An Archive of Rage

Rage’s Resurgence

In 2016, unaired footage of Donald Trump making lewd comments about women during a conversation with a television host surfaced: “You know, I’m automatically attracted to beautiful—I just start kissing them. It’s like a magnet. Just kiss. I don’t even wait. And when you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything. Grab them by the pussy.” ¹ Later, the Trump campaign dismissed the comments as “locker room banter.” ² Despite this misogynistic display celebrating the objectification of women and the glorification of sexual assault, on top of routine racist and xenophobic diatribes that emboldened white supremacists to peddle their hatred of women, people of color, immigrants, Muslims, Jews, and the LGBTQI+ community, Trump was elected the 45th President of the United States.

Trump’s performance of white masculinity uplifts white male supremacy.  Publicly, and with great fanfare, he “uses the gendered, racialized body as a proxy for the nation and locates threats to the nation in women’s and non-white male bodies embodying deep-seated fears of ‘white decline’ and threatened borders.” ³ In this way, he became an icon of the alt-right movement.  The ‘manosphere’ and social media platforms fuel the growth and visibility of the movement and the man (Trump), saturating the mainstream with ideas about the “preservation of Western civilization.” ⁴ Philosopher Myisha Cherry writes that the alt-right protesters in Charlottesville, Virginia who marched chanting the antisemitic and anti-Black phrase “you will not replace us” were deploying “wipe rage,” a term she uses to describe a belief that “whites are on the verge of extinction by non-whites—and something must be done about it.” ⁵ The Trumpist culture war that emerged revived and emboldened an ecosystem of white supremacy, anti-democracy, and anti-intellectualism. In one culminating event in this ongoing war, Trumpist groups including the Proud Boys ⁶ and Oath Keepers ⁷ unleashed seditious mob violence at the U.S. Capitol to overturn the outcome of the 2020 presidential election. ⁸ In the imaginaries and practices of Neo-Nazis, antisemites, Islamophobes, and misogynists, white Western civilization equals superiority. The establishment of a white ethnostate is the necessary and inevitable outcome.

The upside of Trump’s atrocious presidency was the resurgence of feminist rage in scholarship and activism that animated a broad range of issues and imaginative possibilities. An outpouring of essays, opinion pieces, books, public forums and conversations on feminist rage testified to its ubiquitousness as a collective feeling across lines of race, class, geography, and generational divides. Such texts included Roxane Gay’s opinion piece, “Who Gets to be Angry” (The New York Times, 2016); Samhita Mukhopadhyay and Kate Harding’s Nasty Women: Feminism, Resistance, and Revolution in Trump’s America (Macmillan, 2017); Brittney Cooper’s Eloquent Rage: A Black Feminist Discovers Her Superpower (Macmillan, 2018); Soraya Chemaly’s Rage Becomes Her: The Power of Women’s Anger (Simon and Schuster, 2018); Burn It Down: Women Writing About Anger, edited by Lilly Dancyger (Basic Books, 2019); and Rebecca Traister’s Good and Mad: The Revolutionary Power of Women’s Anger (Simon and Schuster, 2018). White, privileged, liberal feminists were shocked by the election outcome and the potential erosion of their rights, while people of color faced increasingly virulent white supremacy sanctioned by the highest office in the country. Differences in positionality, power, and hierarchy among women created complexities in this shared feeling of rage, but the unifying outcome that cut across differences drove women to one goal: resistance to Trump. This was imperative, as was learning to channel heightened and collective rage into organizing at the familial, communal, and national levels.

In what has been termed the “female wave,” affiliated and unaffiliated women rallied around the Democratic party to change the 2018 midterm election landscape, turning out volunteers, voters, and donors, and running for office at all levels of government. ⁹ The significant uptick in political engagement included the candidacy and election of women of color, where Ayanna Pressley (the first Black woman), Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (the youngest candidate), Debra Haaland (the first Native woman), Ilhan Omar (the first Somali Muslim woman), and Rashida Tlaib (the first Palestinian woman) were all elected to Congress. ¹⁰ The worldwide protests of the Women’s Marches; the global #MeToo movements; the Shaheen Bagh protests in Delhi against the Hindu majoritarian Citizenship [Amendment] Act; the “Escape the Corset” movement in South Korea against societal expectations of femininity; Aurat Marches across Pakistan against patriarchal structures, violence, and harassment; and the Black Lives Matter movement’s protests against anti-Black police murders and routine violence all bear the hallmarks of rage. Rage politics have found renewed purpose in private and public lives, academia, and activism, locally and transnationally.

In this essay, I offer an autoethnography of rage that enables an understanding of what it means to witness and harness the power of rage as a source of radical possibilities. I build on the rich genealogy of women of color and transnational feminist writing about anger and rage to elucidate how rebellious lives enact practices that defy structural and normative constraints and bridge the divide between the academic and social worlds. I draw on the pedagogical practices I use when teaching a course on feminist rage alongside students’ responses to the course to demonstrate how deconstructing and reconstructing rage are simultaneous processes that, grounded in an intersectional and transnational feminist analytic framework, can decolonize the neoliberal institution and its sanctioned modes and forms of knowledge production. I also demonstrate how the intimate space of the classroom functions as a laboratory to construct rebellious subjects able to self-determine and enact radical politics to address systemic violence and oppression. My hope is for students to seize feminist ways of knowing rage that are personal, collective, old, and renewed, and to deploy them in the quotidian where everyday relationships and experiences illuminate and materialize futures where solidarity, liberation, and freedom are central elements of generative coexistence.

Harnessing Rage

Contemporary feminist rage can be traced to two foundational texts that laid the groundwork for affect theory: Audre Lorde’s essay, “The Uses of Anger: Women Responding to Racism” (1981), and Cherríe Moraga and Gloria E. Anzaldúa’s edited collection This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color (1981). Lorde, writing on racism, the pain of injustice, and the collective capacity and responsibility to grapple with the unfinished project of radical resistance and movement building, argues for the utility and value of emotions. She writes, “Every woman has a well-stocked arsenal of anger potentially useful against those oppressions, personal and institutional, which brought that anger into being. Focused with precision, it can become a powerful source of energy serving progress and change.” ¹¹ Complimenting Lorde, Moraga and Anzaldúa’s collection assembles a profound array of “theory in the flesh” in which women writers of color visualize freedom to live and love through their own “uncompromised definition of feminism.” ¹² In these soulful texts, affect is valuable and knowledge production is counter-hegemonic, qualities central to the potentialities of social and political transformation. Truth-telling theory-making takes shape when rage is regarded as indispensable and productive, when we use it to ignite our radical practices of narration and radical movements to act against the discipline, silence, and pain of oppression.  

“Emotions are crucial to politics,” Sara Ahmed writes. ¹³ In this essay, I foreground rage as a central element in gender and sexuality studies and feminist solidarity movements in general, and my personal history and pedagogy specifically, to demonstrate how the affective dimensions of rage help us learn from the past, exist in the present, and imagine the future. I embark on a meditation on individual and collective dimensions of rage as a decolonial feminist praxis of confronting and navigating the violence of neoliberal institutional life and its precarities that inform the everyday. In the tradition of Maria Lugones, I engage the feminist process of “faithful witnessing” in which the agential act of listening, participating, and resisting facilitates the birth of radical politics to counter hierarchies of power and oppression. Lugones writes,

A collaborator witnesses on the side of power, while a faithful witness witnesses against the grain of power, on the side of resistance. To witness faithfully, one must be able to sense resistance, to interpret behavior as resistant even when it is dangerous, when that interpretation places one psychologically against common sense, or when one is moved to act in collision with common sense, with oppression. Faithful witnessing leads one away from a monosensical life. One ceases to have expectations, desires, and beliefs that fit one for a life in allegiance with oppression. ¹⁴

The faithful witnessing that unfolds in my classrooms bridges the theory and practice of rage, enabling students and myself to chart the specific stakes of rage in the architecture of our social and political lives. It allows us to remember feminist history and collective actions that have shaped movements for rights and freedom, to name injustice and inequality, to identify oppressive genealogy and structures, and to imagine a radical existence where minoritized voices and aspirations are visible in public life. Faithful witnessing demands an understanding that the feminist project is never complete as long as the forces of coloniality, racial capitalism, and human commodification continue to erode the path to freedom and liberation. The classroom is a curated space where we come together to normalize intersectional rage and recognize what it means to grapple with and refuse gendered and racialized expectations of our emotions. In essence, it encourages us to respond to Lorde’s call to consider the role of rage in materializing radical resistance and collective organizing. 

Why do I/we rage? What provoked my/our rage? How did I/we react in the moment? How does rage impact my/our behavior? How does it shape others’ perceptions of me/us? What are the consequences of my/our rage? Is it shameful to rage? Is rage always destructive? Meditating on rage and dancing with its rhythm, drawing it out from the innermost depth of one’s existence, and articulating its meaning in one’s life is a profoundly intimate act that offers renewed thinking about feminist theory, methodology, solidarity with others, and the self. This requires baring one’s soul on a visceral level. Inviting others into an exploration of the harrowing experiences of rage that induce uncertainty, erasure, and invisibility requires vulnerability in the hope that the collective can fortify the self (and others). Our embodied experiences, narratives, and testimonials of when, why, and how we rage structure the process of decolonizing knowledge and guide our actions. This, in turn, challenges the neoliberal practices that invalidate, constrain, and invisibilize subjugated ways of knowing. Those of us who are Black and brown, who are constantly reminded not to risk public rage or risk racist backlash, including violence and death, experience the witnessing of our rage as an affirmation of its value as a political feminist act deserving of public recognition. Raging intimately and communally makes rage a legible and formidable fuel for rebellious subjectivities.

Pedagogy of Rage

In designing my course Feminist Politics of Rage I heed Black feminist scholar bell hook’s vision of the interconnectedness of radical epistemology, collectivity, and liberation. hooks writes,

The academy is not paradise. But learning is a place where paradise can be created. The classroom, with all its limitations, remains a location of possibility. In that field of possibility we have the opportunity to labor for freedom, to demand of ourselves and our comrades an openness of mind and heart that allows us to face reality even as we collectively imagine ways to move beyond boundaries, to transgress. This is education as the practice of freedom. ¹⁵

As a pedagogical practice of freedom, I encourage students to consider rage as a cultural source of agency while acquiring the intellectual and political history of feminist rage to reimagine other lifeworlds and feminist futures. The syllabus maps a path for students to draw on and move with critiques of the affective turn in feminism, which interrogates the theoretical engagement of the interconnectedness of emotion, body, and language. ¹⁶ I view this course as a decolonial speaking-back to the neoliberal academic culture that has depoliticized intersectional and transnational feminist epistemologies and solidarities by disconnecting them from their radical roots and reconstituting them through elitist knowledge production. The course generated exceptional interest from students and the public; strangers wanted to audit and enrollment exceeded capacity. This reception spoke to the widespread feeling of demoralization in the face of Trump’s America that revitalized fierce feminist energy to counter misogyny and white supremacy and protect fundamental rights.

My work as a thinker, teacher, and writer is anchored in my life’s journey and my affection for liberating ways of knowing. As a newly arrived immigrant in the United States in the 1990s and later as a graduate student in the post-9/11 climate of anti-Muslim racism and Islamophobia, I was introduced to gendered racialization through embodied experiences, academic training, and feminist activism. Each day as I took the train from the South Side of Chicago into the city for school, I crossed a landscape of racial segregation riddled with its legacies. This was my first window into the racial politics of America and American cities. When I became an adjunct instructor, I found myself in a newly precarious existence, juggling responsibilities across two institutions with no security and limited income. As an adjunct, I was expected to take any course offered to me, often at the last minute, to accept payment below the minimum wage, and to stay silent in the face of these and other injustices in hopes of contract renewal. Now, as tenure-track faculty, I actively resist institutional harms by refusing to participate in masking racism under performances of diversity and inclusivity to maintain white dominance. ¹⁷ Meanwhile, I navigate rampant microaggression, reluctant mentoring, and persistent cultural taxation. As with many faculty of color, I routinely endure a hostile work climate, file grievances with little institutional support, and experience retaliation as a result. ¹⁸ As Chandra Talpade Mohanty has documented, one becomes a woman of color through the racial prism of the United States, a country built on the enslavement and genocide of Black and brown bodies. ¹⁹ So did I.

In the synoptic life journey that I’ve shared, anger has been a constant companion. Whether towards sexism, injustice, unethical conduct, discrimination, or racism, the presence of anger both galvanized and terrified me. I’ve lost count of my internal dialogues with my anger. I’ve frequently quarreled with it, carefully nurtured it, sometimes admired it, and often compartmentalized it to survive. It wasn’t until engaging in solidarity work with women of color feminists in Chicago that I learned to sit with my anger, listen to its demands, flow with its rhythm, and recognize its fragility. I meditated on this complex affect in relation to my existence as an immigrant Muslim woman of color. I began to see how, like Audre Lorde’s uses of anger, mine could show me its shifts, its locations in myself, its conscious and unconscious manifestations, and its interactions with the world, its people, places, and ideas. ²⁰

Over the years, I’d like to think I’ve achieved an intimate state in my relationship with anger, which I now embrace as rage. If anger clued me in to the politics and embodiment of pain and pleasure, in rage I experience a clarity and strength to seize the possibilities of these feelings. I think of rage as an epistemology of the self as a life force because it allows for an intimate exploration and reclamation of my innermost desires and fears. In the words of Lorde, my rage “empowers [me] and becomes a lens through which [I] scrutinize all aspects of [my] existence, forcing [me] to evaluate those aspects honestly in terms of their relative meaning within [my] life.” ²¹ When I rage and am in rage/enraged, my world is brighter, my senses are heightened, and my purpose is definitive. In times when I simply felt I could not go on, it has seen me through. And although it is still sometimes terrifying, I have learned to trust it because it signifies a flourishing vital to living fiercely. Across time and geographical boundaries and through different spaces and relational encounters, rage has been that erotic knowledge, per Lorde, that has changed me.

When I created the course Feminist Politics of Rage, I poured my personal history into the process in hopes that, through modeling, I could generate a communal experimentation zone for critical and joyous conversations about feminist rage welcoming to students who were nonbinary, queer, trans, undocumented, and first-generation people of color. These are students whose sense of self has been fragmented by gender scripts, patriarchal practices, heteronormative values, white supremacy, and combative families. Inspired by Mohanty’s question, “Is home a geographical space, a historical space, an emotional, sensory space?” I worked to offer these students a home in gender studies away from their alienation, misrecognition, and trauma. ²² Home is always political, whether one constructs it intentionally or not. ²³ Gender studies embraces students, faculty, and subjects on the margins, providing security for struggles and ideas otherwise diminished and space to be heard and blossom. While the academy remains a neoliberal institution that commodifies diversity, equity, and inclusion, I aim to make my classroom a space where students can experience the latitude to flirt with their own autonomy, belonging, and imagine differently.

In designing this course, I hoped for the upcoming generation of gender studies students to experience why rage matters in feminist politics and why it belongs in the public space. By exploring their own rage, reading the assigned textual materials, watching clips and documentaries, and analyzing the emotions that inform rage-related movements or actions, students made the connection between public performances of intersectional rage and the innerworkings of solidarity efforts, alliance building, and resistance strategies attentive to interior and exterior dynamics of gender, race, class, ability, imperialism, and empire. I wanted students to believe that their rage is valid, and I wanted to offer them tools to work through the complexity of this emotion to harness its potential for transformative change. I wish for rage to be one in a reservoir of life-sustaining and life-altering resources, both theoretical and practical, from which to anchor their actions. For many students, this experience is very new. Rage is for many a source of shame that people respond to with repression and silence in order to comply with gendered and racialized social and cultural expectations; the risks of doing otherwise, as I mentioned earlier, can be high. Slone, a Filipinx Japanese genderqueer student, had this to say:

When I came to the academy straight out of high school, I struggled deeply with the fact that my rage suddenly seemed illegible in the spaces I needed to succeed in. I started as a sociology major before switching to gender studies. I did so because I was angry and needed an outlet to channel that into. I felt like I was [often] punished for my rage and inability to sit down and shut up in class; sometimes it was a welcome addition, but sometimes I was being disruptive (i.e., disagreeing with the professor). This class has been extremely important in allowing me to feel all my feelings when engaging with this content because there’s no other way to do it. There is rarely space in academia to acknowledge and listen to rage and grief, and that’s part of what has made me feel alienated from academia and my classes. ²⁴

Methodology of Rage

The course is structured to guide students to progress through various stages of knowledge acquisition and production. The first stage familiarizes them with a feminist genealogy of rage, including texts such as Lorde’s “The Uses of Anger” and selections from Moraga and Anzaldúa’s This Bridge Called My Back. We engage in intersectional, transnational, and decolonial feminist analysis to investigate the possibilities and limits of rage. We focus on it as a crucial site for understanding the formation of the self, family, community, and political affiliation. We read key theorists of rage such as bell hooks, Angela Davis, June Jordan, Sara Ahmed, Maria Lugones, Ann Cvetkovich, Randa Jarrar, Soraya Chemaly, Brittney Cooper, and Hil Malatino, among others, to develop critiques of traditional, non-affect-informed epistemologies and methodologies, to innovate ways of thinking and knowing, and to reflect on how theoretical critique relates to embodied experiences. We use feminist rage theory to analyze issues including sexism, racism, harassment, gender-based violence, reproductive justice, body image, and social protests.

I created assignments, in-class writings, and collaborative exercises that could hold a spectrum of rage and rage-based feminist analysis. Examples include a concept illustration that encourages students to synthesize key concepts through creative imagination and mixed media, and an anthology of feminist rage wherein students contribute original scholarly/experimental/creative essays, testimonials, short stories, poems, recorded performances, multimedia pieces, or art pieces through intersectional, transnational, postcolonial, and decolonial feminist frameworks. Students are encouraged to submit bilingual and non-English works accompanied by a translated text. Writing exercises produce memorable and teachable pieces that illustrate the meaning-making of rage in students’ lives. For example Stony, a mixed-raced self-identified C-PTSD trauma survivor, wrote, “And in some unforgotten corner lived the memories that sought to consume me, waiting to grow large and fanged in my inability to accept someone else’s violent decision. But in naming the creature I once found too ugly and terrible to acknowledge, I find my first step out, away, back to me. In raising a hell to encircle the beast, let it burn hot like a beacon that cannot, that will not mark me, for it was me who lit the fire.” ²⁵ Stony has long struggled with the rage that emerged from “someone else’s violent decision.” Gendered expectations led them to feel that their rage must be squashed, but through the course their buried rage surfaced. They began to grapple with how self-silencing and denial impacted their mental health and selfhood. By harnessing their rage, they were able to find a source of self-determination and healing.

Both times I offered this course, class sessions generated intense, intimate conversations that emotionally and intellectually depleted us by the end of the day. We’d discuss, disagree, innovate, cohere on issues, work in unison, then disagree. Tense discussions did not always lead to breakthroughs, but we never gave up on each other. Rage threaded through the various narratives of memory and forgetting: tempers flared, tears flowed, and emotions were laid bare. I could only marvel at the necessity and urgency of this course to our lives.

This level of vulnerability required an even higher level of collective trust and reciprocity. I spent hours aligning assignments with community building activities to help students develop their own stakes in creating and maintaining a collaborative, political, feminist space. I did not exempt myself from the process. I, too, shared my stories and traumas, signaling to students my commitment and accountability to the goals of the course, as well as my willingness to transgress academic norms. With this, I hoped students could trust that our political investments and our principled actions toward a just world could see us through the most challenging conversations. What resulted was a cocoon of exhilarating reciprocity. Students saw, heard, and valued each other’s pain, labor, and worth. Through intimate witnessing, we transformed our private rage into collective rage.  

The solidarity from these shared moments was intellectually cathartic and poignantly soul stirring. I share the thoughts of Roxy, a first-generation queer Xicana, to demonstrate how feminist spaces of dissent and healing can emerge out of a repressive neoliberal institution:

This course has allowed me to engage in my own emotions, something often difficult to do in a capitalist system. What you have done for us is truly revolutionary and I’m confident in saying that each person in this room will take a piece of this course with them into their lives forever. What I ended up doing [for the final project] was reflecting on the instances in my life where anger was transformative to me. I’ve never really had the opportunity to reflect and write ​on these events or think about the ways in which they have shaped my relationship with womxn in my family. It was such an emotional yet empowering experience to write about anger in a healing manner. ²⁶

Julia, a self-identified Latina who is “not Latina enough for Latinas,” wrote,

I used to think that it was necessary to silence my emotions and anger to protect myself and not get tired, but this class has shown me how privileged that perspective was and how necessary it is to remain deeply emotionally connected to the work I do. This class has introduced concepts that I am using in my personal healing journey and my feminist politics, and it has constantly made me interrogate my own work and my place in the feminist movement. ²⁷

Students’ radical feminist praxis, courageous thinking, and creative self-expressions made the course into an unapologetic feminist laboratory where the politics of rage, resistance, and love translated into a viable and meaningful practice of freedom. The laboratory held us together and nourished us when the horrors of Trump’s presidency produced an uptick in hate rallies and crimes. Students’ laboring bodies collectively forge the path for feminist futures by reclaiming selves and envisioning alternatives to individualized preoccupations, capitalist destructions, and transactional relationships. Their situated subjectivity links lived realities and histories of subjugation and alienation with on-the-ground struggles locally and globally. As a community, we learn from each other, navigating the deeply layered and complex contradictions, meshing our embodied experiences, and existing. We demand that our voices matter.

Rage’s Future

From my earliest childhood memories in Malaysia, I recall repeatedly being told to “stop being angry” (berhenti marah) and that anger “depletes the body” (memenatkan badan) and “ruins the mind” (merosakan fikiran). In my urban Malay Muslim cultural context with its social and familial mores, anger is antithetical to being a woman. Respectable girls and women should be shy and docile and always exhibit self-control as the family’s reputation and honor lie in their behavior and between their legs. The child that I was did not have the feminist vocabulary to name patriarchy, let alone how women participated and reproduced these patriarchal mandates. But I had feelings. The persistent anger at the injustice of gender inequality oriented my sense of self. Once, during kindergarten, I ran home in tears after a Chinese teacher called me a dog. I couldn’t explain that her racialization of Malays was shaped by the British colonial legacy of “divide and conquer” and ongoing racial strife. I only felt the pain of her abuse. In my journey throughout the Malaysian educational system, I remember frequent experiences like this one and the unbridled anger I felt in the face of gender scripts, race and ethnic divides, and power hierarchies. Many years later when I was an undergrad, I had more choices but not the language and analytical frameworks I have today. I entered concurrent non-monogamous relationships to spurn the patriarchal dictate of gender conformity and male-female dynamics. Since then, I have learned to feel rage and make different choices with it.

As I learned how to rage, so too have my students. Ruby, a self-identified nonbinary student, said,

Rage is a form of passion. It is a passionate response of anger to mistreatment and oppression. Rage is power. It allows us to try and make meaningful changes in the world and begin difficult conversations. This class taught me not to fear my rage but to welcome it with curiosity. I embrace my rage. I challenge the concept taught to me in my wellness circles and therapy sessions that the goal with rage is to learn how to feel it to a lesser extent. My new relationship with rage is to use it as part of my healing. I identify with rage as a form of healing. ²⁸

Zinki, a self-identified genderqueer student, wrote,

I define rage as a recognition that change needs to happen and that the world isn’t as it should be. When I was younger, I rarely allowed myself to feel rage (or I seldom felt like I was allowed to), but once I reached middle school and high school and became aware of my own queerness and transness, I was also introduced to things like feminism and organizing. My rage was endless and directionless at first; I was frustrated and angry that my friends and I were coming into a world that was so clearly not made for us to survive. With time and community, however, I learned to channel that rage into building relationships and organizing. ²⁹

The communal space we consciously nurtured animated a faithful witnessing that connects the personal to the political, private to public, past to present and future. Rage is the energy that thrums through our hearts, minds, and bodies where we learn to identify its life force, the implications of denying, stifling, ignoring, or silencing it, and the boundless potential it holds for revolutionary acts. We diligently work through the various stages of rage, oscillating between sitting with it and being fascinated, bewildered, and disgusted by it, mourning it, and embracing it as a source of healing and forward movement. Our recognition of the power of rage and how it manifests across differences shows us that rage doesn’t have to be destructive. Rage activates a refusal to surrender to the imperialist white supremacist capitalist patriarchy that permeates our lives. Rage encourages a deeper look inward by recalling and grounding us in a particular feminist way of knowing. Recognizing rage in all its complexity is reclaiming the self. It is a labor of radical love central to imagining freedom and liberation.

Conclusion

Soraya Chemaly writes, “Anger is the demand of accountability. It is evaluation, judgment, and refutation. It is reflective, visionary, and participatory. It’s a speech act, a social statement, an intention, and a purpose. It’s a risk and a threat. A confirmation and a wish. It is both powerlessness and power, palliative and a provocation. In anger, you will find both ferocity and comfort, vulnerability and hurt. Anger is the expression of hope.” ³⁰ I share my personal and pedagogical rage journey in the hope that it finds its way into the archive of those who have raged before me and into the collective imagination of those who are raging now and in the future. With Feminist Politics of Rage I want students to see the potential in engaging, rather than suppressing, their rage. Rage should be felt. Rebellion is necessary. Change is possible.

I learn from my rage and from my students’ rage, which has only strengthened my commitment to a feminist education that has the potential to redirect actions into living lives where we can thrive. Thriving is about having the tools and strategies to self-reflect in a generative environment where we can fall or fail, knowing there will be people to pick us up, hold and comfort us, and insist we keep moving, doing, and being. Thriving contests the expectation that survival is the best we can get in this heteropatriarchal and heteronormative world. Thriving is rage’s manifestation of feminist futures on personal, intellectual, and activist levels.

If nothing else, the years of being subjected to Trump’s shock politics, misogyny, xenophobia, and gaslighting reminded us of the indispensable connections between feminism, radical freedom, and democracy. In the days and years following that historic election, rage rose from the ashes of deep wounds and scattered across wreckages. But it didn’t stop. It coalesced into a creative and methodological force that allowed us to practice solidarity across differences and intergenerational divides. Rage produces unexpected connections and conversations, bringing the sacred into the secular and enriching alternative frameworks to fortify feminist organizing. Rage fuels the feminist navigation of precarities in our precious lives and guides the feminist vision of freedom and justice by demanding accountability in our everyday practices. It is precisely the boundless potential in rage politics that makes this affect the future where hope resides.

ENDNOTES

1. “US Election: Full Transcript of Donald Trump’s Obscene Videotape,” British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), October 9, 2016, https://www.bbc.com/news/election-us-2016-37595321.[↑]
2. Danielle Diaz, “3 Times Trump Defended His Locker Room Talk,” CNN, October 9, 2016, https://www.cnn.com/2016/10/09/politics/donald-trump-locker-room-talk-presidential-debate-2016-election/index.html.[↑]
3. Banu Gökarıksel and Sara Smith, “Making America Great Again?: The Fascist Body Politics of Donald Trump,” Political Geography 54 (2016): 79, https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0962629816300506.[↑]
4. Southern Poverty Law Center, “Alt-Right,” https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/extremist-files/ideology/alt-right.[↑]
5. Myisha Cherry, The Case for Rage: Why Anger is Essential to Anti-Racist Struggle (Oxford University Press, 2021), 18.[↑]
6. Southern Poverty Law Center, “Proud Boys,” https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/extremist-files/group/proud-boys.[↑]
7. Southern Poverty Law Center, “Oath Keepers: Guardians of the Republic,” https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/extremist-files/group/oath-keepers.[↑]
8. “Proud Boys Leader Sentenced to 22 Years in Prison for Seditious Conspiracy and Other Charges Related to U.S. Capitol ,” U.S Department of Justice, September 5, 2023, https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/proud-boys-leader-sentenced-22-years-prison-seditious-conspiracy-and-other-charges-related; “Court Sentences Two Oath Keepers Leaders on Seditious Conspiracy and Other Charges Related to U.S. Capitol Breach,” U.S Department of Justice, May 25, 2023, https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/court-sentences-two-oath-keepers-leaders-seditious-conspiracy-and-other-charges-related-us.[↑]
9. Nicole Gaudiano, “Election Result 2018: How Trump’s 2016 Win Inspired the Female Wave,” USA Today, November 7, 2018, https://www.usatoday.com/in-depth/news/politics/elections/2018/11/07/elections-results-2018-how-trumps-2016-win-inspired-female-wave/1864792002/.[↑]
10. Gaudiano, “Election Result 2018.”[↑]
11. Audre Lorde, “The Uses of Anger, ” Women’s Studies Quarterly 25, no. 1/2 (1997): 280.[↑]
12. Cherríe Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa, eds., This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color (Kitchen Table/Women of Color Press, 1981), xxiii.[↑]
13. Sara Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion (Edinburgh University Press, 2014), 10.[↑]
14. Maria Lugones, “Introduction,” in Pilgrimages=Peregrinajes: Theorizing Coalition Against Multiple Oppressions (Rowman & Littlefield, 2003), 7.[↑]
15. bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom (Routledge, 1994), 207.[↑]
16. Ann Cvetkovich, Depression: A Public Feeling (Duke University Press, 2012), 8-10.[↑]
17. Sara Ahmed, Complaint! (Duke University Press, 2021).[↑]
18. For example, see Tracy Lachica Buenavista, Dimpal Jain, and María C. Ledesma, eds. First-Generation Faculty of Color: Reflections on Research, Teaching, and Service (Rutgers University Press, 2023); Sara Ahmed, On Being Included: Racism and Diversity in Institutional Life (Duke University Press, 2012); Piya Chatterjee and Sunaina Maira, eds. The Imperial University: Academic Repression and Scholarly Dissent (University of Minnesota Press, 2014).[↑]
19. Chandra Talpade Mohanty, “Defining Genealogies: Feminist Reflections of Being South Asian in North America,” in Our Feet Walk the Sky: Writings by Women of the South Asian Diaspora, Sheela Bhatt et al. (Aunt Lute Books, 1993), 38-43.[↑]
20. Lorde, “The Uses of Anger,” 278–285.[↑]
21. Audre Lorde, “Uses of Erotic: The Erotic as Power,” in Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (Crossing Press, 1984), 51.[↑]
22. Mohanty, “Defining Genealogies,” 39.[↑]
23. Mohanty, “Defining Genealogies,” 39.[↑]
24. The student’s name has been changed to protect their privacy. This quote is from a submitted assignment for the author’s course Feminist Politics of Rage, Spring 2022.[↑]
25. The student’s name has been changed to protect their privacy. This quote is from a submitted assignment for the author’s course Feminist Politics of Rage, Spring 2022.[↑]
26. The student’s name has been changed to protect their privacy. This quote is from an e-mail a student wrote to me after completing the Feminist Politics of Anger course in Winter 2020. The email was dated March 13, 2020. This quote has been edited slightly for clarity.[↑]
27. The student’s name has been changed to protect their privacy. This quote is from a submitted assignment for the author’s course Feminist Politics of Rage, Spring 2022.[↑]
28. The student’s name has been changed to protect their privacy. This quote is from a submitted assignment for the author’s course Feminist Politics of Rage, Spring 2022.[↑]
29. The student’s name has been changed to protect their privacy. This quote is from a submitted assignment for the author’s course Feminist Politics of Rage, Spring 2022.[↑]
30. Soraya Chemaly, Rage Becomes Her: The Power of Women’s Anger (Atria Paperback, 2018), 295.[↑]