Inspired By: Emma Dabiri
Jamie Clifton
Fri Feb 14 2025
At Miista, we’re inspired by people who do the opposite thing – the pioneers who take risks, challenge conventions and encourage bold decisions.
In our Inspired By series, we showcase the stories of these individuals, whose attitudes embody everything we celebrate in our designs and production process.
Emma Dabiri is in the bar above Margate’s teeny-tiny Tom Thumb Theatre, reflecting on the delights and dilemmas of modern beauty culture.
“I reject this idea that taking an interest in our appearance is just shallow and superficial – or anti-feminist, even,” says the Irish writer, academic and broadcaster. “There are aspects that are tyrannical and oppressive, and bring us pain. But I really feel that beauty – and an appreciation of beauty – is also a source of great pleasure and potential joy in our lives.”
That paradox is neatly illustrated in the introduction to Emma’s 2023 book Disobedient Bodies, her third after 2019’s Don’t Touch My Hair and 2021’s What White People Can Do Next. As a teenager, she writes, the “magic [and] transformation” of jostling for a spot in front of the makeup mirror was often one of the best parts of a night out with friends.
The problem is, this seemingly innocent ritual could just as easily be viewed as submitting to the incessant and unreasonable beauty expectations foisted upon women.
At this point, you might feel like throwing your hands up in defeat: ‘There’s no winning!’
But Disobedient Bodies – which explores the cultural, political and historical forces that shape how we perceive and inhabit our bodies – recognises this duality, and argues that a much healthier alternative is absolutely possible.
“I love the concept of disobedience, applied in many different ways,” Emma smiles. “Many of the beauty standards that we have are about controlling women. So in being disobedient, it's a rejection of – or a protest against – these pressures and ideals that demand we conform to some kind of narrow standard.”
As for how to begin this disobedience, Emma suggests prioritising how our bodies feel and what they do for us, rather than how they look. During the years she taught African Studies at London’s SOAS university, she learned about ocularcentrism, the privileging of sight over all other senses, which is rife in Western societies.
“But there are many other cultures that don’t necessarily derive meaning about the world through sight alone,” Emma explains. “So the way that something looked – simply looked, in its physical, visual form – would not be the primary thing through which you would make a value judgment about that thing or about that person.”
Unfortunately, we still have some way to go before this kind of perspective becomes widespread – in large part, Emma argues, because of the economic system that shapes our lives.
“Under capitalism, there's always more work to do. We can always be better. We can always be more productive,” she says. “I think how that feeds into beauty culture is this kind of Sisyphean labor around our bodies. You know, we can always be more toned. Our bodies can always look better. Our faces can always look better.”
This interrogation of capitalism is a recurring theme in Emma’s work. In What White People Can Do Next, she critiques not only systemic racism and our wider societal response to it after the murder of George Floyd, but also how capitalist structures preserve inequality across racial lines.
“There are many white people whose lives are diminished by the inequalities perpetuated by capitalism,” she explains. “They do not experience racism. But the reasons they're aggrieved have their origins in the same system that is responsible for systemic racism, in the same system that is responsible for overheating the Earth, to the point that life may be unsustainable for all of us.”
Throughout the book, Emma argues that to effectively address these issues we should prioritise coalition over allyship – a term that became a bit of a buzzword during the BLM protests of 2020.
“I was frustrated by a lot of the discourse around allyship,” she explains. “Specifically in the context of anti-racism and this idea of ‘white allies’.” After googling the term, she recalls being overwhelmed by material that focused heavily on “the ally and the victim”. This, she says, felt uncomfortable and patronising: “It was reinforcing quite a white savior dynamic.”
As Dictionary.com made “allyship” its 2021 word of the year, corporations raced to talk up their new DEI credentials. However, come 2025, many of those giant private companies – Meta, Amazon, McDonald’s, Google – have cancelled or massively slimmed down their diversity programmes, echoing President Trump’s executive order to ban DEI at federal agencies.
“[At the time], I felt that a lot of the DEI zeitgeist that was happening was quite performative and almost trend-led,” Emma says. “And I think we’ve seen that borne out by the fact that it's all being very enthusiastically rolled back so quickly."
While Emma acknowledges that some individual actions can be valuable – calling out racism when we see it IRL, lobbying against black income disparity – not all so-called allyship is created equal. Instead of performative posting, policing people’s language or chastising them to “transfer their privilege”, Emma advocates for creating coalitions that benefit everyone.
“While identifying struggles as distinct and unique,” she says, “we should also be trying to identify points of common ground so that we can create coalitions of people who are working together. To start thinking about things more systematically and connect the dots.”
After hopping in a cab along the seafront, to Margate’s Old Bank Bookshop, we pick up where we left off. She mentions a section of the book about the Black Panthers. In 1969, Fred Hampton, the leader of the Chicago chapter of the organisation, founded the Rainbow Coalition, which was made up of Panthers, a Puerto Rican community organisation called The Young Lords, and the mostly white, Southern members of leftist group The Young Patriots.
“Fred Hampton was able to see that, although as white Americans they didn't experience racism, they also experienced police brutality,” says Emma. “They experienced profound inequality and diminished life opportunities because they were poor. So he thought that if all of those people could be brought into coalitions, so many people were part of this that their demands couldn't be ignored.”
While it was one of the most ambitious and visionary attempts to unite diverse social movements, the Rainbow Coalition eventually collapsed. The movement was constantly harassed by authorities, and Hampton was assassinated by the Chicago police department, in collusion with the FBI.
Unlike the Panthers’ and their ten-point plan of demands, Emma says, “I was frustrated by the fact that a lot of what I was seeing online [in the wake of George Floyd’s murder] was being described as activism. It just didn't seem particularly strategic. It was hard to distinguish or to identify what the goals were.”
Emma recalls a talk by one of the members of the Combahee River Collective – a group of black feminist activists who coined the term “identity politics” – that sums up this problem: “She was saying that the feminists who’d come a few generations after them had really run with identity politics. But she was like, ‘They’ve taken the identity and dropped the politics on the floor.’”
Just before wrapping up for the day, I ask Emma about a world in which activists form coalitions, organised around specific goals. A world in which all people are liberated.
“Ostensibly, we're free in so many ways, and yet so many people can't even easily access the basic kind of necessities and essentials of life,” she says. “We live under a system that is designed to extract and exploit as much from us – from the earth – as possible, and under that system it's pretty hard to really be free. If we were allowed to just be, and see what unfolded from that, I think that would be liberation.”
As we step out of the bookshop and into the salty Margate air, Emma's words linger: liberation through being. It's an almost utopian concept in a world that demands ceaseless productivity, relentless self-improvement, and a rigid adherence to beauty and societal norms. But that's exactly why it's worth striving for. Disobedience, after all, begins with imagining the unimaginable.
