This book is a fresh and creative addition to the human rights oeuvre that moves forward our understanding of the power of the spirit of human rights beyond thin legal entitlements. In an era of extraordinary challenges to human rights norms and conditions, it is a welcome move to reconnect theory to the full range of lived experience, thereby advancing a richer concept of rights as reclaiming humanization. Because political repression always operates through trauma and atomization, William Paul Simmons’s recovery of joyful connection to the self and others is a feminist strategy of resistance and agency—as he cites Audre Lorde on “the erotic as power.” Reintegrating the passions with the interests can un-Locke rights from the frozen grip of Enlightenment origins and facilitate the quest for cross-cultural rights translations in a globalizing world. Moreover, the politics of joy articulates with some of the most powerful contemporary repertoires of rights practice: political theater, satire, cultural healing, and community expression.

Simmons establishes a foundation for his argument in political theory in chapter 2, tracing the phenomenology of joy as a transgressive affect by drawing on a range of classical philosophy (Baruch Spinoza), academic psychology (Carroll Izard), social theory (Jacques Lacan), and feminism (Lorde). The central insight is that joy is emancipatory as “an opening of possibilities” (p. 29) rooted in a playful aesthetics of surprise that reconstructs the subject in ways parallel to mysticism. However, tracing the ethos of joy as a transgression of hegemonic norms via Lacan does not yield a clear ethical direction. Although the goal of this section is laudable and the journey ultimately fruitful, the selection of theorists undermines its potential. There are complementary feminists on capabilities and connection (Martha Nussbaum, Iris Marion Young), and Lacan is inherently circumscribed as a source of political theory.

The following chapter (“Whither Joy”), which backtracks to the historical roots of the suppression of joy from the Enlightenment, is a more skillful and comprehensive exposition that could be read before its predecessor. Unfortunately, this chapter downplays historical context in a way that foreshadows the book’s shortfalls in grappling with passionate perpetrators. Locke’s plea for toleration and aversion to religious passion came from witnessing the religious slaughter of the Thirty Years’ War, which claimed an estimated eight million victims—rationalist repression represented a strategy for survival from the mobilization of ideology for mass killing then as now.

Simmons’s long arc treatment of the history of human rights is a commendable contrast to recent partisan partiality (Samuel Moyn), and he goes on to establish several foundational moments in which passion and positivity are excised from human rights analysis and advocacy. Thus, chapter 3 concludes with an extended defense of the Holocaust tragicomedy Life Is Beautiful. Although this discussion is apparently intended to establish the ethical value of joy as an empowering response to trauma, unfortunately the choice of case muddies the waters with crosscutting themes of irony, agency, and the politics of representation.

The heart of the book is found in chapters 4–6, which more successfully apply this framework of joyful political action to understanding human rights activists, perpetrators, and martyrs. As a social movement scholar who has focused on empathy and agency in human rights campaigns (Brysk, Speaking Rights to Power, 2013), I found Simmons’s systematic attention to the role of joyful emotion in chapter 4 illuminating and authentic to my own experience with activists and advocates alike.

It is to Simmons’s credit that he goes on to confront the dilemma of ethically multivalent joyful perpetrators and tries to distinguish authentic from “sinister” joy: the abusive deployment of the pleasure principle that freezes consciousness and separates the subject from the Other. Simmons does good evidence-based work that takes us beyond the facile frameworks of Milgram’s obedience and Arendt’s banality of evil to recover the sadistic ecstasy of many perpetrators. However, he is ultimately unable to theorize the critical difference between the passions in chapters 4 and 5. There are signposts in his discussion of sadism and carnival as a reversal of power relations (pp. 150–54), but when his own perspective devolves back to psychoanalytic Lacanian transgression, it proves predictably insufficient.

Moving on to the joy of martyrdom in chapter 6, Simmons interrogates a long sweep of history to chronicle the transformation of pain to pleasure through transcendent connection to a higher realm. Although this section is a useful extension of psychosocial dynamics, there are notable gaps in the analysis: between the lived experience and the social reception of joyful martyrdom, between the submissive experience of joyful martyrs and the joyful agency of activists profiled earlier, and between the transcendent detachment of martyrs and the engaged self-transformation developed in the conclusion, “Human Rights Winners.”

The book finally finds its full expression in the last section, as Simmons connects positive psychology, accounts of survivors as victors, and Buddhist doctrines of transformative compassion to the recovery of joy as transgressive affect, outlined at the beginning of the book. The post-traumatic growth perspective he introduces as an alternative to PTSD and “survivor syndrome” carries great potential to improve both scholarly understanding and human rights practice, but it is sketched too quickly and insufficiently distinguished from resilience. Although the material presented on cultural healing practice and the voices of victors is a fitting conclusion that points in the same direction as the emancipatory erotic of the theory chapter, the book would have been much stronger if these psychological and spiritual transformation perspectives had been presented as an opening frame following Lacan and Lorde and then been systematically applied to the empirical chapters. Although it is a common critique to say that a reviewer “wishes the author wrote a different book,” I merely wish that the author had written a different version of the same book. I encourage fellow readers to exercise their agency to elicit that more persuasive version by first reading chapters 3, 2, and 7 before tackling chapters 4–6; those latter chapters resonate more after gleaning the further insights of the conclusion.

Although the book ultimately succeeds as an expansion of the scholarly gaze, it somewhat misreads its pedagogical niche. The first chapter’s motivation of the need for positive affective engagement of students gives a narrow and outmoded account of human rights pedagogy based on a skewed statistical exercise of counting references—carried over into the author’s thoughtful but limited reflection on the limits of his own pedagogy in the conclusion. Numerous contemporary human rights courses already ground students’ passion and balance accounts of abuse with action-oriented testimonials and speakers, fieldwork, and constructive service learning projects. Such elements of optimism can be found increasingly in pedagogical workshops and syllabi collections of the American Political Science Association Human Rights Section, the University of Connecticut Human Rights Syllabus Project, Scholars at Risk campaign course modules for member institutions, and student participation in human rights conferences, journals, and law clinics, including specific alternative models I have encountered at Roosevelt College, the University of Dayton, and UC Davis, among others.

Although Simmons playfully announces as his problematic “The Thrill Is Gone,” his artful blend of political theory, history, psychology, and sociology goes some distance toward restoring joy to human rights scholarship. This much-needed project is ambitious and perforce uneven: it is more successful in recognizing than analyzing the social erotic elements of repression and resistance. Nevertheless, it goes far beyond a typical work of social theory to proffer promising guidance for an engaged social practice of mobilization and transformation, offering profound feminist insight that “the personal is political.”