic. I just – and it's, and it's and it's been essential to some of the new work I'm doing, that just taking these ideas of emotions and kind of somatic resistances further.

Alexis Hieu Truong  50:40 
Every episode we have a section on pop culture, and expanding on this topic of hooks being everywhere and having thought about everything right, in 2016 hooks wrote in The Guardian that Beyonce's album Lemonade was capitalist money making at its best, but criticised the notion of freedom depicted in the lyrics. She wrote that “to truly be free, we must choose beyond simply surviving adversity, we must dare to create lives of sustained optimal well-being and joy”. Is that something you agree with and how else do you think these arguments play out in pop culture? Is that something that interests you?

Akwugo Emejulu  51:25 
Well, of course. And okay, first of all, I mean, hopefully your listenership is not, does not include the Beyhive, because, oh my god, they're so scary. So I'm gonna say this, but I don't want to be trolled by them. I'm so scared of them. They are really terrifying, her stans are really scary. But of course, I mean, come on, of course, bell hooks is right. You can't have this woman standing up in a weird blonde wig and like her strange plastic surgery talking about like freedom and liberation and all the rest of it. Oh, come on. She is, like, dressed for the male gaze, has adapted her look for the white gaze and yes, there's a whole strand of – I don't know – post-feminism that says that, you know, this performance is for yourself, blah, blah, blah. I've never bought into that. I don't think that makes a lot of sense to me, because these, these folks are never, like you're always entangled in the society in which you live, whether you like it or not. So, like any honest reading of Beyonce is, like, of course, you know, she's a deeply contradictory figure, and bell hooks was, was right to say and I think she even said that Beyonce was a slave. And so, you know, she's being provocative in a certain way and I was like, that, is that too far bell hooks? Probably too far. But she isn't wrong, right? Like you can't have talking about, you know, her bragging about being a billionaire, and what is it, what is it in her, one of her newer singles, like, you can't break my soul, she talks about working in nine to five. And I remember some wag on Twitter was like, “this is high camp from Beyonce. When was the last time she worked a nine to five?”. So, let's be honest, you know. It's like, she's a pop culture figure who's not an anti-feminist. Wow, when I was growing up, that was not the case, right? For a lot of, like, the kind of the female pop singers at that time, right? So, so she's a deep contradiction, and she's kind of going only so far, but very happily hoarding her wealth, she and Jay Z and all the rest of it. So it's like, of course, of course, like she is a deeply flawed figure. But let me tell you that, that album Lemonade is really quite excellent. But I don't know, I also don't look to my, I don't look to pop stars for my politics, you know. And as we saw from like Taylor Swift, you know, endorsing – finally endorsing – Harris and all the rest of it, I think we make a mistake thinking that the everyday public looks to celebrities either for their politics.

Rosie Hancock  53:48 
So I mean, on the topic of pop culture, we do like to invite our guests to give us a tip on, you know, something in the realm of pop culture that helps us to see our subject a little bit sideways. And I was curious if you had one for us today?

Akwugo Emejulu  54:03 
It isn't clear that how connected to joy this is, but it certainly brings me joy, I guess. So, during the pandemic, I really got into a bunch of manga and anime. Like my older brother tried to get me into this – and like he and his weird friends tried to get me into this – as a child of the 80s. And I was like, get away from me, you weird people, you nerds. But of course, we all had a lot of time on our hands during lockdown. I kind of ran out of things to watch. And I was like, let me give this a try. And let me tell you, I've gone down a rabbit hole and I have, like, tattoos and everything like, it's a whole thing that's really.

Rosie Hancock  54:39  
Wow!

Akwugo Emejulu  54:39 
I know I'm very committed. So I, so I have to admit some of the best storytelling at the moment is happening via manga and anime, some of the and it's some of the best and worst of storytelling that reinforces a lot of horrifying racial, racial – gender stereotypes. But also some weird, the way that Japanese think about themselves and how they portray themselves is very weird, I will say so, some very weird racial and gender politics alongside some cracking storytelling, right? And so, you know, I think some of the best things that I watch are things that teach me things that I hadn't realised before. There's a new anime on Netflix called the Orb, which is about the struggle of a bunch of heretics to understand that the sun at the centre of, of our solar system. And I don't know, I, when I was reading about the medieval Christian, Christendom – and understanding how the Earth was at the centre of the universe – I don't think I understood in that strain of Christianity that the earth was not just at the centre, but was at the bottom. And, and the reason why life was so terrible is because we were being punished by God because we've been cast out of Eden. I don't think I understood that when I learned that at school, right? And so this is, like the best of manga, teaches you something like that, right, and so you understand their struggle to whatever. I recommend people watch Fullmetal Alchemist Brotherhood or read it, but watch it because not only is, so – you should see Alexis' face, he's so happy, and I'm happy that he's happy – because not only is this a classic, it's written by a woman and it is, it is an allegory about Japanese imperialism. So if you want to watch something that has something very important to say about Japan and the Second World War, but through a lens of magic and a cracking story and one of the best endings in anime history, here you go. And it is joyous. It's a lot of fun and also deeply horrific in many ways. So see, I've opened up something, and you have to get me to stop talking, because I will keep talking about this.

Alexis Hieu Truong  56:50 
That's all the time. That's all the time we have for today. Thank you so much for joining us Akwugo. It's been an absolute joy.

Akwugo Emejulu  56:58  
Thank you guys so much for having me.

Rosie Hancock  57:00 
Thank you. We'll make sure to put all the links to what's been discussed today in our show notes, which can be found on the app you're using to hear this, and on the podcast page at thesociologicalreview.org There you'll also find all episodes from our past two seasons, including ones relating to today's topic on subjects like emotions, solidarity and community. And you can explore all that the Sociological Review Foundation has to offer, our other podcasts, our magazine and much more.

Alexis Hieu Truong  57:30  
That's the end of season three. We'll be back soon with more Uncommon Sense and a brand new season. So stay tuned. Our sound engineer was Dave crackles, and our producers were Alice Bloch and Christine Garrington. Thanks for listening, bye.