The Feminist Killjoy Handbook

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

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

Feminism too can end up being the avoidance of that price. We have to find another way through feminism. I think of how bell hooks’s critiques of white feminism gave us so many tools, for instance, her critique of Betty Friedan’s solution to the unhappiness of the housewife, the “problem that has no name” (except of course, you named it). You write, “She did not discuss who would be called in to take care of the children and maintain the home if more women like herself were freed from their house labor and given equal access with white men to the professions” (2000, 1–2). And you taught me how to “do feminist theory” by reflecting on what happens when we “do feminism.” You write, “a group of white feminist activists who do not know one another may be present at a meeting to discuss feminist theory. They may feel they are bonded on the basis of shared womanhood, but the atmosphere will noticeably change when a woman of colour enters the room. The white women will become tense, no longer relaxed, no longer celebratory” (2000, 56). In this description there is so much insight into everything. A woman of colour just has to enter the room for the atmosphere becomes tense. Atmospheres – they seem intangible mostly. But when you become the cause of tension, an atmosphere can be experienced as a wall. The woman of colour comes to be felt as apart from the group, getting in the way of a presumably organic solidarity.

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

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. 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 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. 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. 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.”