Sara Ahmed, "Feminist Killjoys (And Other Willful Subjects)"
(page 8 of 8)

Conclusion: A Killjoy Manifesto

Audre Lorde teaches us how quickly the freedom to be happy is translated into the freedom to look away from what compromises your happiness.[21] The history of feminist critiques of happiness could be translated into a manifesto: Don't look over it: don't get over it. Not to get over it is a form of disloyalty. Willfulness is a kind of disloyalty: think of Adrienne Rich's call for us to be disloyal to civilization. We are not over it, if it has not gone. We are not loyal, if it is wrong.[22] Willfulness could be rethought as a style of politics: a refusal to look away from what has already been looked over. The ones who point out that racism, sexism, and heterosexism are actual are charged with willfulness; they refuse to allow these realities to be passed over.

Even talking about injustices, violence, power, and subordination in a world that uses "happy diversity" as a technology of social description can mean becoming the obstacle, as the ones who "get in the way" of the happiness of others. Your talk is heard as laboring over sore points, as if you are holding onto something—an individual or collective memory, a sense of a history as unfinished—because you are sore. People often say that political struggle against racism is like banging your head against a brick wall. The wall keeps its place so it is you that gets sore. We might need to stay as sore as our points. Of course that's not all we say or we do. We can recognise not only that we are not the cause of the unhappiness that has been attributed to us, but also the effects of being attributed as the cause. We can talk about being willful subjects, feminist killjoys, angry black women; we can claim those figures back; we can talk about those conversations we have had at dinner tables or in seminars or meetings. We can laugh in recognition of the familiarity of inhabiting that place, even if we do not inhabit the same place (and we do not). There can be joy in killing joy. Kill joy, we can and we do. Be willful, we will and we are.

Endnotes

1. This paper is dedicated to all feminist killjoys. You know who you are! [Return to text]

2. Arlie Russell Hochschild, The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003) 59-61. [Return to text]

3. Sara Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006) 138. [Return to text]

4. Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, trans. by H.M. Parshley (London: Vintage Books, 1997) 28. [Return to text]

5. See, for example: Nancy Garden, Annie on My Mind (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1982) 191. [Return to text]

6. Marilyn Frye, The Politics of Reality: Essays in Feminist Theory (Trumansburg, New York: The Crossing Press, 1983). [Return to text]

7. Frye, 2-3. [Return to text]

8. 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). [Return to text]

9. See Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (Trumansburg, New York: The Crossing Press, 1984). [Return to text]

10. See bell hooks, Feminist Theory: From Margin to Centre (London: Pluto Press, 2000). [Return to text]

11. hooks, 56. [Return to text]

12. Lorde, 131. [Return to text]

13. Ama Ata Aidoo, Our Sister Killjoy (Harlow: Longman, 1997) 10. [Return to text]

14. Alice Walker, In Search of Our Mothers Gardens (Phoenix: New Edition, 2005). [Return to text]

15. Julia Penelope, Call Me Lesbian: Lesbian Lives, Lesbian Theory (Berkeley, CA: Crossing Press, 1992) 42. [Return to text]

16. Marily Frye, Willful Virgin: Essays in Feminism, 1976-1992 (Berkeley, CA: Crossing Press, 1992) 9. [Return to text]

17. Judith Schwarz, Radical Feminists of Heterodoxy (Chicago, IL: New Victoria Publishers, 196) 103. [Return to text]

18. Sara Ahmed, Shona Hunter, Sevgi Kilic, Elaine Swan, and Lewis Turner, "Race, Diversity and Leadership in the Learning and Skills Sector," (PDF) Unpublished Report, 2006. [Return to text]

19. Nirmal Puwar, Space Invaders: Race, Gender and "Bodies out of Place" (Oxford: Berg, 2004). [Return to text]

20. For excellent discussions of racial melancholia see: Anne-Anlin Cheng, The Melancholia of Race: Psychoanalysis, Assimilation and Hidden Grief (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001); and David L. Eng and Shinhee Han, "A Dialogue on Racial Melancholia," in David L. Eng and David Kazanjian (eds.) Loss: The Politics of Mourning (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003) 343-371. [Return to text]

21. Lorde, 76. [Return to text]

22. Adrienne Rich, "Disloyal to Civilization," in Lies, Secrets and Silence (Norton: New York, 1979). [Return to text]

Page: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8