FEATURE
The Resistance Cycle: On Joy as Fuel
Visitors listen to musician Claire Pendreigh during the Indiana University Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology's Love at the Museum event. Photo by Shelbie Porteroff.
It wasn’t raining the night Trump was elected a second time. I watched Kamala Harris fall further behind for a few hours in key battleground states before I shut the TV off. I woke up around 3:00 am and knew what the results were before my partner even told me.
In 2016, I was twenty-one years old, working towards a degree in Outdoor Recreation, Parks, and Human Ecology. On Inauguration Day of Trump’s first term in 2017, I was in my mentor and friend Dr. Brian Forist’s class at Indiana University. I remember how so many of us students cried as terms like “LGBTQ” and “climate change” were removed from the White House’s website. It felt like the world was ending, and Brian stood before us as the only beacon of hope. “What do we do?”, we asked. “How do we stop this?”
Looking back on that moment from November 2016, and waking up eight years later in November 2024 to the barrage of panicked, devastated messages from my friends in their early twenties, all I could find myself thinking was, “Damn, poor Brian. He was so brave then, even though this pressure is suffocating. How do I now tell the truth to everyone asking? I don’t know if we’ll be okay.” The world still felt like it was ending on Trump’s second Inauguration Day, even more so than the first.
In the purest case of life’s paradoxes, I started my dream job two months later, at the beginning of January 2025, working as the education coordinator for a museum heavily invested in Indigenizing and Decolonizing their collections, programs, and exhibitions. I had been watching the Indiana University Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology’s work for several years while I did my graduate studies at the same university, and the timing for my graduation and this job offer all came together like it was fated.
Back at the end of 2020, my partner and I bought our first house in Bloomington, Indiana, and, having lived in the area for seven years already, I knew I wanted to call it home permanently. Because Bloomington is a university town, I didn’t expect to get a job in my career field that was full-time, had benefits, and was an environment that made me feel safe and appreciated, but knowing I wanted to plant roots in this town, we took the plunge on buying the house regardless of what I might miss out on. You can imagine how, when that dream came true for me this January, I was overwhelmingly excited. It didn’t take long for me to feel crushing guilt at my own happiness while fascism took the country to new heights (or new abysses, if you will). My algorithms quickly began feeding me, “Joy is an act of resistance, resistance is joy,” and I found myself repeating it when the guilt came.
It felt like a copout, though. I’m white, femme-passing, have a house that’s relatively affordable for the prices of a college town, and have a job with benefits. How is my joy “resisting” when my body and life are safer than scores of my community members? Where did this notion of “joy as resistance” come from, anyway?
You guessed it. “Joy as resistance” came from People of Color. And white people did what we often do best: we took it completely out of its context, gave no credit to its origins, and used it as justification to let our guilt and anxiety paralyze us into inaction.
Toi Derricotte wrote in her 2009 poem “The Telly Cycle” that “Joy is an act of resistance for Telly the fish.” The poem evolved and was published in her 2011 book The Undertaker’s Daughter, in which she included the lines:
Visitors gather around a table to make botanical-themed journals at IUMAA’s Spring at the Museum event. Photo by Shelbie Porteroff.
Joy is an act of resistance.
Why would a black woman
need a fish
to love?
Indiana University Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology. Photo courtesy of Indian Public Media.
Derricotte, a Black woman born in Michigan, is credited with the phrase that has taken American social media by storm. It was her work that I repeated like prayer for weeks on end, and the concept she evoked with the phrase is one that has been known for millennia by communities of color around the world. So, how is joy an act of resistance? And why do we need it?
Work songs created by enslaved African Americans, the blooming of Capoeira in Brazil, the Baltic nations’ “Singing Revolution” of the late 90s, ballroom culture in New York City’s queer communities of color, and dance all over the world (including Merengue, Bomba and Vogue, and Sun Dance ceremonies) are all examples of joy as resistance and as defiance. In conversation with his good friend and fellow philosopher Simone de Beauvoir, Albert Camus said to her, “Happiness exists, and it’s important; why refuse it? You don’t make other people’s unhappiness any worse by accepting it; it even helps you fight for them.” That was the ticket that had been missing for me, and, I believe, for many others. Happiness can help you fight for those that need it.
So, joy is an act of resistance because it is something we do in spite of our circumstances. Joy is an act of resistance because it roots us and connects us to our communities when agents outside of them seek to keep us divided. Joy is an act of resistance because it fosters love and empathy between peoples, and because joy fuels us when we have had our humanity battered, our dignity stripped, and our rights seized. Joy, when embraced, can be an effective weapon against oppressors. We need joy because it moves us forward when it feels impossible to take a step.
When I stopped wallowing in the guilt I felt for feeling happy about my new job and the circumstances of my life that weren’t controlled by a tangerine tyrant, I let joy become my fuel.
Joy settled in my chest at first like a delicate, fluttering thing, and as I could, I fed it kindling from my life: a cat on my lap here, a loaf of sourdough there. The more I practiced, the easier joy was to grow. A kiss from my partner, the scent of lilac on a breeze, soil on my hands from the garden.
When the headlines of dead Brown children, measles outbreaks, and kidnapped community members barreled through like a torrent, I’d center myself with a breath and picture my little Joy as a blue, waning ember, not unlike Calcifer at the end of the 2005 film Howl’s Moving Castle. “Sophie, I’m so tired,” he said, but he never went out in spite of it all, and he was never alone. With the full support of my colleagues and the mission of our museum behind me, I took my Joy and fueled it by creating moments for others to fuel theirs.
A vibrantly colored flyer highlights the activities at the IUMAA’s Dance at the Museum event. Photo by Riley Laferriere and Camden Hill.
My work situates me in a unique and privileged position to connect with people all over our little town. We have the university, bustling and brimming with students, scholars, and academics from all over the world; and then we have the rest of the city, comprised of vibrancy and diversity that is largely made possible by the global pull that the university brings in. Our students are citizens of the town for their duration at Indiana University, our faculty and staff often live in and around Bloomington. The gap between the “townies” and the University is somehow the largest chasm and the greatest mirage, so I put to work on bridging it with my programming at the museum.
Though formally called our Night at the Museum series, the monthly, free events we host at the Indiana University Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology could arguably be called “unprescribed acts of joy.” The themes change every month, we offer at least some small refreshments, sometimes there is music or dance, activities are abundant and usually have a take-home aspect, and there is always, always a polaroid station. Just because.
Picture a room full of people of all ages, races, and genders, learning how to dance to Bollywood songs. Inside the museum where this event is happening, there are sounds of laughter, the smells of samosas and pakora, the pulsing beat of a Punjabi tune, and carefree, unrestrained joy. The museum doesn’t currently have anything in its exhibitions focused on South Asia (it’s a small place with only a handful of exhibits up at any given time). There isn’t an attempt to force the event to be connected back to what the museum has out for the public currently; it’s just an event with two South Asian dancers hired to teach community members about the forms of dance in their cultures.
Around the corner from the dance lessons is a little photo station, where the Director of the museum is taking polaroids of families, couples, kids, and friends to take home in memory of their evening. An act of joy. A token of happiness.
A powerful resistance, because outside of the museum, the dance teachers are fearful about what may happen to their visas, the couple that just finished getting their photo taken are even more afraid of what will happen if they hold hands in public than they used to be, and the group of friends playing a board game don’t know how the tariffs are going to affect their ability to afford groceries. But, for this two-hour block, the community is together. They feel safe, they feel loved, they are able to grab a small bite to eat, and their joy is sharpened. When they go home, they have some of this fuel, brought on by their community rooting in place and holding ever steadfast in support of one another to help them tackle the turmoils of tomorrow. Next month, we’ll do it again.
Alfa Dhakal (left) and Ananya Mahaptra (right) practice their performance of Bollywood style dance before leading a group of museum visitors through a dance routine at the IUMAA’s Dance at the Museum event. Photo by Shelbie Porteroff.
So, how do we create these spaces? As an academic and practitioner, I faced a lot of pushback in parks and museums when I advocated for paying community partners in exchange for their labor and expertise. The typical arguments were made about budget constraints and not having enough funds to do programs that paid community artists, musicians, educators, etc. While I fully recognize that there are financial barriers (especially in government agencies), I often found that the biggest hurdle wasn’t the money itself, but the work that went into making a case for the funds and securing it.
For folks in the field that want to practice more equitable community partnerships, I offer these tips:
- Pay partners as often as possible. Be transparent about how much you can afford to give them. If you have budgeted for more than a partner quotes you, give them what you budgeted. That compensation and compassion goes a massive way in building community trust. If you pay people their worth (which we often do not accurately identify for ourselves when pricing our services and art) they will see that and appreciate it.
- If funds are hard, focus as much effort as staff can give to identifying grants or potential donors. These opportunities are out there, and you never know if there is a retired musician in your community that wants to financially support local bands in acquiring gigs to get their names out unless you start looking.
- Leave your bubble and go talk to people. Go to a local coffee shop, go walk through a park, go to a market on the opposite side of town than you usually do. Take print-offs about your events and organization with you to hang up or set around. People will ask you questions, and you’ll meet incredible folks that, at the very most, may be able to support your work, and at the very least, bring you some of that oh-so-crucial joy.
- If money is really, truly an impossible ask for your organization, think about ways to offer fair, equitable labor exchange. Ask outreach specialists and educators at local orgs if they’d be willing to bring an activity to an event at your institution in exchange for your reciprocity at one of theirs. Let them decide what is a fair labor input and be collaborative on your reciprocal labor output.
- Get creative with your non-currency labor exchanges. If your local food pantry is coming to teach a workshop on canning foods, offer to run a food drive during the workshop to help support them back.
We are people, and we are also practitioners in the fields of what-makes-us-human. We help platform stories from all over the world told by voices human, animal, environmental, and material culture alike, then we return to our homes nestled within our communities at the end of the day to confront whatever grief or joy awaits us. At risk of referencing the coconut tree too soon, we exist in the context of all in which we live and what came before us.
So, build spaces for these connections to exist and exist within the context. I would argue that our honesty and vulnerability cements the authenticity behind our efforts. At the end of it all, we get to choose who we are both on and off the clock. I choose to resist the violent silencing of immigrant, Palestinian, queer, and BIPOC voices, and to cling desperately to the little, “Bye! I love you!” from a four year old at a Night at the Museum event to fuel me in that resistance. I hope you choose joy as fuel too.
Visitors gather around a table to make botanical-themed journals at IUMAA’s Spring at the Museum event. Photo by Shelbie Porteroff.
An Instagram story captures a moment of Bollywood dancing at the IUMAA’s Dance at the Museum event. Photo by Brandie MacDonald.
