The Feminist Killjoy Handbook

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hooks writes of how you can be caught out by others who think they have found something out about you by finding your words. She mentions how her sisters would find her writing and end up “poking fun” at her (7). She describes leaving her writing out as like putting out “newly cleaned laundry out in the air for everyone to see” (7). Note she does not talk about dirty laundry, that expression often used for the public disclosure of secrets. This is cleaned laundry; it is hanging out there because of labour that has already been undertaken. When writing is labouring, it is what we do to get stuff out there, to get ourselves out there. There is still exposure of something, of someone, in the action of airing, making your interior world available for others to see. Decisions to cut aid for the terminally ill, for the elderly, for dependent children, for food stamps, even school lunches, are being made by men with full stomachs who live in comfortable houses with two cars and umpteen tax shelters. None of them go hungry to bed at night. Recently, it was suggested that senior citizens be hired to work in atomic plants because they are close to the end of their lives anyway.

That killjoy truths are shut out by institutions because of what they would reveal about them is how some of us are shut out. If I had been asked this question at another time, or if the question had been asked using slightly different words, I might have given this answer:We need these resources. We need each other more than other to show up, turn up, however we can, in our queer ways, so they cannot contain it, the violence, the injustice, the sheer abject cruelty, the devastation of a place and a people, screen it out, the blinds down. And so, we assemble to bring these truths out. We come out with it. We come out with them. That’s why they are shutting the door. They don’t see it like that. They won’t use the words to describe it – the Nakba, genocide, ethnic cleansing- as if without the words to describe what is happening it is not happening. We use those words, Nakba, genocide, ethnic cleaning because that is what is happening. The most famous feminist killjoy did not stop smiling through our two-hour-long conversation. Sarah Ahmed took joy in everything: her sweet dogs, the books lining the shelves of her home office. She was optimistic about the feminists in her life, the students who fought against a sexist university administration. Her sunny demeanor reminded me that the grinding struggles of feminism and anti-racism are efforts towards greater joy. A Complainer’s Handbook is intended as a companion and follow up text to The Feminist Killjoy Handbook. Rather than being a set of instructions on how to complain, it will explore how making complaints (whether expressed formally or not) can gives us a set of instructions about the world and in particular about institutions and power. To complain about abuses of power is to learn about power. A sense of what it is to be British is understood both in a positive sense and as a common sense. So many different actions are being named as assaults against this common sense – including complaints or grievances made within the workplace. In my book, Complaint! I did not use the language of “hegemonic complainers” because I was well aware how many complaints in the workplace are dismissed as if they derive from those who are either powerful or have a will to be so. The minimization of harm and inflation of power work together as if some make slights more than they are to make themselves bigger. “Hegemonic complaint” would, nevertheless, be a good description of what is going on in common sense conservatism. Hegemonic complaint functions as meta-complaint, a complaint about complaints, those minor grievances made by mischievous minorities. A meta-complaint might not register as a complaint, made without leaving a clear inventory, becoming common sense.

Shutting the door to the violence enacted against the Palestinian people by the Israeli state is also shutting the door to other violences, shutting the door to our complicity, the complicity not just of present governments, but past governments. The injunction not to speak of the violence being enacted against Palestine and in Gaza is the same injunction not to speak about the violence of British imperialism, that history that is present. Those of us living and working here whose families came from former British colonies, know this injunction, we recognise it, because we know what follows failing to meet it. When you describe an entitlement as harassment you are understood as depriving somebody of what is theirs; the complainer-as-killjoy could characterize this deprivation. I explored this reversal of power in the first chapter of The Feminist Killjoy Handbook. Consider how racism and transphobia are often articulated as if they are unpopular or even minority positions (or to be more specific many people in the public domain position themselves as being censored when their views are described as racist or transphobic). And so, we need each other. We need to become each other’s resources. Feminism can or should be such a resource. But what goes under the name of feminism, at least in the UK right now is anti-queer as well as anti-trans, willing to use categories such as sex or nature or natal to exclude some of us, categories that many of us have long critiqued. We say no to this. That no is louder when we say it together. A book can be a no to this. We keep writing, keeping fighting, knowing that we are sending our work out into the hostile environment that we critique. Right now, there are many of us protesting even though some of us have been prohibited from doing so. Our governments are trying to stop us from assembling, from expressing our solidarity with you, from chanting for your freedom, from waving your flags. To protest is also to protest those who try to stop us from protesting, who are complicit in the violence being enacted against Palestinians.

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When we see through the polish, we see so much. I spoke to another woman of colour academic who talked to me about complaints she had about sexism and racism but did not make. In explaining to me why she did not make them, she offers a sharp description of the culture of her institution: In the first paper I published from my happiness research (in 2007), I did not even use the term “the feminist killjoy.” She appears but as “the kill joy feminist” (“Take the figure of the kill joy feminist. She appears alongside the happy housewife” – yes, I made kill joy two words). And, the kill joy feminist is then turned into a series of questions in a discussion of affect and atmosphere: There would be so much, then, that we would not be free to say or do, because of how it will be dismissed as terrorism or as “support for Hamas.” We are right to be disturbed by the attempt to stop those who support freedom for Palestine from speaking. Such solidarity would not be safe in abstraction, warm and fuzzy, a way of feeling something without doing it. It would be a call to action and to attention, keeping at the front of our consciousness the reasons we need to be in solidarity, the violence, the material realities of suffering, ongoing colonial occupation, the brutality of state racism. Killjoy truths: what are revealed to us when we try and reveal the violence. We learn how that violence remains unseen, behind closed doors, covered by the materials, the blinds we might call ideology, from what happens when we say no to it, when we complain or protest. If you raise the blinds, or try to, or open the door, or try to, revealing a violence that many are invested in not seeing, you become the cause of it. That’s how killjoys often appear: as if they are the cause of the violence they reveal.

hooks, bell (1996). “Inspired Eccentricity: Sarah and Gus Oldham” in Sharon Sloan Fiffer and Steve Fiffer (eds), Family: American Writers Remember Their Own (ed.), New York: Vintage Books. The British-Australian scholar’s latest book, The Feminist Killjoy Handbook, is an elaboration of her popular theory of killing joy. Ahmed first explored the idea in her 2010 book, The Promise of Happiness, and in Feminist Killjoys, a blog she began in 2013. The new book uses pop culture and little jargon to make the “killjoy” figure legible to feminists of all kinds. I learn from Lorde and many others what it means to fight for change, to be in solidarity with Palestine, to form coalitions across our differences, keeping them in mind, making them meaningful, to march but not to a prescribed step, to fight, and to fight despair. We become vigilant for the smallest opportunities for change before they close like windows.I am glad to be embarking now on a book tour, which we are calling F eminist Killjoys on Tour (you can find some of the events listed here). The BBC did issue an apology for calling those who marched for Palestinian freedom “Hamas supporters.” I often use killjoy as an adjective: not just as a way of being someone doing things but as a way of describing what we are doing. The “common” in common sense matters. If there is a reversal of power, there is also a reversal of position. Consider how when we try to widen the curriculum you are treated as damaging the tradition. We want more, and we are treated as stopping this or that writer from being taught. By asking for more, we are treated as less, as lessening the value of something, but also as removing what or who is already there. You taught me that to change the system we have to stop it from working. I think of that price, the price we pay for the work we do.

I began researching common sense some years ago, although I put the project on hold to write The Feminist Killjoy Handbook. You can see a description of the project here. Recently I was asked if I was going to continue sharing my work on my blog. I decided it was time to start sharing some ideas from my common-sense research. Future posts might include a critique of the idea of “biological sex” as common sense (extending some of the arguments from “ Gender Critical as Gender Conservative”) as well as a discussion of racialised common sense. In the project I will be drawing especially on ethnomethodology and social phenomenology (in particular drawing on the work of Harold Garfinkel and Alfred Schutz). My hope is that interrogating common sense will provide a good way of diagnosing what is going on in contemporary “anti-woke” movements. For a lecture that draws on some of the material shared in this post see here.Hall, Stuart. 1977. “Culture, the Media and the ‘Ideological Effect’”, in J. Curran, M. Gurevitch and J. Wollacott (eds), Mass Communication and Society, London: Edward Arnold, The culture of her institution is that you don’t complain about the culture of the institution. Institutional culture can be what stops a complaint about institutional culture. To complain is thus to provide evidence that you have not been in an institution long enough to understand it, to respect it, how its organised, its traditions. The complainers would be those who have not yet internalized the norms of the institution, those for whom the project of the institution has not yet become their own. She did not complain but that was not because the project of the institution had become her own. She did not complain because, as one of two academics of colour in an otherwise all white department, she did not want to stand out any more than she already did. But because the problems she did not complain about did not go away, she decides to leave for another post. She submits a resignation letter, which took the form of a complaint about how racism and sexism were part of the institution. The other academic of colour resigned at the same time, “after we resigned, they said we were the wrong kind of people. This is the two-brown people in the department of around fifty people.” Being the wrong kind of people, not white, not right, is used to explain and dismiss that complaint. When complaints are dismissed as coming from people who are too new to abide by, or respect, an institutional legacy, some people will be dismissed as complainers no matter how long they have been in an institution. A wagon, a red wheelbarrow. The question isn’t which one was it. Objects acquire different colours and shapes, depending. And writing too; how objects acquire different colours and shapes, depending. You might be a red wheel barrow or a wagon. The question isn’t which one. Sometimes, in loosening our hold on things, also ourselves, we bring them to life. In a conversation with Gloria Steinem, bell hooks describes how she is surrounded by her own precious objects, feminist objects. They are the first things she sees when she wakes up. She says “the objects in my life call out to me.” And then she says she has “Audre Lorde’s ‘Litany for Survival’ facing me when I get out of bed; I have so many beautiful images of women face me as I go about my day”.