Sara Ahmed's Blog

A killjoy’s answer is an answer to these questions: why another book on complaint? Why another trade book? Why another handbook?

A Complainer’s Handbook is currently in the process of being retitled but that is not an answer to these questions.

The answer is in an off-repeated utterance:

“This does not just happen in universities, you know.”

I did know.

I do know.

And so, I am pulling these stories out.

Their killjoy truths, too.

I knew I needed to write that knowledge.

Or from it.

I will be sharing what these tales tell us: about institutional power and institutional change.

World change even.

Power also.

Tales and trails.

And that is also a killjoy’s answer to the question of why I am writing a newsletter.

I am writing to share killjoy knowledge, to ask questions, to answer them. You can subscribe here:

https://substack.com/@feministkilljoys

In killjoy solidarity as ever

Sara xx

Some definitions.

1 “A woman has a vagina; a man has a penis”

(some politicians, with a nod to “gender critical” feminists)

2 “A woman does not have a penis”

(some politicians, with a nod to “gender critical” feminists)

3 “A woman is an adult human female”

(“gender critical” feminists, citing dictionaries).

4 “A woman is a woman and a man is a man, that’s just common sense”

(former UK prime-minister, citing the well-known source “common sense” also cited by “gender critical” feminists)

What the fuck!

Welcome to the patriarchal dystopia otherwise known as “gender critical” feminism where women are defined as having vaginas as if this definition is necessary for feminism.

Much made “gender critical” claim: we have to define women to liberate women!

But that’s the patriarchal order! Define women!

Much-needed critique: You don’t need to define something to liberate it.

Much-needed counter-claim:  We need to liberate women from being defined.

After all, consider where we ended up, by definition.

A woman is a woman.

Oh, the sheer and utter banality of this, sexism, his received wisdom, the patriarch, learning nothing about anything by saying something is something.

To say a tree is a tree is to say nothing about trees.

To learn nothing.

If man is the answer to the question of what is man, the answer is there is no question.

A woman is a woman.

The patriarch is telling us he has nothing to learn about women.

That he does not want us to question who women is or for there, even, to be a question.

But we do.

Question, that is.

????

!!!!

Question yes, but why the exclamations, Sara?!

Because of where we have ended up, dear reader.

Turning feminism into another, nothing learnt.

Anneliese Dodds and Bridget Phillipson has been recently appointed as ministers for women and equalities. Neither seem to be part of the “gender critical” feminist movement, by which I mean, they do not seem to be endlessly searching for a definition of women that is robust enough, or crude or banal enough, to exclude trans women, once and for all.

Dodds has said what many feminists have long said. Definitions of women are contextual: how we define women depends on who is defining women and in what domain.

Responses from “gender critical” feminists and their patriarchal pals are as expected.

A “gender critical” feminist said: her comments are “nonsensical.” Labour has “abandoned” women!

A patriarchal pal said: “That is like appointing two climate deniers as Co-Secretaries of State for Net Zero.”

Oh no, they won’t define women! Which means they deny women exist!

Why do we have such a ministerial position? Not because of who women are, but where women aren’t. We have such a position in order to redress gender inequalities. In fact many people who are happy to define women do not believe in the existence of gender inequalities!

You don’t need a definition to pay one group of people less than another or to treat one group as worth more than others. As anyone who knows equality law knows, you can be discriminated against because you are perceived to be a member of a disadvantaged group whether or not you are.

Perceptions have material consequences.

Groups, social achievements. With histories.

To be a member of a group is to be assigned a place in history.

Not all of us keep to our assignments. Our place in history.

To fight for change requires, usually, loosening the hold of a history, sometimes by saying something has a history, what might have previously been thought of as nature.

The way things are.

Or were.

Definition is a past tense activity (the word coming from French definicion from de “completely”+ finire “to bound, limit,” from finis “boundary, end”).

No, we are not finished! We will not end the conversation! We are just beginning. We don’t know who will come, or who we will become, when we have refused to be delimited by definition.

That refusal is not about words or not only about words. It is about worlds.

Definitions precede us.

Yes.

We exceed them.

Also, yes.

That is why, mostly, liberation is from definition. This is no mere negative model of freedom (freedom from rather than freedom to). To be liberated from definition is how we open up what it is possible to do and to be.

For some to define ourselves for ourselves is to counter claims that we do not or cannot exist.

Claim 1: You cannot change sex.

Claim 2: Sex is material.

These claims are in contradiction. If sex is material, then it most certainly can be changed.

Matter is, after all, dynamic.

Almost by definition.

And so are we; dynamic, that is.

Almost by definition.

Power: how the change that might otherwise happen because of the dynamic nature of life is stopped.

Power: how you stabilise what is required to survive or thrive within a given environment.

No wonder the elites promote “gender critical” feminism– sex made another conservative agenda, turned into evidence of what cannot or should not be changed (like history, institutions, the nation-state, civilisations itself).

Back to sex, to nature, that rock.

“What passes as common sense feels as if it has always been there, the sedimented, bedrock, wisdom of ‘the race’” (thanks Stuart Hall).

A feeling of longevity, what goes without saying.

That rock crumbles.

Things, they say, have always been that way.

Except they haven’t.

Words, they say, have always meant the same thing.

Except they didn’t.

Feminism’s Brexiteers (thanks Sarah Franklin),

Oh, what your victories are costing us, will cost us, all of us, even all of you.

So: we will keep moving, fighting, being.

And knowing.

Those who refuse to be bound by definition know more about definitions, how they  function, what they do; we learn about police by being policed, from doing what we are not supposed to do, by definition.

Definitions are not private acts. They are messages, often issued as instructions, with social lives; telling us who we are or who we can be, where we can go or not go.

Boundaries are drawn; a hand in things.  No, we are not saying boundaries are fascist (they say we say that for a reason).  Boundaries are products of labour. They are made from materials, what is “out there,” but they are made. They sometimes have a moral purpose, a way of grouping things, like the boundary between weeds and flowers, a boundary which does something, issued as another instruction: weed them out, get them out, they will take over, protect the garden, that little petal!

Boundaries: how worlds are shaped.

Boundaries: established by force, at least sometimes.

The violence directed to someone because she looks like a woman. And that is a message passing down like electricity, that he can do that, she deserves that.

She shrinks, makes herself smaller.

Or perhaps she makes herself smaller to squeeze into the space she has been given.

Sex as architecture: who ends up with more space. Or less.

Before we enter the world, there are doors that tell us where to go, W or M.

If so then, sex is social before it is biological.

Institutional, even.

Any category.

Something you can be at home in.

Or not.

We might be told, we are girls right from the beginning: a girl, a woman-to-be!

We might be girls, or women, and never feel uncertain about the assignment, even when it is hard, the hostility the drips, another boundary lesson; the misogyny so close to the surface.

I understand the need for our own spaces.

But it is complicated.

The violence directed to some of us because we don’t look like women.

Is it a boy or a girl?

A question, hostility unmasked.

When some of us open the door with the letter, W, are told we are in the wrong place.

You don’t look like what a woman is supposed to look like.

You can be cis and be told this.

We might be told it is better or safer to be clear so they can tell us apart.

“Gender critical” feminists used these words: it is a “regrettable cost” when women are “mis-sexed” because they don’t look like women.

The demand, let us be clear, is to be clear.

Look like women, or else.

What did you expect would happen?

Gender normativity through the back door.

No wonder some of us are shown the door.

You might be taught that this is not a suitable place for women and girls.

But that place is.

Here; not there.

A hand, everywhere.

A meeting can be a definition.

You might be told you did not get the promotion because you did not attend all those meeting; the ones in the pub, too, nudge-nudge.

You did not drink and joke your way into their affections. Show your commitment.

Perhaps you did not attend the meetings because you had caring responsibilities.

Or because you cannot bear their affections.

Or because you disagreed with their definition of work. Or commitment.

You can be defined out of a promotion.

Defined out of existence.

And so yes,

Definitions most certainly matter.

Because of how they are made.

And, who makes them.

Who gets to define? Who is defined?

Toni Morrison wrote “definitions belong to the definers not the defined.”

Thank you Toni Morrison for so many wisdoms. What a novel philosopher.

Black and brown people, we know too well: what it means to be the defined not the definers.

Definition: a history of the definers.

Audre Lorde, gratitude for what you teach us, said, “If I didn’t define myself for myself, I would be crunched into other people’s fantasies for me and eaten alive.”

We will not be eaten alive.

Nor crushed.

A definition: the weight of a history. We have to feel it to be free of it.

We might say: women have been defined too much, too often, by men.

Gender: one set of definitions amongst other sets.

Gender as genre: thanks Sylvia Wynter.

And so, feminism as liberation movement is about making it harder not easier to define women.

Intersectionality: another way of making that point.

When a group has been oppressed, understandings of who they are (what they are) will be implicated in that oppression.

Implication = sticky

Remember, thanks to Marilyn Frye, the press in oppression.

A press, an impression, a definition.

Women: defined as the weaker sex.

Weakness, Simone de Beauvoir teaches us this, thanks for the lesson, is a moral judgement. Weakness only means something in relation to a project with an end. That is why biology is not just there, inert, but being shaped. That is why woman is not a biological category or, if biological, how biology becomes history.

Women as a historical situation. Most certainly, then, women as contextual.

You can be made weaker by definition– you are a girl so don’t do this or don’t do that. You might not acquire capacities that derive from action; also, from repetition.

It comes to look effortless with effort.

You teach yourself not to try.

You come to “throw like a girl” (thanks Iris Marion Young).

You might assume you don’t because you can’t. But really you can’t because you don’t.

Some women are not seen as women because of what they did or had to do, were made to do, forced to do, because they worked, undertook strenuous, physical labour.

Labouring bodies too strong, too muscular, arms too big, to receive that assignment, women.

Too capable, even.

Working-class women, Black and brown women.

Not too slight or too light to labour.

From having laboured.

There are many different kinds of labour.

Women going into labour, bearing children.

Women defined in terms of their reproductive capacities.

Women as becoming wives.

Well, some women.

It is an old wives’ tale.

The history of the word. Woman is a compound of wif (wife) and man (human being).

Woman as wife-man, woman as female servant.

The history of woman, impossible to disentangle from the history of wife, she becomes an “adult human female,” by being in relation to man.

She becomes his relative: wife, daughter, mother, sister.

Not herself, by definition.

Man = universal

Woman = relative

That is why lesbian feminist Monique Wittig claimed “lesbians are not women.”

To be a woman with a woman, women with women, is to become an “escapee” or a stray. Thanks Monique Wittig for escapees.

Straying from a system.

Oh, the strays, let’s get away!

Woman defined as being for man.

Woman as an empty vessel, a gap, a hole, to be filled by a man.

Woman has a vagina, they say.

Why are you so fucking obsessed.

What about clits and all the other bits?

I can feel an explosion, coming.

“Woman-Identified Woman” by RADICALESBIANS begins with an explosion.

“A lesbian is the rage of all women condensed to the point of explosion.”

An explosive speech act.

A lesbian herself becomes a tipping point, a breaking point, a snap.

She explodes

And not just definitions,

When reality is conferred as being in relation to man,

A relation can be revolting.

Women with women change the meaning of women.

They cannot see what we change.

Not real, not seen as real, not really.

That might be why lesbians tend to be more supportive of the project of trans liberation than many other people.

And yes, some of us are trans.

Because we know what it is like to be seen as less real or not really real; to have other people doubt our existence.

Not even to notice our explosions.

What is made possible by not wanting to be defined by the definer.

Let us revolt!

Refuse the patriarch’s instructions!

We fight for women!

We fight as women refusing to be defined as women!

Doing it for ourselves,

by which I mean,

of course,

this goes with saying,

for each other,

Sara xx

 

 

I am thinking of how we need poetry

To express ourselves

Practicing feminism

By bearing witness to genocide

To echo the words of Sarah Ihmoud

To get our no’s out.

To express, to press out, to speak one’s mind.

The sense evolution “perhaps via the intermediary sense of how clay under pressure takes a certain form.”

When I imagine that clay, I imagine not only how we give shape to something, but how we  under pressure to take a certain form.

Maybe we are supposed to be polite.

A smile, a container.

To express ourselves, to get it out of ourselves, ourselves out, means we have to resist that pressure.

That is why we need poets, now, more than ever, always now, always more than ever, whenever your now is.

The need for new words is not new.

Consider Lorde’s short essay ‘Poetry is not a Luxury’. The title is a claim. Lorde is making a claim about what poetry is not, perhaps because she is challenging an assumption about what poetry is.

For whom would poetry be a luxury? Lorde responds by saying that poetry is not that, not a luxury, that poetry is necessary, as necessary, perhaps, as bread. Poetry is what we need to sustain ourselves.

It is “through poetry,” Lorde suggests, “that we give name to those ideas which are ‒ until the poem ‒ nameless and formless ‒ about to be birthed, but already felt.”

Poetry is giving birth to new form. Feeling, for Lorde, is giving form to something.

Those who don’t fit the old forms need to create their own forms.

If we need to create our own forms, we don’t yet have what we need.

So, we need each other.

Lorde writes, “As we learn to bear the intimacy of scrutiny and to flourish within it, as we learn to use the products of that scrutiny for power within our living, those fears which rule our lives and form our silences begin to lose control over us.”

We are told that to leave the safety of a brightly lit path, the happiness path, the straight path, would be to cause your own misfortune, to steal your own future happiness, such that if something happens, if the worst happens, and let’s face it, shit happens, then you have brought this upon yourself.

You have to go towards what you have been taught to fear.

Speaking the words you have been told will cost you.

Speaking them louder.

Pointing to history, feeling the weight of the words.

Returning to that history with a demand for freedom.

With words, what can you do?

In her essay, “Eye to Eye,” Audre Lorde described racism and sexism as ‘grown-up words.”

We experience them before we can name what we experience.

To return to your past with these words is to see something that you did not, could not, see at the time.

This is why some of the work we do in giving problems their names could be understood as poetry.

The past becomes alive with new meanings. You become estranged from the past; you rearrange it. To rearrange the past is more than rearranging furniture, although it can feel like that, creating a different sense of space.

We open the door to the past, we let in it, because of what we did not see in what happened when it happened, the violence, the structure of it, the repetition, the pattern.

When we open that door, so much spills.

History spills.

I think of Alexis Pauline Gumbs’s Spill: Scenes of Black Feminist Fugitivity, her ode to the work and wisdom of Black feminist literary critic Hortense Spillers. Gumbs attends to Spillers’ words with love and care, to what spills, to words that spill, to liquid that spills out from a container, to being somebody who spills things.

Spillage can be a breaking, of a container, a narrative, a turning of phrases so that “doors opened and everyone came through.”

Spillage can be, then, the slow labour of getting out of something.

A poem, too, what spills.

In Undrowned, Gumbs teaches us to learn from marine mammals, what we need to breathe, to live, despite what is diminishing. We can be captured by the net of language, by names and pronouns, by how we are called into being. To free ourselves, we invent ourselves. We don’t demand recognition, to be seen. We cast our hopes elsewhere.

Gumbs asks: “What becomes possible when we are immersed in queerness of forms of life that dominant systems cannot chart, reward, or even understand?”

Dominant systems make so much and so many impossible.

We fight for possibility.

I think again of Lorde, who picked up on possibility, too, the time it takes.

Lorde wrote, “Poetry is not only dream or vision, it is the skeleton architecture of our lives. Possibility is neither forever nor instant. It is also not easy to sustain belief in its efficacy.”

Possibility can take the longest time because to make something possible requires dismantling what makes it not so.

Possibility is not plucked out of thin air.

Possibility comes from intimacy with what has thickened in time, the walls, the doors, how rooms are occupied, making it hard to breathe.

History is stale air.

A poem, a breath of fresh air.

To make something is to make it possible.

What we create is fragile because we need it to survive.

It is a loose thread.

Maybe our writing becomes looser as we refuse the requirement to express ourselves in a certain way.

We become conscious of words, how they matter, the sound of them.

In the language, we breathe.

Lightening a load by loosening the words.

Leaving our ends loose,

flopping and fraying.

We write, like we love, like we live.

telling tales, leaving trails.

The more we leave behind us, the easier it is to find us.

And by us, I mean each other.

Maybe that is what we do: find a way of getting no to you.

I talk about these words from Audre Lorde often. Because I hear so much in them. More each time.

How she was “sickened with fury” about the acquittal of a white policeman who had murdered a Black child that she had to stop the car to get her feelings out.

What came out was a poem she called “Power.”  

 Lorde teaches us that we sometimes have to stop what we are doing to register the impact of violence.

In that poem, Lorde uses an image of what poetry is not, poetry is not letting our power “lie limp and useless as an unconnected wire.”

Lorde uses words like electricity, snap, snap, sizzle.  

When Lorde stopped the car to write a poem about power, she took so much in, the violence of the police, the violence of white supremacy.

She took it in to get it out, a no, so that it can be passed around, so that it can be passed to others.

So, we can read her words now. So, we can pick them up and take them with us.

Language is a lead.

I am writing now, in the face of so much violence.

I am writing as Israel is carrying out a genocide against the Palestinian people, so much more violence built on so much more violence: long histories of forced displacement, of colonial occupation.

Our government is not only complicit in that genocide but is seeking to criminalise those who protest.

We protest.

Silence about violence is violence.

We cannot pass over the violence happening now.

Without passing over justice.

It makes it hard to speak.

What makes it hard to speak is why we need to do so.

And it is poetry that comes to mind, words sent out, such as those by Refaat Alareer, Palestinian writer, scholar and poet, killed by a targeted Israeli strike on December 6, 2023.

His poem, “If I must die,” begins

“If I must die

you must live

to tell my story”

A poem can be the gift of an image.

Alareer gives us an image of a piece of cloth, and some strings, becoming a kite, “flying up above,” so that a child in Gaza, might see it and “think for a moment an angel is there, bringing back love.”

That poem, read out, by so many, translated, by so many, kept alive, by so many.

We need to be so many to keep you alive.

That cloth, those strings, words strung together, becoming a story we must live to keep telling.

A hand, setting the story free.

It is an image of hope. And of freedom.

We fight for that hope. For freedom.

We fight for the liberation of Palestine, and we do so collectively, each line, each lead, each fragile thread, delicate, precious, leading us to each other.

To keep the connections alive is to carry the words, Alareer’s, Lorde’s words, too, onto the streets; the snap of a slogan, a no, a stop, stopping the flow of human traffic, stopping the cars, taking it in, more of it, in.

 

#FreePalestine #EndTheGenocide

 

 

This was the first year since the beginning of the pandemic that I was able to be in the same room with other feminists, sharing our work, our words, our struggles. It meant so much. Presenting our work virtually has allowed us to reach each other in ways that we had not been able to before. But there is still something special about being in the same room together.

It was so energising, to feel that snap, snap, sizzle of an atmosphere.

To hear when you laughed. When you didn’t.

I am so grateful it was possible to do that. Thank you to everyone for sharing time and space.

I wrote The Feminist Killjoy Handbook as I wanted the feminist killjoy to be a shared resource; a handle, a hand. The figure of the feminist killjoy helps to make sense of how we become the problem for pointing out the problem, or how naming violence can mean we end up being treated as the cause of it.

You can killjoy when you don’t laugh at an offensive joke or when you refuse to cover over the injustices with a smile. You can killjoy because of what you do not and will not celebrate; national holidays that mark colonial conquest or the birth of a monarch. You can killjoy by entering the room because your body is a reminder of a history that gets in the way of the occupation of space. You can killjoy by asking to be addressed by the right pronouns or by correcting people if they use the wrong ones. You can killjoy by asking for that panel or that plenary not to be all white men, again. You can killjoy by asking to change a room because the room they have booked is not accessible, again.

Killjoy Truth: We have to keep saying it because they keep doing it.

But even if we are saying it because of what they keep doing, we are heard as the ones repeating ourselves, a broken record, stuck on the same point.

We are willing to repeat ourselves.

To be that broken record.

But:

It is hard to do that work on our own.

And so:

We need to find other killjoys.

That is one of my killjoy survival tips.

A student wrote to me she had shared my earlier book, Living a Feminist Life with friends, ‘I have been giving it to all of my girlfriends when they had their birthdays, and slowly, we are becoming a little group of killjoys.’ We might use the term consciousness raising, to describe the collectivity of feminist becoming. Another student wrote to me about her experiences of complaint. She wrote from a very painful place, giving me a trigger warning for the content she was to share. She wrote at the end of her letter, ‘My killjoy shoulder is next to yours and we are a crowd. I cannot see it at the moment but I know it’s there.’ I love the idea of a killjoy shoulder, of becoming feminist killjoys as we lean on each other.

Even when we cannot see a killjoy crowd, or especially when we cannot see it, it helps to know it’s there. I wrote The Feminist Killjoy Handbook, to say, it’s there.

Or we are here.

Find other killjoys is a survival tip, yes. It is also a research method, a way of reading texts, of recovering histories, and a life method, a way of connecting with people at a party, of surviving institutions.

When I took feminist killjoys on tour, I found other killjoys.

On return from taking the #FeministKilljoysOnTour for the launch of the US edition, I was going to do more. But I had to stop, to take in what was happening, the genocide in Gaza, the devastation.

Sometimes, we have to stop, to take it in, the violence in.

Sometimes, we need to be disorientated, to lose our bearings.

Or we are disorientated, whether or not we need to be.

Unbearable loss, grief, lost bearings.

Also rage.

I could no longer speak. My voice could no longer hold or at least I feared that my voice, usually my friend, would not be able to say the words that needed to be said. I am still writing, for some reason words keep coming out that way, writing about hostile institutions, how to survive them or, writing as I am now, about writing. But in the past months I could not bring myself to participate in any events in which I would have to speak. I could go to demonstrations, express my solidarity with Palestine, amplify the voices of Palestinian activists and poets and scholars on social media, read their work, signs letters and protest statements: but speaking with my actual voice, no, not that.

It might partly be that I could not imagine taking feminist killjoys back out on tour, virtually, at this time, to do anything that felt like it would be about promotion of my work, even though I know we don’t have to understand sharing our work using that logic. But whatever, it felt wrong to continue with the events I had planned. Still does.

I have been thinking about Chicana-Palestinian feminist Sarah Ihmoud’s question, “What does it mean to practice feminism in a moment of bearing witness to genocide?”In her beautiful piece, Ihmoud talks about her exchanges with Mona Ameen, a young Palestinian scholar in Gaza. She asks Mona if she has any messages for women and feminists around the world. Mona answers, “Keep posting and posting and posting about us … keep us in your prayers.” Sarah writes “ghassa/  غصة, that lump in our throat when the grief is thick and suffocating, to boldly disrupt the noise of complacency. We must loudly denounce this genocidal violence.”

As we enter a new year, we have to post and keep posting and be loud enough to get through that “noise of complacency.”

We speak to each other

Above that noise

For Palestinian freedom

For freedom

We speak to and through our grief

The struggle to get the words out

Why they matter

Even if we lose our voices when we speak

It is better to speak

You might be able to hear Audre Lorde here.

“It is better to speak.”

Better to speak to and with each other

To read for each other

To read each other

Finding other killjoys can be a reading project.

In Living a Feminist Life, I suggested we create our own killjoy survival kits. I included many books in mine. At the end of The Feminist Killjoy Handbook, I cite many books, old trails, old tails.

Citation is feminist memory.

The feminist killjoy herself could be understood as memory, a way of recalling part struggles.

I also include at the back of the handbook a recommended reading list for feminist killjoys. It includes many kick-ass books by Black feminists, Indigenous feminists and feminists of colour that have published since I first assembled my survival kit. They are in there now, doing their thing.

There are so many books that give killjoy inspiration! There will be more books to come. There will be more books to come because we need them.

Another feminist killjoy, Rajni Shah, wrote about their experience of setting up a feminist killjoy reading group in Sydney:

Several years later, the Feminist Killjoys Reading Group continues. Now there is a core group of five who meet regularly and organize monthly events at which anyone is welcome. It is a growing community. And creating this community is one of the ways of saying: it takes work to be a killjoy, and we need each other in order to be able to continue doing this work. In order for this work to exist, part of the work needs to be the work of finding solidarity and not parcelling each other up in the process.

I love how a reading group is a meeting group, a space opened for other killjoys to join. We need each other, more than ever. Finding other killjoys is finding solidarity. So, if you are reading The Feminist Killjoy Handbook in a group or class in 2024, I could to pop in virtually to express my killjoy solidarity. I hope to keep Sarah Ihmoud’s important question “what does it mean to practice feminism in a moment of bearing witness to genocide” in mind. These will need to be small groups and non-public events.  

If you would like me to join you, email thefeministkilljoyhandbook@gmail.com.

In killjoy solidarity

And in hope for a free Palestine

Sara xx

 

I was asked a question earlier this month. I cannot remember the exact wording, but it went something like “is it sometimes ok to be silent to be at peace with oneself.”

If I had been asked this question at another time, or if the question had been asked using slightly different words, I might have given this answer:

We do what we can, where we can, by recognising our own limits, our capacities, and that can be a way of surviving politically, by which I mean, keeping hold of our commitments. Sometimes, then, withdrawal from a conversation or silence in a situation can be how we keep doing our work.

But in the words “at peace with oneself” I heard something else.

They gave me another answer.

There are times when we cannot be at peace with ourselves.

There are times when we should not be at peace with ourselves.

We are in those times.

It is not the time to be silent.

Nor at peace with ourselves.

I do not want not to be shocked by what is happening right now, as I get up, move around, begin each day. I do not want not to be conscious of it, to let myself be distracted by this project or that. If I get distracted, which sometimes I do, I remember how that too can be a privilege, when you are not having to work just to stay alive.

The shock cannot stop when what is shocking has not.

It is shocking, the genocide happening right in front of us, watched, endorsed, justified, cheered, even, by so many officials on the left and the right; the destruction of lives and hopes and dreams, memories, futures, places, spaces, the deaths of so many Palestinian people. I don’t want understanding how colonial occupation works as an architecture of brutality and surveillance, how the military industrial complex is a condition of possibility for the incarceration of populations and peoples; how extreme acts of violence by a state can be justified as a right to defence; how some lives are valued more than others, how some deaths count more than others; how reality is distorted to fit the interests of those who are powerful, made into another weapon, so perpetrators of violence don’t have to see themselves, to stop myself from being shocked by this.

And then the shock of how others are not shocked.

And then, having the Home Secretary Suella Braverman calling protests against the violence committed against the Palestinian people, protests calling a ceasefire, for freedom for Palestine, “hate marches.”

Maybe it is not shocking because of what we know, that long history of justification of the violence committed by Israel through the use of the charge “antisemitism” against anyone critical of Israel,  also “extremism,” deflecting not only the critiques but the violence they point to.

You can not be shocked because it has happened before. Because we have been here before.

You want it to be shocking before it is too late.

It is already too late for too many.

You want it to be shocking before it is too late.

The BBC did issue an apology for calling those who marched for Palestinian freedom “Hamas supporters.”

You can apologise for an action but still do it.

Drop the words keep the frame.

Michelle Donelan, Secretary of State for Science, Innovation and Technology, wrote a letter to UK Research and Innovation (UKRI). She says she finds that its appointment of individuals to its equality, diversity and inclusion advisory group who had expressed “extremist views” disturbing. It is a disturbing letter, singling out and naming two academics (I will not name then because that she named then was itself an abuse of power). One had tweeted that she found the UK “crackdown on Hamas support” disturbing. Donelan demonstrates exactly why it is right to be disturbed. The UK “crackdown” has meant that any person who expresses support for Palestinian liberation or who critiques the actions of the Israeli state, past or present, can and will be treated as “supporting Hamas.”

There would be so much, then, that we would not be free to say or do, because of how it will be dismissed as terrorism or as “support for Hamas.” We are right to be disturbed by the attempt to stop those who support freedom for Palestine from speaking.

Saree Makdisi has described with breath-taking clarity the violence Palestinians speaking to the Western media are not allowed to speak of, “What we are not allowed to say, in other words, is that if you want the violence to stop, you must stop the conditions that produced it. You must stop the hideous system of racial segregation, dispossession, occupation, and apartheid that has disfigured and tormented Palestine since 1948, consequent upon the violent project to transform a land that has always been home to many cultures, faiths, and languages into a state with a monolithic identity that requires the marginalization or outright removal of anyone who doesn’t fit.”

We need to listen to Palestinians, to hear about the violences that would otherwise be left unsaid.

Donelan also calls the communications of another academic “extremist” because she used words the “apartheid” and “genocide” with reference to Israel.

These terms are used widely with reference to Israel for a reason.

So what else are we being told? I can hear what else we are being told.

When we are told calling enforced racialised segregation Israeli apartheid is extremism, we are being told Israeli apartheid is not extremism.

When we are told that naming extreme violence genocide is extremism, we are being told genocide is not extremism.

When human rights lawyer, Craig Mokhiber, the director of the New York Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, resigned he described what Israel is doing in Gaza as “a textbook case of genocide.” He also said, “The European, ethno-nationalist, settler colonial project in Palestine has entered its final phase, toward the expedited destruction of the last remnants of indigenous Palestinian life in Palestine.”

I understand the need to make this claim “a textbook case” but I still shuddered when I read it. As if that it is a textbook case makes it clearer or more real.

We don’t need a textbook or a definition or the law, even, to call it what it is.

The extremism that won’t see itself. The extremism that says it is not extreme to murder thousands of people, to call them human animals, not to see the difference between all of these people and a terrorist organisation, maybe they see some people vaguely, a threatening brown mass of humanity, racism that blunt instrument, calling them, “the children of darkness,” themselves the “children of light.”

But the marches are happening all over the world because people are seeing it, which also means that people, many, many people, are making it harder for the violence not to be seen, the violence of colonial occupation.

It takes a collective.

Has done, will do.

I remember saying (it’s a killjoy truth, even) this.

There is only so much we can take on because there is only so much we can take in.

Sometimes, we need to take it on even when we can’t take it in: to take it on as to take it out, to get out, to protest, to express ourselves.

To share our solidarity with Palestine.

All over the place.

I am grateful for all the people who are doing that: sharing words and solidarity, Black feminist solidarity, getting themselves onto the streets, into train stations, Sisters Uncut, Jewish Voices for Peace, stopping the traffic, becoming the traffic, chanting for Palestinian freedom, speaking up, speaking out, sometimes risking their own livelihoods in doing so. I am grateful for podcasters who are doing that, speaking out, speaking up, for radical publishers (also here), who are doing that, sharing resources on Palestine, a history, ever present.

We need these resources. We need each other more than other to show up, turn up, however we can, in our queer ways, so they cannot contain it, the violence, the injustice, the sheer abject cruelty, the devastation of a place and a people, screen it out, the blinds down.

I learn from Audre Lorde.  I always do. I reread her 1982 address  “Learning from the 60s,” given as an address to Black people on the occasion of Malcom X weekend at Harvard University.  Lorde says in her address that “revolution is not a one time event” but means becoming ever “vigilant for the smallest opportunity to make a genuine change in established outgrown responses.” In this address, Lorde gives an account of the times she is living in.

We are Black people living in a time when the consciousness of our intended slaughter is all around us. People of Color are increasingly expendable, our government’s policy both here and abroad.  We are functioning under a government ready to repeat in EI Salvador and Nicaragua the tragedy of Vietnam, a government which stands on the wrong side of every single battle for liberation taking place upon this globe; a government which has invaded and conquered (as I edit this piece) the fifty-three square mile sovereign state of Grenada, under the pretext that her 110,000 people pose a threat to the U.S. Our papers are filled with supposed concern for human rights in white communist Poland while we sanction by acceptance and military supply the systematic genocide of apartheid in South Africa, of murder and torture in Haiti and EI Salvador. American advisory teams bolster repressive governments across Central and South America, and in Haiti, while advisory is only a code name preceding military aid.

Decisions to cut aid for the terminally ill, for the elderly, for dependent children, for food stamps, even school lunches, are being made by men with full stomachs who live in comfortable houses with two cars and umpteen tax shelters.  None of them go hungry to bed at night. Recently, it was suggested that senior citizens be hired to work in atomic plants because they are close to the end of their lives anyway.

Can anyone of us here still afford to believe that efforts to reclaim the future can be private or individual? Can anyone here still afford to believe that the pursuit of liberation can be the sole and particular province of anyone particular race, or sex, or age, or religion, or sexuality, or class?

Lorde’s words echo as wisdom in history, her descriptions of her time, too relevant to our own. She calls for us to pursue freedom for all. It is an urgent call, a question turned into a bolt of electricity, to anyone of us here. I  hear in Lorde’s call for anyone of us here, to be committed to revolutionary change in the work we do, with our full selves and with each other. Lorde says, “To refuse to participate in the shaping of our future is to give it up. Do not be misled into passivity either by false security (they don’t mean me) or by despair (there’s nothing we can do). Each of us must find our work and do it.  Militancy no longer means guns at high noon, if it ever did. It means actively working for change, sometimes in the absence of any surety that change is coming. It means doing the unromantic and tedious work necessary to forge meaningful coalitions, and it means recognizing which coalitions are possible and which coalitions are not.  It means knowing that coalition, like unity, means the coming together of whole, self-actualized human beings, focused and believing, not fragmented automatons marching to a prescribed step.  It means fighting despair.”

I learn from Lorde and many others what it means to fight for change, to be in solidarity with Palestine, to form coalitions across our differences, keeping them in mind, making them meaningful, to march but not to a prescribed step, to fight, and to fight despair.  We become vigilant for the smallest opportunities for change before they close like windows.

We work for change whether or not it is coming.

Because that is the right and just thing to do.

Yes, each of us can only so much. Together, we can do more.

#SolidaritywithPalestine. #FreePalestine. #EndIsraelliApartheid #EndtheOccupation #CeaseFireNow

 

I write this post in solidarity with Palestine. I express my solidarity as a  feminist killjoy, in my own terms, on this blog. To express solidarity with Palestine is to be a killjoy, wherever we are. We get in the way because of how we mourn, or who we mourn, becoming a problem because of what we point to or because of the violence we refuse to pass over, the violence of colonial occupation, the violence enacted right now against people in Gaza by the Israeli state.

We are willing to get in the way.

I write this post as a no, made all the louder because of how it is shared with so many others, all over the world, no to the Israeli state, no to those standing in alliance with the Israeli state, no to those who justify the violence unleashed against Palestinians, no to the dehumanising rhetoric that has its own colonial history allowing that violence to be enacted, legitimated, by not being seen.

To see the violence can be to unlearn how it is not seen. To see unseen violence is to be a killjoy at work.

I often use killjoy as an adjective: not just as a way of being someone doing things but as a way of describing what we are doing.

Killjoy Solidarity: solidarity in the face of what we come up against.

Killjoy Solidarity: the solidarity we need to face what we come up against.

Such solidarity would not be safe in abstraction, warm and fuzzy, a way of feeling something without doing it. It would be a call to action and to attention, keeping at the front of our consciousness the reasons we need to be in solidarity, the violence, the material realities of suffering, ongoing colonial occupation, the brutality of state racism.

I learnt this from Audre Lorde: sometimes we have to stop what we are doing to register the impact of violence, violence as structure not an event. In an interview with Adrienne Rich, Lorde describes how she was listening to the radio in her car, and heard about the acquittal of a white police officer who had murdered a black child. She says she had to stop the car to get her feelings out. That expression took the form of a poem called “Power.”  Lorde took it in, the violence of the police in, the violence of white supremacy in, to get it out, to get it to us.

I was going to write something else today. Then I couldn’t. I had to stop what I was doing to write this instead, this post, this killjoy truth, a solidarity statement with Palestine. I write this statement as a feminist and queer scholar of colour based in the UK, whose family are from Pakistan, brown Muslims who had to leave their home in the midst of the violence they called Partition, to express my killjoy solidarity with those fighting for the lives, for Palestinian liberation, right now.

Right now, there are many of us protesting even though some of us have been prohibited from doing so. Our governments are trying to stop us from assembling, from expressing our solidarity with you, from chanting for your freedom, from waving your flags. To protest is also to protest those who try to stop us from protesting, who are complicit in the violence being enacted against Palestinians.

We refuse. Collectively. We are saying no to that.

For me, killjoy solidarity is a killjoy truth, a term I introduce in The Feminist Killjoy Handbook. This is the last truth in that book.

Killjoy Truth: The More we Come up Against, The More we Need More

The more we need more. The more we need each other, to become each other’s resources.

I also call killjoy truths hard worn wisdoms: it is what we know because of what keeps coming up. Our exhaustion with something is how we know so much about it – trying experiences as a revelation of structure.

A killjoy truth is also what is hard to know, what we might resist knowing because of what we sense we would have to give up. There are so many ways we can “not see” violence even when it is being directed at us, let alone when it is directed toward others. We can inherit ways of not seeing violence – dismissing words or actions as small or trivial, explaining violence away: it didn’t mean anything, he didn’t.

We have to open the door.

I think of a conversation I had with a woman of colour. She was being harassed by her supervisor. At one level, she knew what was happening: killjoy truths are often those we first feel in our bones. Bones can guide you. So, she knew enough to know to keep the door of the office open during supervisions. But it was hard to admit what he was doing. She feared she would “take [herself] down by admitting to the violence he was enacting.” To admit can mean to confess a truth and to let something in. To admit violence can feel like killing your own joy, getting in the way of your own progression.

So, she closed an actual door. But, she also closed the door of her consciousness, trying to handle the situation by shutting out what he was doing. When handles stop working, the truth gets in. It can be a shattering. It can hit you. It is harder to see what it takes longer to see. And, if to admit something is how it becomes real, it can feel like you are the cause of it. It can also require work: to recognise the situation as harassment is also to realise the work you have to do to get out of the situation you are in.

A killjoy truth can be what you have work to admit yourself. Killjoy truths can be what institutions refuse to admit about themselves.  A complaint can be the effort to make the institution admit it, let it in. But then: you come up against the institution. So often: you end up out.

Hence all the doors in these stories. Those who are stopped see what stops them. Doors, also blinds. Another person I interviewed described the architecture of the university: the doors with locks on them, windows with blinds that come down, the narrow corridors. The architecture of power. I think of one woman who was physically assaulted by her head of department. She complains but he is cleared of wrong doing. How? In the report the violence is described “on par with a handshake.” On par, equals equal.

The violence of an action is removed by how it is described. 

Description as a blind.

It is not that we don’t see the violence because the blinds are down.

The blinds come down because the violence is seen.

Unseen violence is not simply violence that is not seen. Unseen violence is an action. You have to unsee something because it is seen. A complaint can be an effort to make the violence seen, to bring it out. A protest, also, can be an effort to bring the violence out, to make it public by creating a public.

Killjoy truth: we learn how that violence remains behind closed doors, from what happens because you complain or protest. We become killjoys at work when we work to get these truths not just out of ourselves, but institutions. If the truth would damage the reputation of an institution, we need to be willing cause damage. I call that: a killjoy commitment

We are learning how our truths, killjoy truths, can end up in the institutional closets we sometimes call filing cabinets, under lock and key.

The nation too has many closets; the British empire, also. It is well known that the British government ordered the destructive of  thousands of documents from colonial archives, records of colonial crimes that “might embarrass Her Majesty’s government” or that could “embarrass members of the police, military forces, public servants or others eg. police informers.”

Killjoy Truths: What they do not want to reveal.

They removed evidence of violence. That removal is successful when it also removes evidence of itself. I sometimes call this polishing, empire as world-polishing, empire as a polished story, told by removing the violence.

Perhaps that’s why our stories matter so much. We become the evidence. Our bodies, our memories, our stories, colonial archives. And so, they try and contain us, to stop us from expressing ourselves. Our killjoy truths: in expressing them, we shatter the containers.

There are many ways that state violence, colonial violences are made to disappear from view, not seen.

We see the blinds come down.  We see how they don’t see it.

I think back to my career as a feminist of colour academic, I have seen how I have been seen; I have seen what it is not seen. I shared this story in the handbook:  It is my first year as a lecturer in Women’s Studies. I am in the top room of the fanciest building on campus. We are seated around a large rectangular table. The meeting is for the approval of new courses. I am there because I have a new course on Gender, Race and Colonialism being considered.  Most of the courses are approved without much discussion. When my course comes up, a professor from another department begins to interrogate me, becoming angrier as he went on. And he went on. I was there, seated at the same a table as he, a young woman, a person of colour, the only brown person in the room. The word in the course description that triggered his reaction was the relatively uneventful word “implicated.” That I had used that word was a sign, he said, that I thought that colonialism was a bad thing. He then gave me a lecture on how colonialism was a good thing, colonialism as modernity, that happy story of railways, language and law that is so familiar because we have heard it before. I think of this as a killjoy encounter not because I spoke back in response to what he said when he said it, I did not, but because I could hear from his reaction that what I was doing, was speaking back, refusing to tell that story, that happy story, of imperial progression.

Not to tell that story, the happy story, is to be positioned as stealing not just happiness but history.  We know we are supposed to gloss over these histories, the violence that led us to be here. We smile for their brochures; smiley, happy, shiny brown faces.

Or we don’t. We learn from how we are received when we don’t gloss over the violences that make it hard to be here. Perhaps it is not surprising, given what I learnt that I ended up out of it: the institution, that is.

Killjoy Truths are shut out by institutions because of what they would reveal about them.

We can be shut out for truth telling.

And so, we assemble to bring these truths out. We come out with it. We come out with them. That’s why they are shutting the door. They don’t see it like that. They won’t use the words to describe it – the Nakba, genocide, ethnic cleansing- as if without the words to describe what is happening it is not happening. We use those words, Nakba, genocide, ethnic cleaning because that is what is happening.

A shut door

To the truth.

What else is being shut out? Who else?

Shutting the door to the violence enacted against the Palestinian people by the Israeli state is also shutting the door to other violences, shutting to the complicity to complicity not just of our present governments, but past ones too. The injunction not to speak of the violence being enacted against Palestine and Gaza is the same injunction not to speak about the violence of British imperialism, that history that is present. Those of us living and working here whose families came from former British colonies, know this injunction, we recognise it, because we know what follows failing to meet it.

I think back to the professor who heard a no in use of the word implicated. We make no the implication of our work.

We say no to that. We take it out.

We have to remove the polish from the picture, not be the polish in the picture.

We remove the polish of the past or from it. I suspect most of us living and working in the UK are not taught by schools about the role of British imperialism in determining what happened in and to Palestine. We most likely are not taught about past deals made by government officials, premised on utter disregard for Palestinian people, the Sykes-Picot treaty of 1916, the Balfour declaration signed on November 2 1917.  I borrow the word disregard from others. Palestinian journalist Ramzy Baroud describes how he heard the name Balfour, as a child growing up in a Gaza refugee camp,  because the anniversary of the declaration was a day of shared protest. He concludes: “While Balfour cannot be blamed for all the misfortunes that have befallen Palestinians since he communicated his brief but infamous letter, the notion that his ‘promise’ embodied – that of complete disregard of the aspirations of the Palestinian Arab people – is handed from one generation of British diplomats to the next, the same way that Palestinian resistance to colonialism is also spread across generations.”  The late Palestinian scholar Edward Said described the Balfour Declaration thus “made by a European power … about a non-European territory … in a flat disregard of both the presence and wishes of the native majority resident in that territory.” In “Zionism from the Standpoint of its Victims,” Said summarises this history for us with characteristic precision, “Imperialism was the theory, colonialism the practice of changing the uselessly unoccupied territories of the world into useful new versions of the European metropolitan society. Everything in those territories that suggested waste, disorder, uncounted resources, was to be converted into productivity, order, taxable, potentially developed wealth.” He notes that the Zionist attitudes about “the Arab Palestinian natives” were “more than prepared for in the attitudes and the practices of British scholars, administrators, and experts who were officially involved in the exploitation and government of Palestine since the mid-­nineteenth century.”

When we hear how Palestinian people are being talked about now, it is history we hear, our history. “Human animals.” “Not a humanitarian crisis.” Not ethnic cleansing” because they are “not humans.” “Not civilians.”

A people as a target.

The violences committed by Hamas were barbaric. I deplore these actions; mourn for lives stolen.

But the brutality of those actions cannot be used to obscure the violence that came before them, nor the violence that has come after, how that brutality was used to justify more violence against a people already fighting against brutality. We have to refuse to shut the blinds on this history, the ongoing violence of settlement and displacement, how violence is used to remove Palestinian peoples from what they have left of their land. We need to see the violence of an open-air prison that is Gaza, of fences, and borders, and police. We need to see the violence of not having what you need, food, water, electricity, medical supplies.  We need to see the violence of having nowhere to go, shelters, when bombs fall. Or if we don’t see it, see what we need to see, we commit ourselves to learning, solidarity requires giving attention to what demands it, the violence of colonial occupation.

Killjoy Truth: We see in the violence that is seen, the violence that is not.

We see the violence of how people turn away from the violence, turn away from those who suffer the consequences. We will not turn away. Solidarity also means being willing to keep opening that door, to the hardest most painful truths, the violent colonial histories kept present.

I write this post also in profound admiration for Palestinian people, for your resilience and resistance, and with rage against the world that demands it.

#FreePalestine #KilljoySolidarity

Since the launch of The Feminist Killjoy Handbook in March of this year, I have been taking #FeministKilljoysOnTour to share some #KilljoySolidarity.

I am looking forward to the US edition of #FeministKilljoysOnTour to coincide with the publication of the handbook by Seal Press on October 3rd. I will share details on my website in September.

I am pleased to share the audio recording of an event from the earlier tour, a Conversation with Judith Butler that took place on April 28th at Cambridge University.  It was a warm, uplifting and rather overwhelming experience. I was originally intending to transcribe the conversation, but I realised so much of it would not be captured by being written up. So you can listen here.

This conversation gave me another chance to thank Judith Butler for the gift of their work.

What a killjoy joy it is to know you are out there.

I am sharing below my introduction to our conversation.

And thanks to Lucy Van De Wiel for this photo taken just after the conversation.

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Thank you for being here, for being part of this conversation. My name is Sara Ahmed and today I will be in conversation with Judith Butler and we hope as well to leave time and space for you to join in the conversation if you so wish, to share thoughts and feelings.  A conversation needs a space. Thank you so much to Q+ for providing this space, for providing so many queer spaces, so we can assemble together. I think of queer spaces as small pockets we open up within institutions so we can breathe more easily within them. If we need these pockets to survive the institutions that remain hostile environments for many of us, it is still work, institutional work, even, to make them. Thanks especially to Sarah Franklin and Lucian Stevenson for that work. Creating queer space is precious and painstaking work and it can also be a source of queer joy, or what I sometimes call killjoy joy, the joy of crafting worlds by making room for those who are not accommodated.

A conversation needs a space. A conversation is a space. I feel as if I have been in conversation with Judith Butler in one way or another since I took up my pen and began to write my way into existence.  Judith and I previously had a conversation almost a decade ago, over email; the editors of the journal Sexualities asked me to ask Judith about Gender Trouble. I remember so well your response to the first question, which was that you found questions about Gender Trouble “odd” because you “never reread” your own books. I remember being rather impressed by the firmness of the “never”!  And yet we talked of how books have many lives in part because of where they go, who they find. Maybe today we might talk of how our own lives become entangled with the lives of books as readers, as writers, as both. Most of my conversations with Judith, admittedly, though, have been inside my own head. Some of these conversations came out in words, on pages, as citation. Concepts can be craft: the concepts Judith has given us, shaped and sharpened by use, provide materials to help us to do our own work. I think of how I reused your definition of performativity from Bodies that Matter to describe what I called non-performativity: how words do not bring into effect what they name (words like diversity, for instance).

To be in conversation with someone else’s work over a sustained period of time can be a queer kind of intimacy, you are not on the same page but you catching something, a thought or an idea that does not come to you with crisp edges, as clarity or revelation, but more slowly or gradually in turning the pages, by sustaining the engagement. Perhaps how we write together sometimes in proximity, sometimes not, is another way of talking about the project of living together. In Undoing Gender, you write “I am speaking to those of us who are living in certain ways beside ourselves, whether it is in sexual passion, or emotional grief or political rage. In a sense, a predicament is to understand what kind of community is composed of those who are beside themselves.” You keep teaching me in your work, including in your most recent book, What World is This?  In which you use the phrase, “strangers in grief,” that collectivity can be a way of being beside ourselves, beside each other, responding as best we can to a crisis that is shared. Sharing is not always warm or fuzzy, or happy; it can be hard and painful and bumpy.

Still, I have killjoy joy to be speaking with Judith in person, to be sharing this space with you all. The impetus for this conversation is the publication of my book, my first trade book, The Feminist Killjoy Handbook.  In the last month or so, I have been taking feminist killjoys on tour, visiting bookshops and theatres; where I go, feminist killjoys are coming with me. The handbook is a collection of killjoy stories, assembled because of how many of you came with me, stories of how we become the problem when we point to a problem of we when give that problem its name, sexism, transphobia, homophobia, ableism. I call this a killjoy truth: we have to keep saying it because they keep doing it. But we are heard as the ones repeating ourselves, a broken record, stuck on the same point. We don’t even have to say it before eyes start rolling. I turned that into a killjoy equation: rolling eyes equal feminist pedagogy.

And yes we do laugh. And we say it more. And we need more to say it. That more can be who is behind us. Citation is feminist memory. The handbook brings together many authors who have given me killjoy inspiration. Judith’s work appears throughout and I also include Gender Trouble and Precarious Life in my recommended reading list for feminist killjoys at the end of the handbook (I only allowed myself to pick two for any author). Sarah Franklin introduced Judith on Wednesday by reading out the first paragraph of their PhD dissertation. I am not going to go that far back, but I do want to read out two sentences from the preface of Gender Trouble. Judith wrote, “To make trouble was, within the reigning discourse of my childhood, something one should never do, precisely because that would get one in trouble. The rebellion and its reprimand seemed to be caught up in the same terms, a phenomenon that gave rise to my first critical insight into the subtle ruse of power: the prevailing law threatened one with trouble, even put one in trouble, all to keep one out of trouble.” Judith taught me that we need to be in trouble or to be the trouble we are assumed to cause, to trouble the prevailing laws, the rules that tell us where we can go and who we can be, even if being in trouble is to risk being reprimanded, caught up in the same terms. Perhaps we become trouble makers, queer trouble makers. Queer troublemakers, feminist killjoys, we are assembled here. I know I could only write The Feminist Killjoy Handbook because of who is assembled here, because of all the trails that have been left behind by those who deviated from the paths they were told to follow.

Trails, and other queer tales. We will begin the conversation with Judith asking me some questions about The Feminist Killjoy Handbook. Judith has a book coming out next year Who’s Afraid of Gender, which is also their first trade book, which they spoke about with such feminist and queer fierceness on Wednesday.  This book is going to be such a gift for us, helping us to handle something, the anti-gender, anti-trans and anti-queer and neo-fascist movements as they manifest globally, by giving us to the tools to diagnosis how they work. So, the conversation might also move to the act of sending work out into the hostile environments that work is about. And then, who knows, we will follow a queer feminist trajectory, which means ending up in unexpected places. Over to you, Judith.

 

I am writing this post to express my gratitude to Ama Ata Aidoo. Ama Ata Aidoo died on May 31, 2023.

Gratitude can be grief.

I am deeply indebted to Ama Ata Aidoo for how she repurposed the figure of the killjoy. Her novel, Our Sister Killjoy, published in 1977, was the first text to give a killjoy her own voice.

In The Feminist Killjoy Handbook, I acknowledge my debt to Aidoo in the following way.

“To Ama Ata Aidoo thanks for the gift that is Our Sister Killjoy. It is a joyous killjoy debt that I have to you.”

A joyous killjoy debt.

Our Sister Killjoy was my travelling companion in writing the handbook, which also meant that Sissie, the narrator of the novel, our sister killjoy, was also my companion.

I wrote the handbook in the very best of company.

I had written about Sissie before. She appears, albeit rather briefly, in The Promise of Happiness. In that book, the feminist killjoy was herself rather contained – I gave her a chapter. I don’t think she was too happy about that! Over time, feminist killjoys have spilled out of that container, taken over even, roaming more freely in my life and my work. Over time: the time it took for me to realise my debt to Aidoo.

I recently listened to a panel with Ama Ata Aidoo, “Five Decades of Killjoy Feminism.” Thank you so much to the Radical Book Collective, as well as Bhakti Shringarpure, Ainehi Edoro, Esther Armah, Meg Arenberg, Otoniya Julianne Okot Bitek as well as Ama Ata Aidoo for their beautiful and warm contributions to this panel.

I learnt so much from how Aidoo spoke about the writing of Our Sister Killjoy in the panel. She says, “Some critics have told me it is an experimental book…when I was writing it, I wasn’t thinking it was experimental. It was the way it came out; my words came out.” I was reminded of how Audre Lorde spoke of writing her poem, “Power.” Lorde writes, “I was driving in the car and heard the news about the cop being acquitted. I was really sickening with fury, and I decided to pull over and just jot some things down in my note book to enable me to cross town without an accident, to continue functioning because I felt so sick and so enraged. And I wrote those lines down, I was just writing—and that poem came out without craft.”

Writing: how words come out.

Writing can feel like something coming to you rather than from you.

Perhaps the writing comes to us especially when we are writing from the killjoy; when what we are writing about is what we write against, the ongoing and structural violences of colonialism and racism.

The violence that takes our breath away can sometimes give us the words for it.

In the panel on killjoy feminism, Aidoo also discusses how she came to the word killjoy. She says, “I didn’t sit down and say Sissie is a killjoy…it just came to me, like titles and characters come to other writers.” The word killjoy came to Aidoo perhaps because of how Sissie acquired her shape or character, as somebody who is a trouble maker, who is anti-colonial, but also who is sharp, witty, funny, fierce, someone who can cut the atmosphere. Aidoo describes Sissie as “an elephant in a China shop.” Such a precise description! Some of us become killjoys because of how we refuse to walk or to talk, to pass over difficult topics, to speak delicately. You become a killjoy because you are perceived as such by others, too much, too big, clumsy, breaking what is of value, not taking care. Aidoo comments on how Sissie is seen: “they think she is going to say something to embarrass them.” The killjoy comes out with it, she says it, what is there, lurking in the background, but so often remains unsaid, the violence of colonialism, that violence of who gets to speak, who gets to be judged as worth something, as being human.

The killjoy comes to us as a word for the work as we are doing it.

I have been thinking about how I came to that word killjoy, too. When I first began working on happiness, I did not begin with the figure of the feminist killjoy (or any other kind of killjoy). I became interested in writing about happiness (as an extension in a way of my earlier work on the cultural politics of emotion) because I wanted to explore what happiness was doing as well as saying, how happiness can be a polite speech. It was researching the uses of diversity that led me to happiness – how diversity can create a happy impression. A practitioner described diversity as “a big shiny apple…it all looks wonderful but the inequalities are not being addressed.” I can’t quite remember how I came to the figure of the feminist killjoy, but I suspect politeness was the thread. It came to me, she came to me, as a memory of being that person around the family table, failing to be delicate in the face of what I found so painful and problematic, my father’s sexism, his patriarchal reasoning.

The words feminist killjoy came to me because she was already out there, a recognizable figure, a stereotype of feminists, those miserable feminists who make misery their mission. Misery is not our mission. But still if misery is what we cause in saying what we say, doing what we do, we are willing to cause it.

Even when a word, a figure, a stereotype, is out there, we still have to pick it up. I picked up the feminist killjoy slowly. And it took me time to pick up Our Sister Killjoy. I remember when I first heard of this book. I was giving a lecture on the promise of happiness at the University of Kent back in 2006. The feminist killjoy appeared in the middle of that lecture.  When someone in the audience asked me a question, she mentioned Our Sister Killjoy.

I don’t remember her question. I remember Our Sister Killjoy.

The feminist killjoy led me to you.

A feminist killjoy, a sister killjoy, a live connection, an electric connection: snap, snap, sizzle. I heard that in Sissie.

Snap!

I have been thinking more about how we come to writing, and how writing brings us to other writers, to words that capture something, about ourselves, about each other.

For me, the feminist killjoy did not arrive fully formed. I did not hear her smile brightly and say hello or frown and say no. She was, in many senses, an impression, a vague one at that. She became sharper in time. How sharp she became!

In the first paper I published from my happiness research (in 2007), I did not even use the term “the feminist killjoy.” She appears but as “the kill joy feminist” (“Take the figure of the kill joy feminist. She appears alongside the happy housewife” – yes, I made kill joy two words). And, the kill joy feminist is then turned into a series of questions in a discussion of affect and atmosphere:

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 killjoy began to acquire more of a status as a figure as an answer to this question about what she is doing (or what she, by saying something, teaches us about what others are doing). There was more to firm up. And, when I firmed them up, giving them a book of their own, a handbook, I came to understand my joyous killjoy debt to Ama Ata Aidoo. I am sure there is more to understand. I know there is.

I might yet write more love letters to Sissie.

I love how Our Sister Killjoy is a catalogue of killjoy encounters, how Sissie’s story is written like a travel diary; she travels from Africa to Europe, from Ghana to Germany to England. Her killjoy story begins before she even gets to Europe. On a plane, a white flight attendant 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 to the comfort of all her passengers.” Sissie’s hesitation speaks volumes. Not to go to the back of the plane or to say she does not know the other Black people would be to refuse the place she had been assigned. If the flight attendant is trained “to see to the comfort of all,” not to follow her instruction would be to cause the discomfort “of all.” At this point Sissie goes along with it. But she can see what is wrong with it. And because she can, we can.

Aidoo (and also Sissie) shows us how being a sister killjoy or feminist killjoy is to be conscious of what we create, “an awkward situation.” To create an awkward situation is to be judged as being awkward.  That judgement is how we hear ourselves in history. And, this is why becoming conscious of what we create can be a world consciousness.

In Germany, Sissie wanders around a market. She sees “polished steel. Polished tin. Polished brass.” Sissie “saw their shine and their glitter.” Something becomes shiny because of what is not seen. Sissie sees what is not seen. She then sees how she is seen: “Suddenly, she realized a woman was telling a young girl who must have been her daughter: ‘Ja, das Schwartze Mädchen.’ From the little German that she had been advised to study for the trip, she knew that ‘das Schwartze Mädchen’ meant ‘black girl.’ She was somewhat puzzled. Black girl? Black girl? So, she looked around her, really well this time.” When she is addressed as the Black girl, she is puzzled. But then she sees that it is she they see. Reading this passage, I was reminded of Frantz Fanon’s discussion of being seen as a Black man by a white child. Fanon shows that to be seen as Black is to be made fearsome in the present and to be given a history. He describes how the white man had “woven [him] out of a thousand details, anecdotes, stories.” A history can make it hard to breathe, a circle “drawing a bit tighter.”

When Sissie sees herself seen as a Black girl, she looks around. It is then that she sees whiteness, “She looked around her, really well this time.” She regrets it: “when she was made to notice differences in human colouring.”

For Sissie, seeing whiteness is about refusing to be drawn into it.

And then Sissie becomes more herself, more of a killjoy, in conversations she has with other Black people about why they stay in Europe. Sissie listens to an eminent doctor who said he stayed in Europe “to educate them to recognize our worth.” Sissie asks if by “them” he means “white people,” and he says, “Well, yes.” Sissie can hear the violence of that yes of having to demonstrate one’s worth to those who have denied it. Sissie’s critique of the injunction to be positive is a critique of what those who have been colonized have to do in order to be recognized by the colonizer as being worthy, what they have to remove from themselves. The implication is that some end up having to polish themselves, make themselves more palatable, appearing grateful, smiling, as shiny as the commodities that Sissie sees in that marketplace.

I recognise that smile. That shine. That sheen.

And so, along the way, you helped me to circle back to another starting point, diversity as polite speech. You helped me to appreciate why the project of killing joy, that world making project, is about seeing whiteness, seeing how you are seen, seeing what is not seen, who too, who is not seen, however much we regret what we have to learnt to notice.

I turned what I learnt from you into a killjoy equation:

Noticing = A Feminist Killjoy’s Hammer

We hammer away at the world by noticing it. But a hammer is a rather blunt instrument. Noticing can also be a pen or a key board, writing as fine tuning, how we rearrange the world, moving words around so things appear differently. There is wisdom here. I use the word strangerwise for this wisdom. It is an odd word for an old wisdom, the wisdom of strangers, those who in being estranged from worlds, notice them.

Sissie’s wisdom, also, yours.

Perhaps writing is another kind of circling, how we learn not being drawn into it, that narrow picture of the human, whiteness as worth, as a project of becoming worthy, etched into the ground by colonialism.

I have been wondering too if that is why writing matters so much, writing ourselves out of their stories by writing our own. In considering the feminist killjoy as poet, I wrote about how Aidoo wrote about writing (as I wrote about bell hooks writing about writing). In an interview, Aidoo give us her answer to a question:

At the age of 15, a teacher had asked me what I wanted to do for a career, and without knowing why or even how I replied that I wanted to be a poet. About four years later I won a short story competition but learned about it only when I opened the newspaper that had organised it, and saw the story had been published on its centre pages and realised the name of the author of that story in print was mine. I believe these moments were crucial for me because . . . I had articulated a dream. . . . It was a major affirmation for me as a writer, to see my name in print.

The poet can be claimed in a reply to a question of what you want to be, who you want to be. You can claim to be one before you are one. A poet can claim you, and in claiming you, a poet can be how your name and your words end up in print.

I think again of Sissie, our sister killjoy, how by travelling she gets her words out and about. Sissie gives serious speeches. She writes an unsent letter to her lover, addressed as “my Precious Something.” She begins by restating his instructions to her, “Yes I remember that I was going to be positive about everything. Since you reminded me that the negative is so corrosive.” But when she reflects on his reminder of the corrosion of negativity, which he compares to cancer, she makes an analogy with the West: “I nodded agreement, my eyes lighting up at how professionally clear you always are. But I remember too when I attempted to grasp your point better by suggesting a political parallel, that negativism then must be like the expansion of western civilization in modern times, because it chokes all life and even eliminates whole races of people in its path of growth, you said laughing: ‘There you go again, Sissie, you are so serious.’”

The feminist killjoy or sister killjoy is often caught by that word serious. Alice Walker describes a “womanist” in the following way: “A black feminist or feminist of color. . . . Usually referring to outrageous, audacious, courageous or willful behaviour. Wanting to know more and in greater depth than is considered ‘good’ for one. . . . Responsible. In charge. Serious.” We can be willful because we know too much, say too much, because we exceed other people’s expectations of what will do us good. Walker highlights both the words willful and serious.  We are willful when we will for ourselves, know for ourselves, seriously.  A judgment can be a negative charge. We turn the judgment into a project. We are willing to be charged. We are charged up.  It can be electric; we are back to that snap, snap, sizzle.

Snap, snap; Sissie.

Sissie accepts that charge. She becomes a sister killjoy poet even if she appears in novel form. Sissie is not given a linear story. Some sentences appear all alone, finding their companions on other pages. Some pages appear like poems with jagged edges, allowing words to be sharper, clearer, more illuminating. A chapter turns out to be a letter she has written but not sent. As readers we become the recipient of the unsent letter. The thoughts she has, killjoy thoughts, spill onto the pages. Perhaps a killjoy character needs another kind of book. Perhaps she writes one.

Another kind of book: we read them because we need them. From Our Sister Killjoy we receive so much; snap, energy, defiance, will. I think of how Michele Cliff describes how she was inflamed by reading Our Sister Killjoy. She writes, “In her pellucid rage, Aidoo’s prose breaks apart into staccato poetry—direct, short, brilliantly bitter—as if measured prose would disintegrate under her fury.” Cliff shows how Aidoo’s story of our sister killjoy, Sissie, with its “rage against colonialism,” freed her to “direct rage outward into creativity,” so that if she could write in fire, she would.

And so, she did.

To write in fire is to write fire. Audre Lorde describes her own commitment to writing fire as she was dying: “I am going to write fire until it comes out of my ears, my eyes, my nose holes—everywhere. Until it’s every breath I breathe. I’m going to go out like a fucking meteor!”

And so, she did.

Writing fire can be how you go out.

Writing fire can be how you go on.

I know so many fires are being lit, will be lit, because of what you wrote, sent out, put about.

It is a joyous killjoy debt we have to you.

Thank you Ama Ata Aidoo.

Your feminist killjoy

Sara xx

 

References

Aidoo, Ama Ata (1977). Our Sister Killjoy: Or, Reflections from a Black-Eyed Squint. Harlow: Longman.

Cliff, Michelle (2008). If I Could Write This in Fire. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Fanon, Frantz. (1986). Black Skin, White Masks. London: Pluto Press.

Lorde, A (1978). The Black Unicorn. New York: Norton.

Lorde, Audre (1984). Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches, Trumansburg: The Crossing Press.

Walker, Alice (2005). In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens. Phoenix: New Edition.

 

 

 

In my previous post Common Sense as a Legacy Project, I explored how common sense becomes a way of defending national culture, social traditions and social institutions from perceived threats. The book Common Sense Conservativism for a Post-Liberal Age repeatedly evokes wokeism as a summary of threats to common sense: the woke are those who are trying to take what is ours for themselves, denying reality, truth, stealing our happiness as well as our history.

Readers of this feminist killjoy blog are probably very familiar with these uses of wokeism. The projects of widening participation and social inclusion are often dismissed in these terms. Diversity training in public institutions: that’s woke! Disabled dancers and “mismatched same sex couples” on Strictly Come Dancing: that’s woke! A Black mermaid or a Black James Bond: it does not matter if it’s a mythical creature or fictional character, that’s woke! Putting your pronouns in your signature: that’s woke!

Woke is a much-used term, a useful term, because of how much and how many can be dismissed by it.  These dismissals can be understood as techniques. My task in writing this follow up post is not to try to persuade anyone of anything (let alone those whose careers rest on the “anti-woke” wave). I am writing this post as I think it helps to try to explain what is going on as it is going on. Let me identify three key aspects of anti-wokeism/ common sense conservatism.

The imposition of change

A primary implication of the argument for common sense conservatism is that traditions or conventions are or would be unchanging without the imposition of change. One way culture and history are treated possessively is to suggest change comes from outsiders. This is why the refusal to recognise the dynamic nature of culture is central to common sense conservatism. In my book, What’s the Use? On The Uses of Use I name institutions themselves as anti-life: to stabilise the requirements for what you need to survive and thrive within institutions is to stop changes that would otherwise happen because of the dynamic nature of life.  We might call these techniques for stabilising the requirements reproductive mechanisms. When diversity work is understood as imposed change, this is in part a reflection of the investment of some people in institutions not changing (and when I say investment I mean it: those who benefit from institutions do not want changes that might risk their benefits, that transmission of legacy).

When we are judged as imposing change, what is not recognised is the imposed nature of what we are trying to change. What is understood as “the way things are” has become naturalised or habitual. A good example of this is pronouns. Some people seem to experience being asked to respect other people’s pronouns as an imposition on their freedom. Freedoms can be predicated on being unthinking: some people do not want to think about, or be conscious of, social conventions such as how we refer to other people.

Institutions also have habits.

Let’s take one example from my own study of complaint. I spoke to a lecturer about her experience of appointment panels. Her university had introduced a numerical system for evaluating the performance of job candidates in an effort to ensure equality of treatment. She described what actually happened during the appointment process: “Someone would say, that woman’s presentation was outstanding, but, really, he’s the guy you’d want to have a pint with, so let’s make the figures fit.” The figures are made to fit when a person is deemed to fit. The person most likely to be appointed is still the one who can participate in a shared or common culture; “the guy you’d want to have a pint with,” who you can relate to, whose company you would prefer. Hiring can be a habit, how the same sorts of people keep being appointed, reflecting back who is already here. When new policies and procedures are introduced to break that habit, they do not always stop what is habitually done from being done.

When change is treated as an imposition, it is made harder to change things.

Those who try and change how things have been done are often represented as having an “ideology.” So “critical race theory” is treated as ideology, which is central to how the polished view of empire keeps passing itself off as reality (you will quickly find arguments that “critical race theory” is being imposed in schools as soon as teachers try and include a history of the British empire from not-polished points of view).

And also, when the project for trans liberation is understood as motived by “gender ideology,” what is disguised is how gender ideologies, that is, convictions about what women and men are and what they are like (mostly, I would add, with reference to sex, that is assumptions made about men and women on the basis of the nature of their bodies) are reproduced everywhere else. These convictions often disappear, that is, they do not appear as ideology, precisely because of how they become common sense. Ideology often works by demarcating or bracketing ideology itself as happening somewhere else.

This is why freedom struggles often mean coming up against what other people call reality. Feminists should know this: our fights for freedom have often been framed as flights from reality (biology, nature, history, and so on). But given how some feminists dismiss trans liberation as a flight from reality (even using an arm wrestle to signify that reality – I am keeping this point oblique for the time being), it is clear that lessons are not always learnt.

2. The reversal of power

Common sense conservatism (as with other conservative political arguments) positions those who are fighting for equality as not only motivated as a desire for power but as having power.  And those who have power (for example in the media and government) also then represent themselves as without power.

I explored this reversal of power in the first chapter of The Feminist Killjoy Handbook. Consider how racism and transphobia are often articulated as if they are unpopular or even minority positions (or to be more specific many people in the public domain position themselves as being censored when their views are described as racist or transphobic).

The positioning of racial or religious minorities, especially Muslims, and of trans people as too easily offended leads to an increase in racist and transphobic speech acts. There is an ‘incitement to discourse’ in a story of the suppression of discourse: so many people continue to make racist and transphobic statements by saying they are not allowed to make them. One comedian at the end of a set that included much transphobic content claimed, ‘I think that’s what comedy is for, really – to get us through stuff, and I deal in taboo subjects because I want to take the audience to a place it hasn’t been before, even for a split second.” This so-called ‘taboo subject’ is in fact a well-travelled path, where we are used to going rather than where we haven’t been; a confirmation of, rather than challenge to, the transphobia of mainstream culture. But then, if you call it out, give the problem its name, that person will most likely represent themselves as “cancelled” and quickly embarking on a cancellation tour. And so, we end up with some people speaking endlessly about being silenced, given more platforms to claim they are no-platformed.

Those who are more represented in the public domain tend to represent themselves as more censored.

I have described this mechanism in earlier posts.

Whenever people keep being given a platform to say they have no platform, or whenever people speak endlessly about being silenced, you not only have a performative contradiction, you are witnessing a mechanism of power.

Note also the new habit of scholars who have best-selling “anti-woke” books  representing their popularity as a sign that the public are tired of wokeism. It is rather amusing. But it is also sad and pathetic. Of course, their books are bestselling because of the alignment of their arguments with the views of the powerful: governments that are willing to stoke the anti-woke to increase their popularity; not to mention the global rise of fascism.

 That’s the wave you are riding on baby.

Diversity programmes and equality initiatives are also treated as evidence of wokeism. Let’s pause here.  Elite, white and male-dominated institutions are represented as “woke institutions” on the basis of the existence of programmes designed to make them less so, less elite, white and male dominated. Of course, many of these programmes fail because of how hard it is to intervene in the reproduction of power (that these programmes are called woke is one of these reproductive mechanisms!). Recall my earlier example of how a new system was introduced to try to ensure equality of treatment in appointments. That very system, which might be used as evidence of wokeism, was bypassed in order to select people who were deemed to fit or to fit in. One senior manager I interviewed for my complaint project summarised this mechanism as “policies are for the others.”

Power can be exercised by the bypassing of policies and procedures designed to intervene in the reproduction of power. This is also how institutional change can be prevented by appearing to be enabled.  An organisation can be called too woke because of its diversity initiatives, and still be successful at reproducing whiteness and other forms of power and privilege.

As feminists of colour, we know how diversity can be polish. Organisations create the appearance that something is being done; and yes, they sometimes use us, to do that. We also know, even polished versions of diversity can be quickly framed as “too much,” as an ideological imposition, a way of re-naturalising hierarchies and habits of many kinds.

Consider the use of terms such as “race equality industry” to dismiss a whole history of efforts to bring about race equality or the use of the term “trans lobby” by many gender-critical feminists and their anti-woke allies. Any programmes designed to enable trans people to live their lives on their terms, to have access to public resources including health and welfare become treatable as a consequence of a “trans lobby.” This is how trans people who are under-represented in positions of power in media and government can be represented as powerful.

A fight for survival is treated as the formation of an industry.

The reversal of power is how power is retained.

As soon as you try to stop someone who has power from abusing that power, you will be identified as motivated by a desire for power. I think of a conversation I had with a woman professor who supported students who made a complaint about sexual misconduct and sexual harassment by a lecturer at her university. The professor defended his own conduct thus, ‘He came up to me and said, “It’s a perk of the job.” I could not believe it. He actually said it to me. It was not hearsay; this is a perk of the job. I can’t remember my response, but I was flabbergasted.’ The implication is that having sex with your students is like having a company car; what you are entitled to because of what you do. She added, ‘The women: they were set up as a witch-hunt, hysterical, you can hear it, can’t you, and as if they were out to get this guy.’ In this case, the complaint was not upheld and the lecturer returned to his post with minor adjustments to supervisory arrangements.

When you describe an entitlement as harassment you are understood as depriving somebody of what is theirs; the complainer-as-killjoy could characterize this deprivation.

3) More with Less

The “common” in common sense matters. If there is a reversal of power, there is also a reversal of position. Consider how when we try to widen the curriculum you are treated as damaging the tradition. We want more, and we are treated as stopping this or that writer from being taught.  By asking for more, we are treated as less, as lessening the value of something, but also as removing what or who is already there.

I think there is another reversal here: more with less. Let me explain.

In my previous post, I described the experience of a woman of colour academic who as dropped from the diversity committee after “mentioning things to do with race.” It is worth asking: why did she keep mentioning those things? Racism, that’s why. She told me that in her department’s research meetings, senior white men professors frequently made racist comments.  This is just one example, “I’m from London and London is just ripe for ethnic cleansing.”  She described how people laughed and how the laughter filled the room. She decides to complain. She gathered statements from around twenty people in her department. A complaint can be a collective. A meeting is set up in response to her complaint. At that meeting she was described by the head of human resources as “having a chip on her shoulder,” “they treated the submission as an act of arrogance on my part. A grievance is heard as a grudge, a collective treated an individual. She leaves, and “it was all swept under the carpet and the same things continued.” Sweep; sweep; polish, polish. The same things keep happening because of how much is swept away, who is swept away.

The transmission of a legacy is dependent on stopping those who trying to stop the same things from happening.

When she is dropped from the diversity table for mentioning things to do with race, her colleagues are given permission to make racist comments at that same table. This is how, under the banner of diversity, you are allowed to be racist but not call something racist, perhaps because the latter speech act brings the whole thing into dispute, or even just into view, the table itself. If her complaint is treated as me not we, racist speech is heard as we not me, as what we should be free to express around that table.

Common sense can work both by turning a me into a we (society matters as an extension of my hand) and a we into a me (a complaint as a will to power). And so, we learn, common sense is not as common as it is presented as being (how a few make themselves many), whilst complaints are more common than they are presented as being (how many are made into a few).

When those of us fighting against abuses of power are dismissed as having a will to power, we are treated as depriving others of what is theirs. Some understand and describe “theirs” as “common sense.”

The story of how some are losing their hand is a story of those who treat the world as their hand.

We are telling other stories.

Common sense tends to be understood in a commonsensical way at least by those who appeal to it. We typically hear of common sense as what we have lost or what we need to resolve a conflict or dispute in a mature and reasonable way (“a common-sense approach”). Or, common sense is used to indicate the status of proposition as grounded in reality (“it is common sense that sex refers to biology”). Common sense can also be used to demarcate a class of subjects: those who have common sense, who are sensible and practical as well as reasonable, who hold onto reality. Common sense can thus also be used to demarcate a class of subjects who are deemed to lack it or to have lost it. Historically, common-sense has been defined against the absurd (Thomas Reid), scepticism (G.E. Moore) and most recently “the woke” (Michael Nazir-Ali and many, many others, writing right now!).

Across varied usages, the sense of common sense matters (1). Common sense can refer both to a sense of what is obvious and an assumption that this sense is shared. Take Stuart Hall’s (1977) description of “what passes as common sense feels as if it has always been there, the sedimented, bedrock, wisdom of ‘the race.’” Common sense can be a feeling of longevity, what hangs around or goes without saying. For Hall, following Gramsci, “Common sense is not coherent: it is usually ‘disjointed and episodic’, fragmentary and contradictory. Into it the traces and ‘stratified deposits’ of more coherent philosophical systems have sedimented over time without leaving any clear inventory.” That it is hard to give a history of common sense, to provide it with a clear inventory, is a sign of its historical effectiveness. Anthropologist Clifford Gertz (1975) describes common sense as having a recognizable “tone and temper.” He explains, “an air of ‘of-courseness,’ a sense of ‘it figures’ is cast over things –again, some selected, underscored things. They are depicted as inherent in the situation, intrinsic aspects of reality, the way things go.”

And so, the more you challenge “the way things go,” the more you know about common sense. As historian Sophia Rosenfeld notes, “Common sense really only comes out of the shadows and draws attention to itself at moments of perceived crisis or collapsing consensus.” Common sense points to a crisis, rather than resolving it. This is why I describe common sense as legacy project. A legacy can mean something that happened in the past or what the past leaves behind (as war leaves a legacy of suffering, for instance). Legacy can also be something transmitted by or received from our predecessors. Legacy becomes a project when what has been, or should be, received from our predecessors is understood as threatened in some way. It might be that legacy is always a project insofar as reception or transmission is never simple or straightforward or guaranteed.

By common sense as a legacy project, I am pointing to how common sense is used as a defence of social institutions and traditions. In the UK common sense is often spoken of as a national legacy, as what we have bequeathed from the past in the form of a faculty. In fact, during the COVID pandemic, government officials including the then prime-minister Boris Johnson regularly referred to “British common sense,” sometimes described as “good and old,” other times as “solid,” as what we should use in making judgements about what to do, whether to mask or not, where to go, where not to go, a rather convenient way, no doubt, of displacing responsibility from government to individual. This idea of “good old British common sense” is an old idea if not a good one. Sophia Rosenfeld comments, “By the 1720s, good old English or British common sense had become a recognisable entity.”

Appealing to common sense is thus often about appealing to those who assumed to have it and for whom some things should be just plain obvious (if this is a claim about reality, this “should” should show us that claims about reality are also often moral claims).  But even if common sense is presented as a faculty of a subject, the literatures of common sense are full of objects. It might be obvious why this is the case. Those who defend common sense do so by exemplification; examples include human-made artefacts such as tables but also human bodies and their parts (2). The analytical philosopher G.E. Moore argued that he could not be more persuaded by sceptical questions about the existence of external reality than he could by common sense. And in defending common sense, he makes use of his own hand both in his paper “In Defence of Common Sense,” and then in a lecture, “Proof of An External World.” It is in the lecture that Moore’s hand acquires an exemplary status. He asks: how can you prove the existence of an external world? He answers his question by holding up his hand: “How? By holding up my two hands, and saying, as I make a certain gesture with the right hand, ‘Here is one hand’, and adding, as I make a certain gesture with the left, ‘and here is another.’” The gesture is not just pointing to something (what should be obvious to someone with common sense), it is a refutation of something, or somebody, else. The hand provides evidence of the folly of scepticism.  The hand, in other words, becomes a tool.

Note how “certain” is attached not to the object but the gesture. What the hand is doing is partly that, or how, we can make reference to it. I became interested in what Moore was doing with his hand after reading the foreword of a book on conservative common sense, written by the reverend, Michael Nazir-Ali.  The book was produced by a new lobby group in the UK called the “Common Sense Group,” which now has over 50 conservative members, who describe themselves as “the institutional custodians of history and heritage.” There is nothing remarkable about this group. We have heard their stories before, they are old and worn, familiar from Brexit (and well before), stories of taking the nation back, taking back control, stories that are also fantasies of a nation that isn’t and a past that wasn’t. What interests me is how the “Common Sense Group” has made “common sense” part of a wider “anti-woke” conservative agenda.   

How does Nazir-Ali define common sense? He writes that common sense:

came simply to mean good judgement which is not easily swayed by intellectual or cultural fads and takes a realistic view of ourselves and what is around us. In philosophy, this view was vigorously defended by the analytical philosopher, G. E. Moore, who held that when a philosophical view is in conflict with Common Sense, it is more likely that the view was in error rather than that Common Sense had gone astray. He gave the example of knowing that his hand existed and was his as being more certain than any sceptical attempts to show that such was not the case. Moore’s argument can, of course, be legitimately extended to our knowledge of our body as a whole and to the different parts of it and their purpose. It could also be extended to our knowledge of our relationships, their meaning and purpose and, indeed, to the social structures and institutions which provide coherence and stability to the social order.

Nazir-Ali makes use of Moore’s hand, moving from the philosopher’s certainty that “his hand existed and was his,” to his own certainty about the nature of bodies and their purposes, to social structures and institutions. The quality of certainty is thus moved from an object that appears to be near and proximate to what is more complex and distant (2). Common sense conservatism can then speak of the stability of social institutions insofar as they are extensions of “his hand,” or “my hand,” in other words, society matters as an extension of myself or even as his or my possession.  This is how legacy is turned into, or treated, as reality, which is also how reality itself is made a possession. Moore employs his hand as a defence against the sceptics. Nazir-Ali then re-employs Moore’s hand as a defence against “the woke.”  Throughout the book there are multiple references to woke.  It is the references to woke that are substantial.   The hand becomes not only what was there, or is there, but what could be lost, which is why that certain gesture is necessary, the hand as what is being handed down, from one philosopher to another, one generation to another.

If it is the references to woke that have become substantial, the quality of substance is transferred to the hand, which is how the hand comes to matter more, the more it is missing.

Common sense conservatism becomes a story of a lost hand.

Another contributor to the book, Gareth Bacon writes:

Britain is under attack.  Not in a physical sense, but in a philosophical, ideological and historical sense. Our heritage is under a direct assault – the very sense of what it is to be British has been called into question, institutions have been undermined, the reputation of key figures in our country’s history have been traduced. This gives huge power to activists and forces the leaders of organisations to fight endless fires of grievance, stifling freedom, embittering the workplace and sowing division.

A sense of what it is to be British is understood both in a positive sense and as a common sense.  So many different actions are being named as assaults against this common sense – including complaints or grievances made within the workplace.  In my book, Complaint! I did not use the language of “hegemonic complainers” because I was well aware how many complaints in the workplace are dismissed as if they derive from those who are either powerful or have a will to be so. The minimization of harm and inflation of power work together as if some make slights more than they are to make themselves bigger. “Hegemonic complaint” would, nevertheless, be a good description of what is going on in common sense conservatism. Hegemonic complaint functions as meta-complaint, a complaint about complaints, those minor grievances made by mischievous minorities. A meta-complaint might not register as a complaint, made without leaving a clear inventory, becoming common sense.

Bacon includes Black Lives Matter and Decolonizing the Curriculum as examples of assaults on the “philosophical, ideological and historical sense” of what it is to be British. He writes that these movements are “not motivated by positivity. Quite the reverse.” Positivity is tied to preservation. And this is why the judgement of negativity is more than a story of motivation. By locating negativity in the outsider, whether the killjoy or “the woke,” culture and history are not only stabilised, they are given a positive quality.  Bacon adds, “words that have been universally understood for millennia, such as ‘man’ and ‘woman’ are now emotionally charged and dangerous.” Of course, this statement is not true, words change, language does; as we do. Questioning the meaning of words such as man or woman, trying to open them up, is treated as giving them a negative charge or even stopping people from using them. Another conversative politician (he has since become prime minister) stated, “We want to confront this left-handed culture that seems to want to cancel our history, our values, our women.” The argument that women are being cancelled expressed with that old sexist possessive (“our women”) draws loosely from the “gender critical” argument that the term gender has replaced sex.  Perhaps we are supposed to treat sex like a statue, what you have to affirm as being there, what is supposed to stand up or to stand firm.

All you have to do to be heard as complaining, as damaging legacy, is not to affirm something. So, when students asked for more philosophies from outside the West to be taught, offering nuanced and careful critiques, they are represented as cancelling white philosophers; asking for more as stealing what is there or from who is there.

Note that the negativity belongs to the judgement not the action. The tagline for this blog is killing joy as a world-making project. I now have a chance to explain more what I mean by that. Killing joy becomes a world making project when we refused to be redirected by a negative judgement away from an action. Instead, we turn the judgement into a project. We keep it up, questioning, trying to widen range of texts being taught, widen the range of meanings, widen the terms we use for who we are, how we are, widening the routes into professions, widening the doors so more can enter. We keep doing this work even when those actions are judged as damaging.

And we will be judged so, as damaging.

Killjoy Commitment: When critique causes damage, we are willing to cause damage.

But we don’t even have to say anything, or do anything, to be the cause of damage.

Heidi Mirza, a woman of colour professor, describes a conversation at her inaugural lecture as professor ‘a white male professor leaned into me at the celebration drinks and whispered bitterly in my ear, “Well they are giving Chairs to anyone for anything these days”’ (2007). When a woman of colour becomes a chair, chairs lose their status and value. The value of some things is made dependent on the restriction of who can have them or be them. This is how a woman of colour professor becomes a damage to legacy. She becomes, we become, evidence of how some are losing their hand.

We are being told whose hand it is.

Those who are told it is not their hand, know whose hand it is.

I can tell you: we can tell you another story about hands.

We have heard how the hand of common-sense conservatism is extended as certainty from what is mine to social relationships and institutions. This extension is not simply an act of individual cognition, but an institutional mechanism.  To have a place at the table, you are required to affirm something, its reality, value, its status as possession (3). I will be describing this requirement to affirm as “polishing the table.” To polish can mean to make something smooth and shiny by friction or coating, to see to one’s appearance, or to refine and improve. The word polish shares a root with the word polite. In UK, polishing is a national past-time.  The history of the British empire is often told as a polite story of well-mannered colonisers. Those of us living and working in the UK whose families came from former British colonies are asked, nay required, to gloss over the violence of histories that led us to be here. And so, when our very arrival is understood as damage to legacy, we are tasked with repairing that damage.

I remember one time when I, as a junior lecturer designed a new course on race and colonialism. I was asked to attend the university committee. We are seated at a large rectangular table in the fanciest room in the fanciest building. I was the only brown person at that table.  A professor from another department began to interrogate me, getting angrier as he went on. And he went on. I can’t remember everything he said. But the word in the course description that triggered his reaction was the relatively uneventful word “implicated.” That I had used that word was a sign, he said, that I thought that colonialism was a bad thing. He then gave me a lecture on how colonialism was a good thing, colonialism as modernity, that happy story of railways, language, and law, that is so familiar because we have heard it before. This is why in The Feminist Killjoy Handbook, I describe empire as world-polishing, we are required to tell the story of empire as a happy story, not only to remove violence, but to remove evidence of that removal.

Diversity too can be polish. A woman of colour academic describes, “I was on the equality and diversity group in the university. And as soon as I started mentioning things to do with race, they changed the portfolio of who could be on the committee and I was dropped.” I think back to how the professor heard a no in my use of the word “implicated.” You can just use words like race and you will be heard as saying no, as being negative, destructive, obstructive.

Polishing can mean more than smiling for their brochures; it can require using words that gloss over our experience.

We smile or vanish. We smile and vanish.

When we see through the polish, we see so much. I spoke to another woman of colour academic who talked to me about complaints she had about sexism and racism but did not make. In explaining to me why she did not make them, she offers a sharp description of the culture of her institution:

T here’s an agreement between people not to rock the boat. People would talk about the institution as a kind of legacy project and would imply that you just didn’t understand how the institution was formed. The implication was that you have to be respectful of how this place was organised and what its traditions were essentially. And if you were not abiding by that it was because you had not been there for ten years.

The culture of her institution is that you don’t complain about the culture of the institution. Institutional culture can be what stops a complaint about institutional culture. To complain is thus to provide evidence that you have not been in an institution long enough to understand it, to respect it, how its organised, its traditions.  The complainers would be those who have not yet internalized the norms of the institution, those for whom the project of the institution has not yet become their own.  She did not complain but that was not because the project of the institution had become her own.  She did not complain because, as one of two academics of colour in an otherwise all white department, she did not want to stand out any more than she already did. But because the problems she did not complain about did not go away, she decides to leave for another post. She submits a resignation letter, which took the form of a complaint about how racism and sexism were part of the institution. The other academic of colour resigned at the same time, “after we resigned, they said we were the wrong kind of people. This is the two-brown people in the department of around fifty people.” Being the wrong kind of people, not white, not right, is used to explain and dismiss that complaint. When complaints are dismissed as coming from people who are too new to abide by, or respect, an institutional legacy, some people will be dismissed as complainers no matter how long they have been in an institution.

You become a complainer by virtue of not reproducing an institutional legacy.

This expression “rocking the boat” came up often in my interviews, most often in the form of a warning. I spoke to a student who was involved in a collective complaint with other students about sexual harassment. She describes how she was warned, “I was repeatedly told that ‘rocking the boat’ or ‘making waves’ would affect my career in the future and that I would ruin the department for everyone else. I was told if I did put in a complaint, I would never be able to work in the university and that it was likely I wouldn’t get a job elsewhere.” Complaints are framed as how you would damage a department or institution as well as yourself, how you would deprive yourself of a career path. A well-used definition of common sense is sound and practical judgement.

Complaints are impractical. Complaints are made impractical.

It is made practical to affirm the institution.

Earlier, I suggested that common sense as a certainty about something, turns hands into tools: that certain gesture. The hand of common sense, that certain gesture, becomes the hand of correction, telling you don’t go that way, go this way, that this way is the right way, the way you need to go to get what you need.  A warning not to complain is also a positive instruction: you are being what to do by being told what not to do. A hand comes up not just to say, no don’t do this, a hand can also be a yes, to correct as to redirect, that’s right.

To progress you have to say yes.  I think of polishing as a yes, yes to the institution. To become professional is to polish yourself. Consider Edward Said’s (1993) description of the professionalism “not rocking the boat, not straying outside the accepted paradigms or limits, making yourself marketable and above all presentable.”  To polish yourself is to be willing to polish the institution. I think of how when I disclosed what had been going on in my institution, the various enquiries into sexual harassment that had taken place, a colleague said that my action was “unprofessional,” because it caused “a fall-out which damages us all now and in the future.” We are learning what it means to be professional. To be professional is to be willing to keep the institution’s secrets, to protect the reputation of an institution. When we smile, what else vanishes?

Those who complain, who refuse to polish the picture or be the polish in the picture, give common sense a clear inventory.

Let me explain what I mean by returning to common sense conservatism. We could compare the book written by the Common-Sense Conservative Group, to the Sewell Report published in 2021, the UK government’s most report on race. The report declared that there was no evidence of institutional racism in the UK. It claims some ethnic groups do not well because they are too negative, they dwell on racism or are haunted by history. It even suggests we see the positives in slavery. Yes, it was a polished report.

It is important to note that the report was authored primarily by Black and Brown British people.  Diversity becomes a door deal: the door is open to some of us on condition we shut that door right behind us. Shutting the door can mean shutting the door on others like us. Shutting the door can mean not even thinking of oneself as one of the others.  And so, we learn: you are more likely not to be stopped by institutional racism if you deny it exists. You might even be promoted. And then your promotion can be used as evidence of what does not exist. Polishing is tied to progression, the more you deny, the further you go.

When polishing is tied to progression so much disappears, a disappearing, a clearing. We sometimes call that clearing “common sense.” By showing what has been made to disappear, we provide that common sense with its inventory.

I began researching common sense some years ago, although I put the project on hold to write The Feminist Killjoy Handbook. You can see a description of the project here. Recently I was asked if I was going to continue sharing my work on my blog. I decided it was time to start sharing some ideas from my common-sense research. Future posts might include a critique of the idea of “biological sex” as common sense (extending some of the arguments from “Gender Critical as Gender Conservative”) as well as a discussion of racialised common sense. In the project I will be drawing especially on ethnomethodology and social phenomenology (in particular drawing on the work of Harold Garfinkel and Alfred Schutz). My hope is that interrogating common sense will provide a good way of diagnosing what is going on in contemporary “anti-woke” movements. For a lecture that draws on some of the material shared in this post see here.I will be considering the complexity of using the hand as a tool with reference to time and space (because after all, to readers of Moore, his hand is not now or near).I consider the “the table” as an object of common sense in the wider project, drawing on Hannah Arendt’s The Human Condition as well as The Life of the Mind.

References

Bacon, Gareth. 2021. ‘What is Wokeism and How Can It be Defeated’, Common Sense Thinking for a Post-Liberal Age.

Geertz, Clifford. 1975. “Common sense as a Cultural System.”  The Antioch Review, Vol. 33, No. 1.

Hall, Stuart. 1977. “Culture, the Media and the ‘Ideological Effect’”, in J. Curran, M. Gurevitch and J. Wollacott (eds), Mass Communication and Society, London: Edward Arnold,

Mirza, Heidi. 2017. “‘One in a Million’: A Journey of a Post-Colonial Woman of Colour in the White Academy.” In Inside the Ivory Tower: Narratives of Women of Colour Surviving and Thriving in British Academia, edited by Deborah Gabriel and Shirley Anne Tate. London: UCL Press.

Moore, G.E. 1925. “A Defense of Common Sense,” Contemporary British Philosophy (2nd series), ed. J. H. Muirhead.

Moore, G.E. 1939. “Proof on An External World.”

Nazir-Ali, Michael. 2021. Foreword. Common Sense Thinking for a Post-Liberal Age.

Rosenfeld, Sophia. 2011.  Common Sense: A History.  Harvard University Press.

Said, Edward. 1993.  “Professionals and Amateurs.” Reith Lecture.