The Joy We Crave: Joy Against Empire

The abortion access landscape in the United States worsens with each passing year. We are in the middle of a crisis, with health care access breaking down and maternal mortality rates rising sharply across the country. In spite of years of expanding grief and daily trauma exposure, when abortion providers and reproductive health workers gather, we talk about joy. We say how sweet it is to provide care despite the obstacles that we face. We attend panels led by doctors, advocates, and authors in the reproductive rights movement that speak to “centering joy.”

But since the Dobbs decision in 2022 whenever I have found myself in spaces discussing joy, the discussion has felt incomplete. We attempt to talk about something profound to us, our voices trembling. We attempt to combat insidious feelings of numbness and powerlessness. Our conversations conclude with someone pointing out that there are rooms where you can get a massage, or color while listening to sound bath. The talk flounders; we return to joyless work days.

Though I speak here about personal work experiences, I imagine that this hunger for joy must apply to other fields of care work. We realize the need for joy to endure, which is why we keep bringing it up. After all, it would be nice not just to create a better world, but survive long enough to see it. But our need for joy is more complicated than simply feeling happy or experiencing respite after witnessing deprivation and anguish. Sustaining joy requires awareness of and active opposition against the forces that cause our suffering.

Mantras and artwork cannot sustain joy. Massage chairs cannot sustain joy. I do experience joy in animated conversations with others about our work and our lives — that moment of connection when you’re sitting next to someone and you both remember an event that changed you both forever and you name it, speak to it, share feelings about it. But after walking away from countless discussions feeling incapable of sustaining that joyous feeling, I found myself interrogating the missing elements in these conversations.

I recently attended a multi-day reproductive health conference, which concluded with a discussion about the need for joy. At the end of the discussion one of the event organizers pulled out a feedback card and read someone’s anonymous input: “We need to talk about the effects of capitalism and colonialism on us and our work.”

I sat up straight immediately. This was not the first time this need had been expressed; in my three days at the conference, I had heard multiple people make similar comments in passing, but always in a small group walking down the hall, as an aside, or in a rushed question at a panel that didn’t get a proper answer. Now, after event organizers had danced awkwardly around the topics of capitalism and colonialism, here they were, finally acknowledging them in front of the entire conference.

So, let’s talk about joy. And, let’s talk about capitalism and colonialism. This is the context in which our work huddles, ice breakers, and retreats take place. We cannot continue to think of joy as something that exists separate from our suffering within these structures. The two are inextricably intertwined, in resistance to the causes of suffering.

In Joyful Militancy, authors Carla Bergman and Nick Montgomery define the effects of imperialism on our societies as “increasingly affective,” permeating our “emotions, relationships, and desires” in a way that creates “feelings of shame, impotence, fear, and dependence” (2017). These are feelings that I recognize from my worst work days. It’s also how I feel when I hear someone respond to the most tragic thing I’ve ever witnessed by simply advising me to “vote.” The effects of Empire and oppression crush us and make us feel as if the outcome is inevitable and the only solution is to wait: Wait for legal counsel. Wait for the senior administrator. Wait for an election.

When Bergman and Montgomery define the titular joyful militancy, they describe a need to acknowledge joy that exists in the context of Empire and oppression. They use “Empire” as a single word to encapsulate the web of structures that cause pain and violence: capitalism, colonialism, patriarchy, incarceration, cis heteronormativity, ableism. Most importantly, they talk about joy that exists in active resistance to oppression.

The joy we crave, the joy that we need to survive, exists in the context of our institutions failing us, and the ways in which Empire — through capitalism, imperialism, and patriarchy — touches every person in our lives. As abortion workers, we suffer alongside our patients. We struggle to secure affordable housing; we witness police officers harm our neighbors and patients; we witness carceral strategies tear families apart. We are denied funding, which makes our work impossible while our government abandons entire populations and sends billions to military projects abroad that rain terror down on distant populations.

Acknowledging this context, Bergman and Montgomery build on the Spinozan concept of joy not as a mere emotion, such as happiness, but a growth in capacity “to affect and be affected.” Joy comes from accomplishing something new with other people, generating new feelings and connections, and realizing one’s own ability to support community members without merely waiting for institutions to provide. Joy is actually active, militant, transformative — and admittedly not relaxing.

This concept of joy isn’t new, but it does bear repeating, as we tend to soften the edges and drop the context when we speak of a more radical joy. Often people repeat this popular quote from Audre Lorde’s journal entries in “A Burst of Light” as an argument for radical self-care: “Caring for myself is not self-indulgence. It is self-preservation and that is an act of political warfare.” This is true, but Lorde says more in the text, also stating that “[f]eminism must be on the cutting edge of real social change if it is to survive as a movement in any particular country… We are anchored in our own place and time, looking out and beyond to the future we are creating, and we are part of communities that interact” (1988). Lorde is writing about her journey with cancer in this publication and on top of the anxiety is joy, but she is talking about a joy that is more than a hot soak and nap, but invokes real social change and interaction.

At this time of writing, the month before the 2024 presidential election, when abortion justice advocates are being called upon to shy away from “extreme” speech (such as gestational limits, gender-inclusive language, and genocide abroad), at a time when we are talking constantly about self-care, rest, and feeling joy when we get together, we must realize that Lorde also said that we need to be on “the cutting edge of real social change,” connected with others.

Specifically as abortion care workers, we operate within the framework of Reproductive Justice. In this framework, we often shift uncomfortably around the presence of Empire and colonialism, despite those forces being very much a part of it. We talk about racism without Empire.

The joy from change impacted is one that health care providers have at their fingertips: the ability to make something good happen for one person, to feel how it affects you as the worker, as well as the patient and their family members. We experience this joy while simultaneously witnessing the failures of institutions that we depend on. We see people suffer and give up, lose control of their bodies, and witness the death of beloved community members. In the joy of funding arranged for someone’s health care, when they’re brimming with gratitude and holding our hand, we realize our capacity to change people’s lives. We can see the capacity to change people’s lives in the person we’re speaking with. Occurring in that same moment are the literal explosions and violence from where funding went.

Our reality calls for a joy with sharp edges, a joy in active opposition to Empire. This is the joy that we crave, that we seek in these conference meeting spaces, in moments of crisis and suffering: the kind that opens us up and makes space for uncomfortable growth and grief and anger. The kind that operates outside of law and with risk. The kind that doesn’t evaporate into routine, but remains rooted in the context of the suffering and oppression that we witness.

We must find joy not in spite of oppressive systems, but within our very struggle against them. We need to use the “extreme” speech we are being advised to not use, be on the cutting edge, and be focused against oppressive institutions that cause mass suffering. We do this to alleviate collective suffering and preserve ourselves, and in this we can find connection and joy.

If joy is rooted in our capacity to affect others and be affected, then joy can be sustained in the uncomfortable push toward change, and by complete breaks from the status quo. In Healing Justice Lineages by Cara Page and Erica Woodland, the authors describe the discomfort of a joy in opposition to oppressive forces: “Divesting from carceral strategies puts the responsibility, ownership, and emotional, spiritual, and physical labor on us to build something we’ve never experienced and that is difficult to imagine” (2023). Fear and uncertainty are very much a part of this process. Bergman and Montgomery also describe joy as uncomfortable as it “transforms and reorients people and relationships.” In a capitalist society, our anxiety for stability creates a “desire to exploit, control, and direct others,” but when we break from routine, we can discover joy in our “collective capacities” to both accomplish small victories and create something new. From this discomfort is the possibility of and movement toward a better world.

This understanding of joy as our capacity to effect change is more sustainable than the concept of joy in conversations we’ve been having — one that has been primarily focused on self-care and rest. The effects of resistance last longer than the physical relief from acupressure. Our conversations about joy can have more meaning and resonate longer if we embrace the complexity of the joy that exists in the context of Empire. Yes, it is scary and unpredictable. To speak of hope alongside the violence of white supremacy and colonialism is painful, and this more nuanced concept of joy holds happiness with the pain. It involves challenging concepts that have been thoroughly embedded in our lives and feel inescapable, such as prisons, policing, war machines, and hierarchy. If we allow ourselves to recognize the complexity of “wins attached to losses and joys attached to sorrows,” then we can be part of collective and emerging power in our movement and become more capable (Bergman and Montgomery 2017).

For abortion providers — or anyone — looking to sustain joy, this means that we can, in fact, hold both joy and grief together in a way that may well be terrifying, but which may also fill us with thrilling possibilities. The state has failed us, but in response to this failure we have generated networks and projects that speak to a new way of being. Embracing the complexity of both this mournful desperation and creative collaboration can change everything. I see peers freeze from head to toe when powerful people that we depend on are criticized. But we must speak of joy while naming who harms us and our patients — an answer that has always been more complicated than just “Republicans” — confronting the roles of capitalism and imperialism in what we experience and how our own favorite politicians play into these roles. How we, ourselves, play into these roles.

Let’s remember that joy is dynamic. Joy exists in active opposition to Empire. Joy is difficult and it exists within the anxiety-inducing changes that affect us and everyone around us. Joy is about our capacity to create change and be changed without the guarantee of certainty. I encourage us to continue speaking of joy, but also to embrace a joy that is more than happiness, more than self-care, more than hangouts, but a sharp, pressing, and critical joy against the forces that oppress us.

Let’s start having these conversations.

References

Bergman, C., & Montgomery, N. (2017). Joyful Militancy. AK Press.

Lorde, A. (1988). A Burst of Light and other essays. Firebrand Books.

Page, C., Woodland, E., & Levins Morales, A. (2023). Healing Justice Lineages: Dreaming at the Crossroads of Liberation, collective care, and safety. North Atlantic Books.