A flow is an effect of bodies that are going the same way. To go is also to gather. A flow can be an effect of gatherings of all kinds: gatherings of tables, for instance, as kinship objects that support human gatherings. How many times have I had the experience of being left waiting at a table when a straight couple walks into the room and is attended to straight away! For some, you have to become insistent to be the recipient of a social action, you might have to announce your presence, wave your arm, saying: “Here I am!” For others, it is enough just to turn up because you have already been given a place at the table before you take up your place. Willfulness describes the uneven consequences of this differentiation.
An attribution of willfulness involves the attribution of negative affect to those bodies that get in the way, those bodes that “go against the flow” in the way they are going. The attribution of willfulness is thus effectively a charge of killing joy. Conversations are also flows; they are saturated. We hear this saturation as atmosphere. To be attributed as willful is to be the one who “ruins the atmosphere.” A colleague says to me she just has to open her mouth in meetings to witness eyes rolling as if to say, “oh here she goes.” My experience as a feminist daughter in a conventional family taught me a great deal about rolling eyes. You already know this. However you speak, the one who speaks up as a feminist is usually viewed as “causing the argument,” as the one who is disturbing the fragility of peace. To be willful is to provide a point of tension. Willfulness is stickiness: it is an accusation that sticks.
If to be attributed as willful is to be the cause of the problem, then we can claim that willfulness as a political cause. Queer feminist histories are full of self-declared willful subjects. Think of the Heterodoxy Club that operated in Greenwich Village in the early 20th century, a club for unorthodox women. They described themselves as “this little band of willful women,” as Judith Schwarz reveals in her wonderful history of this club.1 A heterodoxy is “not in agreement with accepted beliefs, or holding unorthodox opinions.” To be willful is to be willing to announce your disagreement, and to put yourself behind a disagreement. To enact a disagreement might even mean to become disagreeable. Feminism we might say is the creation of some rather disagreeable women.
Political histories of striking and of demonstrations are histories of those willing to put their bodies in the way, to turn their bodies into blockage points that stop the flow of human traffic, as well as the wider flow of an economy. When willfulness becomes a style of politics, it means not only being willing not to go with the flow, but also being willing to cause its obstruction. One could think of a hunger strike as the purest form of willfulness: a body whose agency is expressed by being reduced to obstruction, where the obstruction to others is self-obstruction, the obstruction of the passage into the body. Histories of willfulness are histories of those who are willing to put their bodies in the way.
Political forms of consciousness can also be thought of as willfulness: not only is it hard to speak about what has receded from view, but you have to be willing to get in the way of that recession. An argument of second-wave feminism (one shared with Marxism and Black politics) that I think is worth holding onto is the argument that political consciousness is achieved: raising consciousness is a crucial aspect of collective political work. Raising consciousness is difficult as consciousness is consciousness of what recedes. If the point of a recession is that it gives some the power to occupy space (occupation is reproduced by the concealment of the signs of occupation), then raising consciousness is a resistance to an occupation.
- Judith Schwarz, Radical Feminists of Heterodoxy (Chicago, IL: New Victoria Publishers, 196) 103. [↩]
