Sara Ahmed,
"Feminist Killjoys (And Other Willful Subjects)"
(page 2 of 8)
Killjoys
To be unseated by the table of happiness might be to threaten not
simply that table, but what gathers around it, what gathers on it. When
you are unseated, you can even get in the way of those who are seated, those
who want more than anything to keep their seats. To threaten the loss of
the seat can be to kill the joy of the seated. How well we recognise the
figure of the feminist killjoy! How she makes sense! Let's take the
figure of the feminist killjoy seriously. One feminist project could be
to give the killjoy back her voice. Whilst hearing feminists as killjoys
might be a form of dismissal, there is an agency that this dismissal
rather ironically reveals. We can respond to the accusation with a
"yes."
The figure of the feminist killjoy makes sense if we place her in the
context of feminist critiques of happiness, of how happiness is used to
justify social norms as social goods (a social good is what causes
happiness, given happiness is understood as what is good). As Simone de
Beauvoir described so astutely "it is always easy to describe as happy a
situation in which one wishes to place [others]."[4]
Not to agree to
stay in the place of this wish might be to refuse the happiness that is
wished for. To be involved in political activism is thus to be involved
in a struggle against happiness. Even if we are struggling for different
things, even if we have different worlds we want to create, we might
share what we come up against. Our activist archives are thus unhappy
archives. Just think of the labor of critique that is behind us:
feminist critiques of the figure of "the happy housewife;" Black
critiques of the myth of "the happy slave"; queer critiques of the
sentimentalisation of heterosexuality as "domestic bliss." The struggle
over happiness provides the horizon in which political claims are made.
We inherit this horizon.
To be willing to go against a social order, which is protected as a
moral order, a happiness order is to be willing to cause unhappiness,
even if unhappiness is not your cause. To be willing to cause
unhappiness might be about how we live an individual life (not to choose
"the right path" is readable as giving up the happiness that is presumed
to follow that path). Parental responses to coming out, for example, can take the
explicit form not of being unhappy about the child being queer but of
being unhappy about the child being unhappy.[5]
Even if you do
not want to cause the unhappiness of those you love, a queer life can
mean living with that unhappiness. To be willing to cause unhappiness
can also be how we immerse ourselves in collective struggle, as we work
with and through others who share our points of alienation. Those who
are unseated by the tables of happiness can find each other.
So, yes, let's take the figure of the feminist killjoy seriously.
Does the feminist kill other people's joy by pointing out moments of
sexism? Or does she expose the bad feelings that get hidden, displaced,
or negated under public signs of joy? Does bad feeling enter the room
when somebody expresses anger about things, or could anger be the moment
when the bad feelings that circulate through objects get brought to the
surface in a certain way? The feminist subject "in the room" hence
"brings others down" not only by talking about unhappy topics such as
sexism but by exposing how happiness is sustained by erasing the signs
of not getting along. Feminists do kill joy in a certain sense: they
disturb the very fantasy that happiness can be found in certain places.
To kill a fantasy can still kill a feeling. It is not just that
feminists might not be happily affected by what is supposed to cause
happiness, but our failure to be happy is read as sabotaging the
happiness of others.
We can consider the relationship between the negativity of the figure
of the feminist killjoy and how certain bodies are "encountered" as
being negative. Marilyn Frye argues that oppression involves the
requirement that you show signs of being happy with the situation in
which you find yourself. As she puts it, "it is often a requirement upon
oppressed people that we smile and be cheerful. If we comply, we signify
our docility and our acquiescence in our situation." To be oppressed
requires that you show signs of happiness, as signs of being or having
been adjusted. For Frye "anything but the sunniest countenance exposes
us to being perceived as mean, bitter, angry or
dangerous".[6]
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