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