In this blog, Tinka Harvard explores how Black women’s joy functions as a radical, political, and historical form of resistance, healing, and self-affirmation in the face of systemic racism, sexism, and intersectional invisibility.

A great deal of emotional, physical, spiritual, and intellectual energy goes into learning to navigate frustrations stemming from racial and gender inequality. It leaves Black women with a particular trauma and exhaustion. Despite existing in an anti-Black and sexist world, Black women choosing to live with joy is a radical and transformative act in the face of systemic oppression. Such joy pushes back on the policing of Black women’s existence and the inequalities they experience. Joy, then, becomes a political and healing tool—one that counters sexism and racism and affirms Black women’s humanity.

Black women’s joy is a modern-day movement—an emergent and critical international discourse surrounding Black women’s joy as a political, cultural, and emotional form of resistance to oppression. With roots in wellness and resistance from the past, it is a resistance with historical inspiration. That is, what exists today is a new wave of historical ideologies and efforts that are beginning to flower now.

Historical Roots of Joy as Resistance

Feminist historian Stephanie M. H. Camp wrote about enslaved Black women finding pleasure in resistance in the antebellum South in the United States. The present has ancient bones—the past influences the present. Camp investigated how enslaved Black women engaged in acts of resistance through pleasure and leisure, carving out ‘rival geographies’—hidden spaces like woods, swamps, and neighbouring farms—where they could temporarily escape the violence of slavery and express bodily autonomy and joy. Camp’s work emphasizes that the body became both a site of resistance and pleasure, challenging the imposed suffering of slavery and allowing enslaved women to assert control over their lives, even in fleeting moments.

Despite brutal conditions, enslaved Black women enjoyed intimacy and relationships, forming emotional bonds and families, underscoring their ability to cultivate love and joy amidst systemic violence. This historical legacy is foundational for contemporary expressions of Black women’s joy, as joy has long served as a survival mechanism and a radical form of self-assertion.

Post-Emancipation Transformation and Joyful Defiance

Tera W. Hunter’s To ’Joy My Freedom chronicles the migration of formerly enslaved people to urban centres, where they sought to deepen their emancipation through labour activism and the creation of autonomous spaces. Black women resisted economic and social constraints by forming communities centred on pleasure and self-expression in places like barbershops and juke joints. Dance and other forms of play became restorative and political practices, illustrating how Black women cultivated joy in the aftermath of slavery and amid ongoing structural racism.

Saidiya Hartman’s Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments emphasizes how young Black women at the turn of the century continued to push back against imposed norms. Their choices—embracing sexual freedom, choosing or rejecting motherhood, opting for single motherhood—represented not only acts of resistance but affirmations of joy and self-definition. They even found love with one another. These women created intimate, joyful lives on their own terms, often in defiance of dominant cultural expectations.

Joy as The Great Refusal, Self-Recovery, and Social Transformation

The Intersectionality of sexism and racism results in a unique form of discrimination. Black women face intersectional invisibility, often excluded from both feminist discourses centred on white women and anti-racist movements centred on Black men. Group prototypes tend to erase those who do not fit a dominant narrative, leaving Black women’s experiences unaddressed. Audre Lorde’s and bell hooks’s foundational feminist writings critique mainstream feminism’s neglect of race and class. affirming the complexity of Black women’s identities and their right to healing and joy. Black women’s joy is a crucial, often overlooked dimension of feminist and anti-racist thought. Joy is a vital component of resistance, wellness, and self-actualization. Rest, pleasure, and creativity are highlighted as forms of wellness and liberation, especially in a culture that commodifies Black pain.

Joy is both personal and political. It is the ground on which Black women assert their right to live fully, to experience pleasure, and to express themselves authentically. The concept of ‘rest as resistance,’ championed by Tricia Hersey of The Nap Ministry highlights a way for Black women to reclaim their bodies and time from exploitative capitalist systems. Rest, like joy, is a refusal to cooperate with systems that demand Black women’s labour while denying them dignity and care. They can begin to dismantle these systems. Their refusal to participate in their own marginalization becomes a form of self-liberation.

Black women’s joy calls for a deliberate rejection of the roles, limitations, and expectations imposed on them. This paradigm shift reflects a growing awareness among Black women of their worth and their need for healing, self-actualization, and communal joy. The work of recovery is ongoing and is a ‘rigorous loving,’ a deep, intentional engagement with the self and the community that facilitates healing and transformation.

The Politics and Promise of Joy

Poetic inquiry is where one’s own traditional academic writings from research findings have been transformed into poetry. Ann-Charlotte Palmgren, scholar and associate professor in gender and cultural studies, writes of how poetic inquiry endeavours to capture in poetry complex and nuanced ideas. The poems themselves include analyses of the material. Quite often, poetry provides an opportunity to express what can be difficult to write in traditional academic text form. Research findings in the forms of poetry, which includes analysis, and traditional academic writings can be insightful and appealing for an audience to engage with the research presented.

A poetic inquiry into the transformative power of joy includes drawing on Sara Ahmed’s The Promise of Happiness, illustrating that joy is not just a personal goal but a political force. Joy provides direction, affirms desires, and fosters flourishing. It interrupts oppressive narratives and offers a vision of a life worth living. Affirmations of joy inspire further joy, making it a self-sustaining and expansive practice. Black women, shaped by pain but not defined by it, can share in the work of transforming the world by diminishing sexism, racism, and diverse forms of oppression through their intentional embrace of joy. Their joy is not a luxury, but a necessity—a potent, revolutionary act rooted in love, resistance, and imagination. Black women’s joy emerges as an act of self-definition, community-building, and cultural reimagination. It is, ultimately, a politics of feeling good that affirms Black women’s right to thrive.

Black Women’s Joy as Resistance: A Poetic Inquiry

Heavenly Creatures and the Politics of Feeling Good

Tinka Harvard

passionate about reclaiming themselves

bit by bit and piece by piece,

black women desire joy

and all the emotions

that gather under its name:

happiness, gratitude, delight, pleasure,

bliss.

black women now

are agents of transformation.

difficult and painful experiences

are an invitation

to joy,

and that joy

is inviolable, intentional.

in Promise of Happiness,

Ahmed asks, who better to lead the process

of such a transformation

than she who has already been

‘cracked up a bit’?

black women are on the mend,

healing brokenness, making space

for joy.

very much like the Japanese art of kintsugi,

in which broken ceramics are mended

with gold dust infused lacquer,

thus beautifully highlighting and accentuating

the cracks,

not trying to hide them.

when affecting joy is the focus

the process is like opening a window,

letting in fresh air

and creating more space

to breathe.

joy shows what is desirable,

where contentment can be found,

and where there is freedom and space to flourish.

immense joy and pleasure have their own momentum

for both the personal and political.

movement from oppression to joy

is powered by the energy

brought by joy.

weaving a tapestry of joy

reduces the space available

for suffering and self-negation.

joy begets pleasure,

signalling that black women

are on the right path

and in the right place.

joy is not a white luxury.

it can feel at home

in a black woman’s body!

and it does because

‘sometimes the night wakes in the

middle of her,

and she can do nothing

but

become the moon.’

Research from this blog originally appeared in Lilith: A Feminist History Journal which can be viewed here.

Tinka Harvard is a PhD student, a Doctoral Researcher in the Doctoral Programme in Theology at the Faculty of Arts, Psychology, and Theology at Åbo Akademi University in Finland. Her research project of centring the silenced and unseen voices of the women in the medieval travel accounts is a part of the larger research project, Praxis of Social Imaginaries – a Theo-artistic Intervention for Transdisciplinary Knowledge. The research is transdisciplinary, welcoming dialogue and encounters between different epistemological practices and cosmologies.She is from Brooklyn, New York and has earned a BA from Wagner College, a Master of Divinity degree from Union Theological Seminary at Columbia University, and a Master of Arts from Åbo Akademi University in Finland.

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