Leigh: You are listening to Hotel Bar Sessions, the podcast where three philosophers sit down at the end of a long conference day to chop it up at the hotel bar—which, as we all know, is where the real philosophy happens.

Rick: Welcome to another episode of Hotel Bar Sessions. I'm Rick Lee, and today I am joined by only one of my co-hosts, Leigh Johnson. We have a special guest, and we'll find out more about that. Today, we are talking about refusal, but as usual, we need some drinks, and I want to know whether you all are ranting or raving. So, Leigh, let me start with you.

Leigh: Well, I'm going to have an amaretto sour today, and I am raving about Steven Spielberg. Now, I know this is an unpopular rave among highbrow aesthetic folks. Most people think that Steven Spielberg is overly sentimental and popular in the wrong kind of way, but I can't quit him. He gets me in the feels every time. I recently rewatched the 1977 film Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and that is such a brilliant film. I really think it's a film that could be remade today, maybe with artificial intelligence instead of aliens. You know, it's got all of the “what's really going on out there” conspiracy theory stuff, and it's just a great film. So, thanks, Steven Spielberg. You hit me in the feels again.

So, I'm really happy to announce our guest today, Devonya Havis. Devonya is an associate professor in the Department of Comparative Literature and the Global Gender and Sexuality Studies Department at the University of Buffalo. Her research and teaching areas cover critical philosophy of race, contemporary continental philosophy, predictive technologies, and critical disability studies. She also describes herself as a Southerner with Northern tendencies, but we'll shake that hornet's nest later.

Havis's groundbreaking work, Creating a Black Vernacular Philosophy, published by Rowman and Littlefield in 2022, explores how everyday Black vernacular practices, invoked to negotiate survival and joy, can be understood as philosophy in their own right. Focusing on creative formations that take place within Black American diasporic cultures via narratives, the blues, jazz, work songs, and other expressive productions, Havis’s book articulates a form of Black vernacular philosophy that is both centered within and emerges from meaning structures cultivated by Black communities.

Her pedagogy actively promotes social justice, perhaps most strikingly evident in the Immersion Eastside Program that she co-designed and has directed for over a decade. This program engages students in the unique rights, rituals, cultural practices, and refusals of Buffalo's largely Black Eastside residents, who operate in a context of numerous structural, social, and political impediments. The Immersion Eastside Program not only confronts and critically examines these realities, but also celebrates the historical capacity of Buffalo's Black community to create possibility from impossibility.

Now, the last time I saw Devonya was at an actual hotel bar only about a month ago. So, Devonya, welcome to our familiar haunt, and what are you drinking and ranting or raving about this week?

Devonya: Well, thank you for the invite. It is great to hang out with you in this hotel bar, as it was a month ago in that other hotel bar, which will go unnamed. I am having a non-alcoholic drink, which is my usual, and this was the joke in grad school—that I was the cheap date because I didn't consume alcohol. I would always have a seltzer with a healthy dose of Rosie's lime juice. So, that is my drink. And I couldn't decide if I had a rant or a rave.

This morning I woke up and started listening to Miles Davis's Sketches of Spain, and I just love the way Davis blends these classical Spanish sounds with a jazz vibe. So, I will rave about that... and rant about being on social media this morning and reading the comments. I don't know why I doom-scroll in those ways. So, doom scrolling is my rant, and Miles Davis is my rave.

Leigh: That's a good one. Both of those are good ones. So, what about you, Rick?

Rick: I'm going to have a bee's knees, and today I am raving about a former guest of the podcast and my nephew, Blake Zolfo. Early in October, Blake ran the Chicago marathon for the second time. He set a goal for himself to finish in four and a half hours, and he finished in four hours and fifteen minutes—and for a non-regular marathon runner, that's a pretty impressive time. I'm so proud of him, and he raised tons of money for charity. So, I'm raving about Blake.

Leigh: Way to go, Blake.

Rick: Yes. So, Leigh, I know we're talking about refusal, but what exactly does that mean?

Leigh: Well, refusing can be a powerful act, whether it's standing up to authority, rejecting harmful norms, or pushing back against injustice. But when is saying no the right thing to do? And what are the stakes when we decide to refuse?

Often, our refusals are quotidian and inconsequential, but sometimes—and sometimes even without our knowledge—they're huge. I think we underestimate how often we issue refusals, both large and small, and we don't consider carefully enough the moral and political dimensions of those acts. It's not always easy to decide when it is appropriate to refuse, and even when we know it's necessary, it's not always easy to do.

So, our guest today, Devonya Havis, has been thinking about the ethics and politics of refusal for some time, and we're very glad to have her with us today to chat about how refusing can be an act of courage, rebellion, or sometimes survival. We're going to ask what happens when, and I never thought I'd appeal to this person on this podcast, but in the immortal words of Nancy Reagan, you "just say no."

Rick: I refuse.

[Musical Interlude]

Leigh: As Rick and listeners of this podcast know, I often start with the exact same question—the “what is it?” question, the definitional question. So, before we jump into some of the stickier points, I wanted to ask you, Devonya, what is refusal?

Devonya: Well, I've been thinking a lot about this, because when I started this work, I was gung-ho about the idea of resistance. I had some suspicions about our ability to absolutely overthrow—I'll call it—“the man.” And exactly what it would mean if we overthrew the man. Like, how could we prevent yet another “man” from taking power? And even worse, what if we ourselves are actually the man?

The question of revolution was a little more difficult, so I thought maybe resistance. But then I kept encountering ways that resistance demanded a kind of complicity with structures that I thought were deeply problematic or that required navigating structures in ways that exacted a hard price. I was directed toward Indigenous scholars who have been working specifically with the concept of refusal as a way to approach things, but also beginning to explore places in literature and music where people are actually refusing structures as they are given or assumed to be.

So, in terms of refusal, first, it's not a call for reform. It can be a refusal of the governing terms or conditions or frameworks that we’re given. It can be a method, an ethical practice, a refusal of recognition. And I like to lean into the idea that refusal is generative. It often happens, as Simpson notes, when discourse breaks down, where you really don't have any other place to go, which makes it potentially generative. So, I want to think of refusal as generative and as an ethical call. And when we encounter it in these everyday ways, how do we invoke refusal as a particular kind of practice?

Rick: I want to pull on one of the things you said, because it's something I've been thinking about a lot—that was your suspicion about resistance. Resistance always has to play the game of that which it resists. There’s a strange kind of affirmation in resistance, so I’m wondering, could you say a little bit about how refusal either stops the game or doesn’t play the game, or how it gets out of this logic of force and counterforce on the same terrain?

Devonya: That’s a great question. I was thinking about Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man. There's a point where the protagonist, who is Black and never actually gets a name—which I find really interesting—says, "I'm invisible because people refuse to see me." And throughout the novel, he's trying to generate ways of being seen. But by the end of the novel, he’s like, “I no longer want recognition,” because recognition is an assent. It’s a way of assenting to a structure that has framed him outside of it, or that has framed him in a way where he is always problematic within it. So, he says, “I'm going to refuse recognition because that means I've got to assent.”

Also, I think to your point, if we’re in an oppositional position, we’re always already bound up with the thing we’re in competition with. For me, refusal leans into the ways that perhaps we need to pivot to something else. And they’re often oblique pivots. I think the idea of directly and bald-facedly refusing is often challenging, and sometimes the refusals are in simply not being complicit, in those small acts we invoke in the everyday.

Leigh: I like that example from Invisible Man because, on the one hand, we could easily see the refusal of recognition by the protagonist as morally culpable, and his refusal of that refusal as morally laudable. One of the things I want to try to get to is whether or not there’s a form or structure to when a refusal is morally appropriate and when it’s not.

So, I think we often consider famous historical refusals like Socrates in the Apology or Martin Luther King Jr. in Letter from a Birmingham Jail. Even the very, very few people in the Milgram experiment who refused to turn the dial, and we think, “Ah, here is where refusal really stands as a kind of moral exemplar.” It’s heroic, right? And I wonder if, placed in different contexts, all of those same refusals could have the exact opposite moral valence. So, does the moral valence of refusal come down to particular contextual circumstances? Or is there a kind of refusal that is morally exemplary?

Devonya: Can I give the classic philosopher’s answer? Both yes and no.

Leigh: Well, I mean, I’m a Derridean, so I’ve just assumed that’s the case.

Devonya: Oh, good! I'm in good company, then. But I would like to talk about the idea of context. For me, the idea of indexing rather than setting a normative standard for what is heroic and what is morally praiseworthy becomes useful because what is complicity in one setting might be radical in another. And we get there through a kind of relationality. Often as philosophers, we go to the abstract to talk about things in general, but we live in a world where we’re embodied in relationships—not only to other people but also to institutions.

Leigh: I do want to push on this a little bit, though, because one person’s terrorist is another person’s freedom fighter. That’s of course the case, but I still want to believe there might be some models of refusal that aren’t so easily reversible in that same way.

Devonya: I agree. And I like to think about refusals—I'll lean into Foucault on this—that emerge from a critical attitude.

Leigh: Right, yeah.

Devonya: That emerge from a desire to make the world a livable place for a broad array of people, not just your own in-group. That, to me, seems to align with the historic refusals we see with King, who is aligned with the 1960s Black Freedom Movement. It would also align with other movements of that sort. So, I want to say that “just saying no” is not the same as refusing, and I think there’s got to be a critical aspect at work when we’re thinking about what it means to move beyond resistance to refusal.

Rick: Just for context, Michel Foucault is a 20th-century French philosopher, and that’s who Devonya was referring to there. You pointed out refusals that are complicit and refusals that are not complicit. I’m wondering if that helps us a little bit to figure out... Okay, it’s not a universal norm, but there are refusals that open possibilities and refusals that foreclose possibilities—and the refusals that foreclose possibilities are not morally exemplary, and they’re also not heroic.

Devonya: So, we can think about this idea of refusals that limit the possibility for others to exercise certain kinds of freedoms.

Rick: Yeah...

Devonya: Yeah, exactly. Like the freedom to survive or the freedom to live a meaningful life or to cultivate oneself.

Rick: Right.

Leigh: I want to go back to something you said a minute ago. You said that “just saying no” is not the same as refusal. I’m trying to wrap my head around that because, you know, even in everyday, quotidian “no’s” in my life—if I don’t let someone merge into traffic, or if I say, “No, you can’t cut in here,” or if a waiter asks me if I want a refill on my Diet Coke and I say no—those are refusals, are they not? I suppose I wonder if you could draw out the difference between just saying no and a refusal.

Devonya: Well, is saying no a refusal, or is it a response? Maybe I won’t be as quick on my feet in drawing out this distinction, but I also want to put it in the context of power dynamics, right? I am in a particular relationship with a server who invites me to consent or to refuse. If refusal is not a possibility, then consent isn’t either. So, I want to think about the power dynamics at play when we talk about heroic or ethically meaningful forms of refusal, and in that way, distinguish them from just saying no or just taking a conservative position toward something. And I don’t mean “conservative” in the left or right sense, but am I trying to conserve the status quo? Am I trying to unsettle the established order in some way—not by providing an answer but by raising critical questions about whether it operates in ways that are just?

And for me, that’s at the heart of the question. Am I engaged in power relations that inhibit my ability to pursue what we might call abstract forms of justice and freedom? But I also think about it personally—can I move through the world in ways where I don’t feel myself always at risk?

Rick: Right.

Leigh: That’s really helpful. It’s almost as if there’s a little “r” refusal and a big capital “R” refusal.

Devonya: Exactly. Which is why, if you’re living in a community that has no opportunities for economic growth, and you say to that person, “Just say no to drugs,” they don’t have the possibility to refuse or to consent. The material conditions are such that what you’re defining as heroic—and “just say no” is already a structural impossibility.

Some people move through the world with greater ease because structures support their movement, while others experience a lot of friction and still have to find ways to act that I’d mark as heroic.

Rick: I wonder if one of the complexities in giving a set of norms around refusal isn’t pointing to a deeper complexity. The way I’m thinking about it, we might distinguish between what we’d call strategy on one hand and theory on the other. For example, I could be a fantastic Marxist theorist of the revolution, but understanding where to bring, say, an armed group in a specific context isn’t coextensive with theoretical ability. I wonder if part of the issue of refusal isn’t saying that strategy needs to inform theory a whole lot more, that we need to “depurify” theory in a way. And yes, that makes theory messy, but it’s a necessary and unavoidable mess—one we, in philosophy, have been avoiding for too long.

Devonya: Yeah. This is where Charles Mills would call it the problem of ideal theory as ideology.

Rick: Right, exactly.

Devonya: And I think, in certain ways, as philosophers, we limit ourselves by trying to come up with these nice, pristine theories without acknowledging how messy they are in the real world. That’s a bit of why I lean into Foucault and social movements—into what people engaged in those movements are saying about the messiness of trying to build and organize coalitions. I do this from the standpoint of being someone who theorizes for my day job, but also as someone who wants to take seriously what folks are doing in the world to make sense of things.

And it’s super important to have some theorizations that guide our strategy. Tactics are also part of strategy, right? Refusal can be a tactic. But sometimes, as my dad would say, I have to “render unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s,” right? I can’t always refuse. Even if in some moments my ethical imperatives encourage me to refuse, sometimes I might have to retreat as a kind of refusal. And here I’m thinking of the I Ching, the Book of Changes, with this hexagram called “retreat.” I was reading it, kind of working out some things, and I’m like, “What do you mean retreat? This is a battle. This is about social justice. How can you retreat?” But the oracle is like, “Retreat is not just running away and abandoning it. It’s understanding that sometimes, if things are stacked against you, simply facing it head-on is going to exhaust your energy.”

Rick: Yeah.

Devonya: Instead, you retreat, and what I really liked about the way it talked about this is that retreat is not abandoning the field to your opponent. It’s a strategic withdrawal where you engage in acts of resistance to prepare the field for your eventual return. It’s retreat as repositioning.

Rick: Yes, yes.

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Rick: Devonya, earlier in the conversation, we mentioned a few critical examples but didn’t dive into them much. One was Socrates, and I could point to two refusals he engages in—one in the Apology and the other in the Crito. Then there was Martin Luther King Jr., in his situation in a Birmingham jail. I’m wondering if you could talk about the ways in which these are examples of what interests you about refusal and what is exemplary about them?

Devonya: Oh, thank you for that. Since being a professor is my day job that involves teaching, I often wonder: how might one go about training someone to attune themselves to those moments where we want to encourage refusal? How do you practice the habit of being able to refuse? For me, Socrates in the Apology and the Crito offers a way to think about productive forms of refusal. The idea that one is not simply providing answers but is engaged in a communal process of interrogating how one lives or the values that society has laid out for them—seems like a good guideline.

Rick: Right.

Devonya: So, one can begin to think in critical ways about where those opportunities to refuse might be. Socrates says, "Look, I have been attached to Athens much like a gadfly to a sluggish horse. I’m here to sting you out of your slumber." As I say to my students, “Well, what is the slumber?” The slumber is that we’re all hustling—trying to make sure we get paid, can buy grits and groceries, trying to be popular, trying to live a life we believe will make us happy. And maybe we’re making compromises in pursuing those things, compromises that have become a slippery slope.

For me, that’s the role of being stung out of your slumber. You’re being asked those critical questions. And I like to lean into how Socrates says, “Look, this is going to cost me my life. There is some sacrifice here, but the greater good is that I am getting society to begin to ask questions about what it values. I’m not telling them what they should value; I’m merely saying we need to do some contemplation and establish commitments around what we’re going to value.” I think King, especially in Letter from Birmingham Jail, aligns himself with that way of thinking. I also want to throw in, as a tennis fan, Naomi Osaka’s refusal to continue to play. I think we can see that as a courageous refusal where she raises questions about being competitive under certain conditions, saying, “These are dismembering conditions.”

Leigh: So do you think there are any refusals that don’t have punitive consequences? Or would you say that if a refusal doesn’t have punitive consequences, then it’s a little “r” refusal and not a capital “R” refusal?

Devonya: I think I’m more interested in effects, so I think we can have little “r” refusals that don’t have punitive consequences. They are still refusals, or maybe they’re refusals—as Saidiya Hartman would say—under cover of complicity. I don’t want to discount those just because people don’t suffer consequences for them. They’re also primers for how we might engage in larger refusals that ultimately may have—and often do have—consequences. Maybe if we think about consequences, we can think of little “c” consequences, which are the sheer discomfort of galvanizing oneself to refuse, even in small ways. One must marshal oneself to engage in the conflict that ensues.

Rick: What I find interesting about the Apology example is that when I teach it, I often talk about the two parts as the trial phase and the penalty phase. What is most striking to readers, and certainly to students, is that in the penalty phase, Socrates says, “You’ve convicted me. The only possible punishment you could give is that you need to kill me.” That’s a moment of incredible refusal.

Devonya: Yes.

Rick: He refuses to be complicit in an ethical and political structure that he’s spent the whole first part of the dialogue—and his life in general—trying to show he’s committed to. I mean, I’m not saying that every refusal has to lead to death, but there’s a refusal to play the game that could have gotten him out of this. Right. His first offer is that they should support him for the rest of his life and keep him fed and housed, and so on.

Devonya: As I tell my students, “Free lunch at City Hall is the appropriate penalty for this activity he’s engaged in.”

Leigh: He’s such an asshole.

Devonya: And I love to ask, why do you think more people sentenced him to death than convicted him? That’s a really notable moment, right? Whatever he’s stirring up becomes even more potent when he refuses to back down and beg for his life.

Leigh: And still he goes home and pays all his debts first.

Devonya: Yeah.

Leigh: What’s up with this guy?

Rick: It’s true. He refuses to not be an asshole.

Leigh: Yes, right.

Devonya: Maybe we can think of the irony of what he’s up to.

Leigh: Yeah, a “take this job and shove it” kind of thing.

Devonya: And yet he does the job that gets him no pay and causes his death. He’s doubling down on that job.

Rick: Yeah.

Devonya: And to your point, in What is Critique? Foucault talks about how thinking critically about the values of one’s governing modes and structures is also about critique. He has these lines I love. It’s about not wanting to be governed like that, or by those means, or according to those principles. It’s also about maybe not accepting as true—and these are slightly modified quotes from Foucault. He’s saying, “Maybe I’m not accepting as true what an authority tells me is true, but wondering about the reasons why an authority is acting the way it is. And maybe I’m saying, I don’t want to accept these laws because maybe they’re unjust.” For me, that’s what begins to distinguish a Socrates from a King, because Socrates presumes that the laws of the nation-state are just in ways King cannot accept as just.

So for Socrates to accept death as the progression of a system of laws he believes to be at core just—but inappropriately applied—is very different than King, who accepts imprisonment as a reasonable cost for engaging in civil disobedience.

Rick: Do you think that King’s refusal there recognizes that behaving in a way to avoid jail would essentially leave in place the very thing he’s trying to tear down? So only by, in a sense, obeying the law, does he bring forth the full measure of its oppressive power?

Devonya: Yeah, and I think that’s a tactic.

Rick: Yeah.

Devonya: And I really think what we now call the Civil Rights Movement, which at the time was often called the Black Freedom Movement—and I have a few things to say about that, but I’ll hold off. Much of the tactic was to demonstrate the slippage between ideals of systems, structures, and laws as objective and universal, versus the practical experience of those laws as anything but universal and equally applied. And it strikes me that these are some of the challenges in different clothing that we are confronting in the present. They have different costumes on, but they’re very similar challenges.

Leigh: You know, it’s occurring to me now that the sense of refusal you’re drawing out is closely aligned with disobedience in civil disobedience. One powerful thing about civil disobedience, or even the concept of disobedience, is that it posits obedience as something not virtuous. If you’re just obeying, then you’re not acting autonomously, right? You should be giving the law to yourself. If you’re just obeying, then that’s not morally or politically valuable. So drawing together what you’ve been saying about refusal, it seems to me that at the heart of it has to be some kind of disobedience inasmuch as it’s always situated within a power dynamic. It has to be, in part, a refusal to obey.

Devonya: Yes, as an unsettling of these conditions of normalized and normative behavior, conditions that have become problematic in and of themselves.

Leigh: Right. And because it’s often the case that in any power dynamic, the one being told to obey is always in the less powerful, more precarious position, I wonder if you’d take the next step to say that refusals by those in the disadvantaged or oppressed position are the ones that have the most effect.

Devonya: Yeah, I often think those are the refusals that draw attention to the power dynamics. Because if one accepts them as given or natural, then conditions of oppression or disadvantage will continue. So if I have any bias, I’m much more interested in those points of refusal than other kinds, because I’m really curious about how people we describe as politically powerless, oppressed, without authority or with diminished agency, actually exercise forms of agency. I’m looking at people that society wants to manage and sees as unruly populations needing to be obedient and productive for society, according to our definitions of productivity.

This idea of unruliness—that Falguni Sheth leans into, this idea of dissidence or insurrection in terms of nonconformity—are the places that interest me most when we’re thinking about refusal. Because invitations from authority are often an invitation to gain rewards by being obedient. It also means we have to consider how power normalizes us to accept these things, even in disobedience. Sometimes incivility may be warranted, and I think that’s something we see more now, as contrasted with someone like Martin Luther King. There was a respectability in King’s presentation that I think is less relevant in more contemporary movements, and there are reasonable questions to ask about leaning into that respectability.

Rick: It strikes me that one reason to view this from the perspective of those dominated or oppressed is that the structures of power often operate invisibly—as if they’re not an exercise of power or authority. Refusals from other perspectives, outside communities under the boot of oppression, don’t bring the visibility of power’s operations as clearly.

Devonya: Right. And it also doesn’t indicate that people, despite these conditions, manage to live lives of meaning. Those lives of meaning can’t come into existence through strict adherence to structures that have created greater vulnerability and precarity for those folks. That’s important to me—how to think about something like the blues, not as about being sad, but about reconfiguring ways of being and embracing the wonder and beauty of lives that are often quite difficult, not because of choices they’ve made, but because of the conditions under which they live.

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 I’d like to bring this down to a more micro level right now and talk a little bit about the very personal refusals we make. You know, there was this article in The Atlantic recently noting what seems to be an epidemic of people instituting basically no-contact rules with their immediate families. And that’s also a kind of refusal. I think it might be a bit of a stretch to say that’s a refusal aimed at correcting injustice, but it’s certainly a refusal many people find necessary because of a different sort of precarity they find themselves in, in their personal lives and emotional relationships.

And then there are all kinds of everyday workplace refusals. You know, “No, I’m not going to be on another committee.” “No, I’m not going to put this stupid clause in my syllabus,” which, by the way, can I just say, as an aside, if something has to go on every syllabus, then why does it have to go on any syllabus? But anyway, you see what I’m saying: there are these personal refusals that, again, don’t have world-historical importance, may not even have robust ethical or political importance, but are hugely important to us as people who operate in a world with others.

Rick: I’m wondering if some of these—what you’re calling personal refusals, Leigh—don’t bring down the injustice, but aren’t they speaking, in fact, to a larger injustice? When you talked about workplace refusals, I was thinking, “No, I’m not going to sit quietly here and be the woman you think I should be. I’m not going to pretend that this curricular change isn’t going to destroy the very nature of our enterprise.” All of those kinds of things actually do open onto, I think, a larger issue. The family one may be slightly different, but I think some of the examples you used are working toward exposing and fighting a kind of larger injustice.

Devonya: I would agree. I started thinking a lot about this while teaching in a philosophy department at a Jesuit school that had a justice requirement. And I intentionally didn’t put theories of justice on my syllabus; instead, I taught theories of injustice. My reasoning was, “How do we get to justice if we don’t understand the nature of injustice?”

So I got a memo from the dean saying, “This is required to be on your syllabus.” And I thought, “How well is it serving people to present the ideal when understanding what rigidifies injustice is, in my view, a very important skill for young people in the world?” How are you going to mitigate conditions of injustice if you don’t understand them, if you don’t understand how they come into existence or are perpetuated? For me, I think it’s often in our everyday experiences where we encounter something we have to negotiate that really resonates. Can I refuse? And if so, what is the cost?

Leigh: I completely agree, Devonya, and it occurs to me that our “refusal muscle” is something that has to be exercised, right? These little refusals are like reps we’re doing every day so we can make the bigger refusals. And now I’m wondering whether it’s the case—and I’m a little worried this is going to sound libertarian, so try to bracket that part of it—but I’m wondering if, even at our most intimate, familial, or friend level, when we refuse, what we’re trying to do is maintain myself as a person capable of refusing. The larger significance of the refusal may not be there, but it’s important for me to still be the kind of agent or subject who can say “no.”

So, as we amp up the significance of my “no’s,” my refusals, ultimately, what I’m trying to do is to refuse only those things that don’t create a world where others can’t refuse. That’s where I think it sounds a little libertarian, like, “my freedom stops where yours begins” or something like that. But I don’t think that’s a terrible ideal—not the libertarian ideal; that’s a terrible idea—but that I should refuse in a way that allows for others’ refusals to exist, too.

Devonya: Oh, I see the Kant and the Sartre seeping in.

Leigh: I don’t even try to hide them anymore, you know.

Devonya: But I also think this speaks to the idea that we aren’t fully autonomous beings, that our existence is in relationship and interdependence.

Leigh: Yeah.

Devonya: If you’re in interdependent conditions, the capacity of those around you to say “no,” or to consent, also shapes the overall conditions of living in a collective. I would lean into the less libertarian side and say we are both individual and collective beings, and often our collectivity determines the possibilities for our individuality. To operate in that dynamic highlights the need for this habit of refusal, and it’s also why I think about the Milgram experiments as instructive.

Leigh: But wouldn’t you grant that some intimate interpersonal conditions are so toxic that they, in fact, make it impossible for me to refuse? I mean, think of an abusive relationship. For the record, listeners, I’m leaning against the libertarian position here. I’m just saying that the formulation I’m trying to put forward—that I ought to refuse in a way that doesn’t impede others’ capacity to refuse—seems to me something that may be close to what I was looking for at the start of this episode, like a form of refusal that is ethically acceptable or laudable.

Devonya: I think Rick was gesturing toward that when he said refusals that limit, that aren’t generative, probably aren’t heroic kinds of refusals, so I think all of that tracks.

Rick: But interestingly, you just gave the “categorical imperative of refusal,” right? “Always refuse in such a way that your refusal could make possible the refusal of all.”

Leigh: I think we’ve all accepted now that my inner Kantian is an outer Kantian. Can we just move on? Hi, my name is Leigh. I’m a Kantian. “Hi, Leigh.”

Devonya: See, these are the parts of Kant that I’m just like… but wait a minute. What if my mere existence is cast as a refusal itself? As Sara Ahmed says, sometimes the mere presence of a brown body in the room is shifting things, even if nothing is said.

Leigh: But on my formulation, wouldn’t that simply mean the refusal to recognize the brown body in the room is immoral? It’s not the same as the brown body in the room’s refusal of that misrecognition.

Devonya: I agree. It’s the influence of Foucault, I guess, that gets me to wonder, “Are you trying to normalize me? Can we have normative standards that aren’t also normalizing?” That don’t simultaneously encourage complicity that we then begin to perpetuate? I think I’m always concerned about settling into points where we no longer see what’s immoral, because we’ve been habituated or desensitized to it.

Rick: Yeah, and what you’re referring to as normalization could also be seen as a kind of naturalization, right? So that it’s not just that this is the norm, but now it appears as if, “Well, this is just the way things are. What are you talking about?” I think that’s one of the dangers, and it goes back to my point about the invisibility of the modes of operation. I remember having an argument with a former colleague who believed that capitalist leaders in the U.S.—and maybe worldwide—actually get together in meetings to make decisions about various things. I said, “That’s really inefficient. Capitalism already operates in their interest; there’s no need for meetings.” That’s how this normalization and naturalization work: no one has to talk about whiteness, because it’s just “the way it is.”

Leigh: One thing I really like about the concept of “queer,” not just as an identity but also as a verb, is that it enacts a refusal that can’t be recognized by the system that is refusing it.

Devonya: Mmm-hmm.

Rick: It’s easy to say, “We’re not going to recognize the queer person in the room,” but it’s harder because you can’t simply say, “I’m not going to recognize that woman or that man or that straight person or that gay person.” One thing queering does is say, “I’m going to take away the categories you have for denying my ‘yes.’”

Devonya: Yeah. I’ve been on a tirade against recognition—not saying, don’t recognize people, but that seeking recognition ultimately reiterates certain kinds of misrecognition. If we think we can use moral suasion to turn people’s bad behavior around, we’re often just going to get a caricature of what they think someone wants or a domesticated version of something illegible to them. I like the idea that some things are just not legible. Some things are just queer and don’t fit. That’s an important part of power dynamics.

I’m also thinking about what begins to happen in certain structures—like for us as professors, the idea of tenure becomes important. What do you mean, no one’s guaranteed a job for life? And I’m like, yeah, but think about it. Professors get two promotions in their entire career.

Rick: Right?

Devonya: How many other people are limited to two promotions in their whole career? You know, when you calculate the hours spent, many of us don’t even make minimum wage. To think of that as the bastion of elitism and privilege misses the current condition of professors in higher ed, who are more like factory workers or piecemeal workers. There need to be alliances that aren’t obscured by what’s been naturalized or assumed. That’s where refusal begins, because when discourse reaches an impasse, there’s an opportunity to see something different and engage in something productive.

Rick: Yeah, and now we’re back to the generative capacity of refusal that you began with, which I think is a powerful insight. In these moments of refusal, I’d been focused on seeing the structures of power and domination, but you’ve just pointed to the capacity to see a new reality, new possibilities… like seeing the world differently than it is.

Devonya: That’s what I thought about a lot in 2020, when life stopped as we knew it. I wouldn’t call it a refusal because it was a forced stoppage, but it meant people began to think differently about how we navigate the world. I thought, “There’s an opportunity to understand how dismembering and unlivable many of our lives have been for a long time, and are increasingly becoming.” But the impetus was always, “Let’s get back to the way things were.”

Rick: Right?

Devonya: And I think there’s a tension there. How do we collectively refuse things as they were when they were only held together with gum and spit?

Leigh: During the pandemic, I think everyone got a tiny taste of precarity. There are people who, of course, live in precarious conditions every day and understand it deeply and existentially, but there’s a whole swath of people who never feel precarious, and suddenly, everyone had to take a breath. Well, not take a breath—that was the thing—don’t take a breath. But everyone had to think about their own precarity.

Devonya: Right. And does that acknowledgment of vulnerability—economic, social, or even from violence because of one’s social group—form a bridge to possible coalition? To me, that’s a big question because, as James Baldwin said, we have to start counting the dead bodies to truly reckon with the ways our participation in certain structures matters. If it’s not killing us, it’s at least building our kingdoms on many corpses. That’s where refusal becomes important.

Leigh: Just a few weeks ago, we had Zahi Zaloua on the podcast to talk about the Palestinian question and the situation in Gaza, and he used the phrase “the gazification of the world.” I think what you’re describing is exactly what he meant by that: this move to make people more and more precarious. Not precarious in the usual sense of being disempowered or suffering, but precarious in the way we’ve been discussing here—unable even to refuse the conditions of their own precarity.

Devonya: Yeah. I think about that slippage in terms of surveillance, our digital presences, and in the U.S., our inability to engage with the right to be forgotten, as they do in the European Union.

Leigh: Yeah.

Devonya: We’re digital commodities in a way that makes refusal difficult. Can I not be forced into arbitration on my credit card and still have a credit card? Probably not.

Rick: Right.

Leigh: Can you not accept the terms and conditions?

Devonya: Exactly. And still use the product? No. It becomes important because if I’m not exercising my muscle to refuse, then I’m exercising my muscle to obey—or to pass off discomfort with ambiguity rather than admit it’s complicity with something immoral.

Leigh: Or worse… necessity.

Rick: Yeah.

Devonya: Yes.

[Musical interlude]

Leigh: So, Devonya, I want to thank you again for joining us on the podcast today. This has been an absolutely fascinating and really generative conversation. It’s given me a lot to think about moving forward, but our bartender is giving us last call—she’s refusing, literally refusing, to serve us anymore. So, we’re going to have to wrap it up and get out of here. Before we do, I want to give both of you a chance for final thoughts. So, let me go to you first, Devonya.

Devonya: Well, thanks. It’s been a great conversation, and I think my closing thought is around the generative nature of refusal as sometimes world-building. Often, in the refusal to accept the terms we’re given, it gives us the opportunity to create worlds and imagine the worlds we want to live in. For me, I think of those worlds as places where not only can my kids live, but it’s a place where they can flourish as who they are.

Rick: Yeah, I want to join Leigh, Devonya, in thanking you. This has been a really great conversation and opened up a lot of insights for me, especially around what you were just talking about—the generative nature of refusal. It’s not just negation; it’s an opening and productive. In the back of my mind, I’ve been thinking during this conversation about bell hooks’ Homeplace essay, where the subtitle is “a place of resistance,” but I wonder if it’s not also a place of refusal. Some of the same structures that bell hooks brings forth in that essay have been resonating with me. So I really just want to thank you. It’s been, for me, a very exciting conversation.

Leigh: I think one of the things this conversation has motivated me to think more about is the situations in which my “yeses” are also refusals. Sometimes refusals are not just “saying no,” but also the way that some “yeses” are complicit in other people’s generative refusals. The world that emerges from those refusals is a world that I shouldn’t be saying “yes” to, even though I might be saying “yes” to this one particular thing. I think that falls into Devonya’s larger point about thinking more carefully and critically about our complicity, both in our “yeses” and in our “noes.”

So, this has really given me a lot to think about. But again, our bartender’s here, she’s refused us… we’ve got to get out of here. She’s actually performed the act of refusal, turning off the lights and stacking the chairs on the bar. Devonya, thanks so much.

Devonya: Well, thank you for the invite.

Leigh: We’d love to have you back again, and I’ll catch you guys next time.

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