The Performance of Belonging is a Funeral I Refused to Attend

I didn’t go to my graduation.

Not because I didn’t finish. I did. I received a 10, the highest mark. Not because I wasn’t proud of my work. I was. I had written a dissertation that mattered, one that was rooted in the lives of Roma women who survive the spaces where institutions fail us, erase us, or simply pretend we don’t exist. I had written a dissertation that felt like a living archive: a collection of stories, traditions, and refusals that I had carried with me long before I had the language to name them. But when the ceremony came, I stayed home. I earned that robe, that stage, that piece of paper, but some honors are not worth the weight of their silence. I refused to stand where they expected my gratitude to cover the cracks in their foundation.

Not attending wasn’t a protest. It was a decision born out of exhaustion. I didn’t want to sit through a celebration that demanded my presence but never made space for my truth. I didn’t want to smile on a stage for an institution that had never once looked like me, or centered people like me. I’ve learned my lesson: that inclusion often means performance. The performance of belonging. The performance of neutrality. The performance of gratitude. And I was done performing.

My dissertation was titled “The Politicization of Ancestral Ties: How Roma Women Redefine Political Resistance Beyond State Frameworks.” It emerged from community spaces, not classrooms. It was born from outdoors kitchens, from prayer circles that doubled as organizing hubs, from online chats where Roma women shared safety plans in between threats, strategies, evictions and survival. I didn’t write it as an academic exercise. I wrote it because I needed to document the brilliance and strategy that surrounds me every day, the kind of political resistance that doesn’t wait for policy to catch up. I wrote it because Roma women have always done politics, just not in the formats they’re willing to recognize. My work is not for them. It is for the Roma girl who is told her voice is "too much". For her, I say: "You are not too much. You are enough".

During my defense, one professor smiled and asked, “But what would you do if we weren’t empathetic?” I understood the subtext. What if we didn’t like your work? What if we didn’t find it beautiful? What if we refused to read your pain as political? It was a reminder that the legitimacy of my research, of our lives, was still being held hostage by the emotional comfort of people who have never had to live with the consequences of their curiosity. As if the value of my work depends on the emotional generosity of institutions that have erased us for centuries.

This is where Kimberlé Crenshaw’s work lives. In that question. Because intersectionality is not a buzzword. It is the daily reality of what happens when structures collide: when racial injustice meets gender violence meets class exclusion. Crenshaw warned us that when you stand at the intersection, you are more likely to be hit by all directions of traffic. I have felt that collision in institutions that want my data but not my presence. In scholarships that applaud my potential but refuse to fund my future. In classrooms where I am both the case study and the silent observer.

I was accepted into Oxford a few years ago. The dream, on paper, was real. But I didn’t go. I didn’t have the funding. The scholarship I applied for declined to support me. The official explanation was quiet, procedural. But the message was clear: I did not fit the profile of the Roma student they were willing to invest in. Maybe I wasn’t tragic enough. Maybe my politics were too sharp. Maybe they preferred a story that could be used to decorate their metrics and take credit, not complicate their frameworks. Institutions often fund narratives that flatter their ideals rather than confront the structures they’ve helped sustain.

This is not new. It is structural. It is what happens when Roma women are visible only as symbols; the token in the brochure, the speaker on the diversity panel, the case study, but never as theorists, critics, builders. It is what happens when our community is studied endlessly but never trusted to lead its own research, define its own methods, or challenge the policies written about us without us.

What my dissertation offers is not just an argument. It’s a shift from the existing frameworks. It exposed their limitations. It introduces the concept of activated memory: the way Roma women turn ancestral knowledge, oral history, and embodied rituals into tools of resistance. This is not heritage as nostalgia, it is memory as infrastructure. A lullaby, in this context, is not simply a song. It is a map of survival. A shared meal is not only care, it is political organizing. These are not symbolic gestures. They are deliberate acts of autonomy.

When public health systems discriminate, when NGOs tokenize, when liberal democracies reduce oppression to "diversity metrics", Roma women don’t just survive. We organize.
And we do it using ancestral knowledge, cultural memory, kinship-based economies, storytelling and refusal.

These aren’t coping mechanisms. They’re counter-governance. They're blueprints for what political resistance looks like when you’re not even seen as political.

Audre Lorde reminds us that “the master's tools will never dismantle the master's house.” And still, Roma women have been forced to navigate institutions that hand us tools that were never meant for our hands. We learn to work in translation: translating trauma into policy-briefs, translating love into “social cohesion,” translating erasure into the language of funding proposals. My work refuses this translation. It insists that our methods are valid as they are. This is what I call feminist governance beyond the state. It’s what happens when you don’t have the luxury of waiting for institutions to care. When Roma women stitch together safety nets from nothing pool cash from street vending to pay for health emergencies because the public hospital turned them away, that’s not informal labor or desperation. That’s autonomous public health infrastructure. That is love worn as armor. The kind that builds what the state destroys.

When elders preserve knowledge about birth, healing, and survival that predates the state, that’s not tradition. That’s counter-archive. That’s radical epistemology. We are the historians you ignored, the economists you erased, the political theorists you refused to cite. But because it doesn’t happen in English, or in conference rooms, or in institutional reports, it’s erased. Dismissed. Romanticized or ignored.

I do this work as a Roma woman, not in spite of it. I do it because I come from a lineage of women who taught me to see care work as political, silence as strategy, and survival as refusal. The women I interviewed for my dissertation were not research subjects, they were theorists. They were archivists of memory. They were builders of non-state feminist infrastructures. They were activists, caretakers, and revolutionaries. And they reminded me, again and again, that resistance doesn’t always wear a banner and it’s not always loud. Sometimes, it comes with soup. Sometimes, it comes with a coded blessing. Sometimes, it looks like not showing up to a graduation that was never really meant for you.

I believe the classroom can still be a radical space of possibility, but only if we make it so. Only if we stop asking Roma women to perform palatable versions of resistance. Only if we recognize that the academia needs our frameworks more than we need its validation. Only if we stop asking what empathy can offer us and start asking what justice demands of us.

I didn’t go to graduation because I no longer needed the ceremony. The work speaks for itself. And I wrote this for every Roma girl who’s been scolded for her voice, punished for her memory, told her pride is too sharp for their fragile world. I wrote this to walk the path our grandmothers cleared when no one was looking. To sharpen their whispers into a language even the archives cannot mute. To refuse their terms, not because we are starting, but because we have always known another way. Our refusal is not a beginning. It’s an inheritance.