Affective refusals: bitterness, failure and disengagement in a French workplace simulation

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.