Affective refusals

Bitterness, failure and disengagement in a French workplace simulation

Bibliographic Data

ID24230413
AuthorsEman Shehata (0000-0002-7684-204X, London School of Economics and Political Science)
Year2026
Publication date2026-10-13
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueFeminist Theory (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 1464-7001 • E-ISSN: 1741-2773
PublisherSAGE Publications (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1177/14647001261490023
OpenAlexW7221638292
LanguageEN
References cited16

At a simulation-based training centre in Lyon where the unemployed engage in practice work, four women of Arab and African origin living on benefits refused to participate in the game of workplace rehearsal. Challenging utopian visions of ‘practice makes perfect’, the women refused calls for mastery. They questioned its so-called egalitarian premises and pointed to historical accounts of injustice that prevented them from striving towards fantasies of self-improvement. Experiencing recurrent dismissal by their colleagues and trainers at the centre, the women responded by doing the bare minimum. This article investigates what it might look like to study bitterness ethnographically, by paying attention to its relational formation. I move away from attempts to understand bitterness as attribution and as grounds for a passive subjectivity to examine instead its collaborative nature and how it crops up as a practice that can gesture towards an otherwise. Drawing on feminist and queer theoretical debates on refusal, ugly feelings and failure, I suggest that bitterness is best understood as an ‘affective refusal’ that is contingent on historical formations of racial and gendered injustice and relational encounters of dismissal.

bitterness · disengagement · Dismissal · failure · Human Development · Queer theory · racial injustice · unemployed women · workplace simulation · Feminist Theory and Gender Studies · Posthumanist Ethics and Activism · Qualitative Research Methods and Ethics

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Open DOIOpen Access