Feminist Killjoys (And Other Willful Subjects)

Feminist Tables

A feminist call might be a call to anger, to develop a sense of rage about collective wrongs. And yet, it is important that we do not make feminist emotion into a site of truth: as if it is always clear or self-evident that our anger is right. When anger becomes righteous it can be oppressive; to assume anger makes us right can be a wrong. We know how easily a politics of happiness can be displaced into a politics of anger: the assumption of a right to happiness can convert very swiftly into anger toward others (immigrants, aliens, strangers) who have taken the happiness assumed to be “by right” to be ours. It is precisely that we cannot defend ourselves against such defensive use of emotion that would be my point. Emotions are not always just, even those that seem to acquire their force in or from an experience of injustice. Feminist emotions are mediated and opaque; they are sites of struggle, and we must persist in struggling with them.¹

After all, feminist spaces are emotional spaces, in which the experience of solidarity is hardly exhaustive. As feminists we have our own tables. If we are unseated by the family table, it does not necessarily follow that we are seated together. We can place the figure of the feminist killjoy alongside the figure of the angry Black woman, explored so well by Black feminist writers such as Audre Lorde² and bell hooks³. The angry black woman can be described as a killjoy; she may even kill feminist joy, for example, by pointing out forms of racism within feminist politics. She might not even have to make any such point to kill joy. Listen to the following description from bell hooks: “a group of white feminist activists who do not know one another may be present at a meeting to discuss feminist theory. They may feel bonded on the basis of shared womanhood, but the atmosphere will noticeably change when a woman of color enters the room. The white woman will become tense, no longer relaxed, no longer celebratory.”⁴

It is not just that feelings are “in tension,” but that the tension is located somewhere: in being felt by some bodies, it is attributed as caused by another body, who comes to be felt as apart from the group, as getting in the way of its enjoyment and solidarity. The body of color is attributed as the cause of becoming tense, which is also the loss of a shared atmosphere. As a feminist of color you do not even have to say anything to cause tension! The mere proximity of some bodies involves an affective conversion. We learn from this example how histories are condensed in the very intangibility of an atmosphere, or in the tangibility of the bodies that seem to get in the way. Atmospheres might become shared if there is agreement in where we locate the points of tension.

A history can be preserved in the very stickiness of a situation. To speak out of anger as a woman of color is then to confirm your position as the cause of tension; your anger is what threatens the social bond. As Audre Lorde describes: “When women of Color speak out of the anger that laces so many of our contacts with white women, we are often told that we are ‘creating a mood of helplessness,’ ‘preventing white women from getting past guilt,’ or ‘standing in the way of trusting communication and action.'”⁵ The exposure of violence becomes the origin of violence. The woman of color must let go of her anger for the white woman to move on.

The figure of the angry black woman is a fantasy figure that produces its own effects. Reasonable, thoughtful arguments are dismissed as anger (which of course empties anger of its own reason), which makes you angry, such that your response becomes read as the confirmation of evidence that you are not only angry but also unreasonable! To make this point in another way, the anger of feminists of color is attributed. You might be angry about how racism and sexism diminish life choices for women of color. Your anger is a judgment that something is wrong. But then in being heard as angry, your speech is read as motivated by anger. Your anger is read as unattributed, as if you are against x because you are angry rather than being angry because you are against x. You become angry at the injustice of being heard as motivated by anger, which makes it harder to separate yourself from the object of your anger. You become entangled with what you are angry about because you are angry about how they have entangled you in your anger. In becoming angry about that entanglement, you confirm their commitment to your anger as the truth “behind” your speech, which is what blocks your anger, stops it from getting through. You are blocked by not getting through.

Some bodies become blockage points, points where smooth communication stops. Consider Ama Ata Aidoo’s wonderful prose poem, Our Sister Killjoy, where the narrator Sissie, as a black woman, has to work to sustain the comfort of others. On a plane, a white hostess invites her to sit at the back with “her friends,” two black people she does not know. She is about to say that she does not know them, and hesitates. “But to have refused to join them would have created an awkward situation, wouldn’t it? Considering too that apart from the air hostess’s obviously civilized upbringing, she had been trained to see the comfort of all her passengers.”⁶

Power speaks here in this moment of hesitation. Do you go along with it? What does it mean not to go along with it? To create awkwardness is to be read as being awkward. Maintaining public comfort requires that certain bodies “go along with it.” To refuse to go along with it, to refuse the place in which you are placed, is to be seen as causing trouble, as making others uncomfortable. There is a political struggle about how we attribute good and bad feelings, which hesitates around the apparently simple question of who introduces what feelings to whom. Feelings can get stuck to certain bodies in the very way we describe spaces, situations, dramas. And bodies can get stuck depending on the feelings with which they get associated.

1. For early work on feminist emotion see: Alison Jaggar, “Love and Knowledge: Emotion in Feminist Epistemology,” in Ann Garry and Marilyn Pearsall (eds.), Women, Knowledge and Reality: Explorations in Feminist Philosophy (New York: Routledge, 1996) 166-190; and Elizabeth Spelman, “Anger and Insubordination,” in Ann Garry and Marilyn Pearsall (eds.), Women, Knowledge and Reality: Explorations in Feminist Philosophy (New York: Routledge, 1989) 263-274. For an important argument about the need to separate injustice from the experience of pain and hurt see: Lauren Berlant, “The Subject of True Feeling: Pain, Privacy and Politics” in Sara Ahmed, Celia Lury, Jane Kilby, Maureen McNeil, and Beverley Skeggs (eds.), Transformations: Thinking Through Feminism (London: Routledge, 2000) 33-47. For further discussion of feminism and emotion see the final chapter, “Feminist Attachments,” which considers wonder, hope and anger as feminist emotions in: Sara Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2004). [↩]
2. See Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (Trumansburg, New York: The Crossing Press, 1984). [↩]
3. See bell hooks, Feminist Theory: From Margin to Centre (London: Pluto Press, 2000). [↩]
4. hooks, 56. [↩]
5. Lorde, 131. [↩]
6. Ama Ata Aidoo, Our Sister Killjoy (Harlow: Longman, 1997) 10. [↩]