For in-person attendees, the talk will be preceded by a light lunch at 12.15pm.

Please email comms@sociology.ox.ac.uk with any questions.

Abstract

Who is entitled to enjoy life, and under what conditions? Drawing on qualitative fieldwork exploring the connections between racism and gender-based discrimination, this talk examines the unexpected analytical significance of enjoyment that emerged from the research. It considers how judgements about pleasure, leisure and intimacy become implicated in the production of social difference and moral worth. 

The analysis attends both to judgements directed at racialised groups and to the counter-judgements through which these groups interrogate dominant ways of living. It also asks how conformity to dominant norms may confer privilege while demanding sacrifices, and how what appears as respectability from one position may appear as deprivation from another. 

Attentive to the unequal power of these positions, the talk asks: what if becoming “normal” requires learning to restrain enjoyment? These competing evaluations raise questions about the making of normality and the connections between racial and gendered forms of exclusion.