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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 talk, by passing over difficult topics, speaking 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 the feminist killjoy up rather 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. 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 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. 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 that chapter as well as an earlier post on this blog). 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.
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 that 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. And, this is how reality itself is made a possession. Moore employs his hand as a defence against the sceptics. Nazir-Ali then reemploys 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:
There’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.
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.
The Feminist Killjoy Handbook is out in the world! Bringing it out into the world has taken time – and my blog has been quiet during that time. I am glad to share its arrival here. Please do order the book from independent bookstores, many of whom have got behind the handbook: you can find a list here. If you do read the book, share a picture on twitter (using the hashtag #wearefeministkilljoys). It means so much to me to know the handbook is in your hands.
We launched the book at an event in Rich Mix, London, on Thursday, March 2nd 2023. It was electrifying and emotional to be with so many people – killjoys, colleagues, affect aliens, trouble makers, friends. Each of us can be all of the above! And we filled the room with our killjoy solidarity. And, it gave me a chance to think more about what I mean by killjoy solidarity. Killjoy solidarity is how I sign my letters, in Killjoy Solidarity, Sara, kiss, kiss. But it means much more than a way of signing or signing off. For me, killjoy solidarity is the solidarity we express in the face of what we come up against. In the handbook I offer what I call killjoy truths, or hard worn wisdoms, what we know because of what keeps coming up. Let me share the last truth offered in the book, which probably best explains what I mean by killjoy solidarity.
Killjoy Truth: The More We Come up Against, the More We Need More.
The more we need more. Sometimes, being feminist killjoy, can feel like coming up against it, the very world you oppose. Killing joy, naming the problem, becoming the problem, can make us feel alone, shattered, scared. I think of a student who wrote to me from a very painful place, giving me a trigger warning for the content she was to share. At the end of her letter, she said “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, becoming feminist killjoys as how we lean on each other.
We cannot always see a killjoy crowd. But we know it’s there. And we are here.
That’s one reason I wrote The Feminist Killjoy Handbook, to say, we are here. Although I have written about feminist killjoys before, the handbook is first book I gave them of their own. I made their book a handbook, because I think of it as a hand, a helping hand, an outstretched hand, perhaps also a killjoy shoulder, or a handle, how we hold on to something. A history can be a handle. It can help to know that where we are, others have been. When we travel with feminist killjoys, going where they have been, feminist killjoys become our companion. We need this companionship.
Killing joy can take so much out of us, the energy and time required to name the problem, let alone to become one. My emphasis in the handbook is also on what killing joy can give back to us. Whilst being a feminist killjoy can be messy, and confusing, it can also lead to moments of clarity and illumination, sharpening our edges, our sense of the point, of purpose. In addition to killjoy truths (those hard worn wisdoms), I offer killjoy equations (what is revealing and quirky about our knowledge) killjoy commitments (the wills and won’ts of being a feminist killjoy) and killjoy maxims (the dos and don’ts). In the second chapter, I also offer some killjoy survival tips; my first tip to surviving as a feminist killjoy is to become one.
To become a feminist killjoy is to get in the way of happiness or just get in the way. We killjoy because we speak back, because we use words like sexism or transphobia or ableism or racism or homophobia to describe our experience, because we refuse to polish ourselves, to cover over the injustices with a smile. We don’t even have to say anything to killjoy. Some of us, black people and people of colour, can killjoy just by entering the room because our bodies are reminders of histories that get in the way of the occupation of space. We can killjoy because of how we mourn, or who we do not mourn, or who we do mourn. We can killjoy because of what we will not celebrate; national holidays that mark colonial conquest or the birth of a monarch, for instance. We can killjoy become we refuse to laugh at jokes designed to cause offense. We can killjoy by asking to be addressed by the right pronouns or by correcting people if they use the wrong ones. We can killjoy by asking to change a room because the room they booked is not accessible, again.
Killjoy Truth: We have to Keep Saying It Because They Keep Doing It
Note that negativity often derives from a judgement: as if we are only doing something or saying something or being something to cause unhappiness or to make things more difficult for others. Killing joy becomes a world making project when we refuse to be redirected from an action by that judgement. We make a commitment: if saying what we say, doing what we do, being who we are, causes unhappiness, that is what we are willing to cause.
Killjoy Commitment: I am willing to cause unhappiness.
But it can be hard, precisely because the negativity of a judgment sticks to us, because eyes start rolling before we even say anything or do anything as if to say, she would say that.
Killjoy Equation: Rolling Eyes = Feminist Pedagogy
She would say that; we did say that.
Even if we say it, killjoy solidarity can be hard to do. I learnt so much about killjoy solidarity by talking to those who did not receive it. I am thinking of the conversations I had with students and early career lecturers who, having made complaints about sexual harassment by academics, did not receive solidarity they expected from other feminists, often senior feminists. Why? It seemed that those senior feminists did not want to know about something that would be inconvenient for them, which would get in the way of their work or compromise their investments in persons, institutions or projects.
Killjoy Commitment: I am willing to be inconvenienced.
It is not so much that killjoys threaten other people’s investments in persons, institutions, or projects. We become killjoys because we threaten other people’s investments in persons, institutions or projects. And “other people” can include other feminists. And “other people” can include ourselves. Killjoy solidarity can also be the work we have to do in order to be able to hear another person’s killjoy story. We need to be prepared for our own joy to be killed, our progression slowed, if that is what it takes.
So yes, the negativity of the judgement can stick to us. It can slow us down, make our lives more difficult.
I think also of the negativity of words such as queer, which have historically been used as insults, and that are full of vitality and energy because of that. Reclaiming the feminist killjoy is a queer project. A killjoy party, a queer party, is a protest. I wanted to have a party, also a protest, to launch the book because of how many of us are under attack, our claims to personhood dismissed as “identity politics,” our critiques as “cancel culture,” our lives treated not only as light and whimsical, lifestyles, but as endangering others, as recruiting them. These attacks, which are relentless, designed to crush spirits, are directed especially to trans people right now. I express my killjoy solidarity to you, today and every day. It can be exhausting having to fight for existence.
Killjoy Truth: When you have to fight for existence, fighting can become an existence.
And so, we need each other. We need to become each other’s resources. Feminism can or should be such a resource. But what goes under the name of feminism, at least in the UK right now is anti-queer as well as anti-trans, willing to use categories such as sex or nature or natal to exclude some of us, categories that many of us have long critiqued. We say no to this. That no is louder when we say it together. A book can be a no to this. We keep writing, keeping fighting, knowing that we are sending our work out into the hostile environment that we critique.
We say no even when we know it is hard to get through.
We say no together, to make room for each other.
I am glad to be embarking now on a book tour, which we are calling Feminist Killjoys on Tour (you can find some of the events listed here).
If I am near you, come by and let us share some #killjoy solidarity. I want to say thanks, too. I left my post, my profession, my life really, back in 2016. I am profoundly grateful to all of the readers who have stayed with me because you have made it possible to dedicate my time to writing, to become a killjoy writer.
For me #killjoy solidarity is also how we thank each other for what we help make possible for each other.
I think of the feminist killjoy as a shared resource for living strangerwise. Strangerwise, is an odd world for an old wisdom, the wisdom of strangers, those who in being estranged from worlds, notice them, those who in being estranged worlds, remake them.
In fighting for room, we make something for ourselves.
Killjoy Truth: To make something is to make it possible.
Possibility can still be a fight because we have to dismantle the systems that make so much, even so many, impossible. Still, this truth is closest to what I call killjoy joy. Killjoy joy is how it feels to be involved together in crafting different worlds. We need joy to survive killing joy. We find joy in killing joy. I think of all the letters sent to me by feminist killjoys, how we reached each other. I think of what I have learnt from picking the figure of the feminist killjoy up all those years ago, and putting her to work. When I think these thoughts, I feel killjoy joy. Perhaps we find killjoy joy in resistance, killjoy joy in combining our forces, killjoy joy in experimenting with life, opening up how to be, who to be, through each other, with each other. Killjoy joy is its own special kind of joy.
In killjoy solidarity,
Sara xx
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