The Feminist Killjoy Handbook

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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:

Towards the end of our chat, I wondered whether being a killjoy requires a certain level of privilege. Quitting your job because you disagree with the workplace’s principles, or standing up to your family — these actions are risky, and resources help mitigate that risk. But Ahmed disagreed. “Some of the people who are least likely to kill joy are people who are the most privileged because they have a lot of investment in the institution as it is and they benefit from that,” Ahmed explained. On the whole, she said, people kill joy to survive.

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. It feels fitting that Ahmed cites Toni Morrison as a feminist killjoy, as she once famously said that “the very serious function of racism,” and, I would argue, most forms of bigotry, “is distraction. It keeps you from doing your work.” Happiness, too, often serves as a distraction, encouraging people to find peace within broken systems rather than tearing them down. Less than 10 years after Obergefell, we may lose that thin promise of happiness anyway, with old victories like Roe v. Wade being overturned by the court. 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. That killjoy truths are shut out by institutions because of what they would reveal about them is how some of us are shut out.

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 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 you are in as harassment is to realise how much you will have to do to get out of it. 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.”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). 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. 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.