Coercive Control is Domestic Violence

“Coercive control is more predictive of fatality than extreme violence.” A quote by Lori Chambers, chair of Women’s Studies at Lakehead University writing about a wife batterer (Berry) who, post-divorce was given increasing access to his children by the B.C. Supreme Court and who in December 2017 murdered his 4 and 6 year old daughters. https://vancouversun.com/news/crime/ian-mulgrew-andrew-berrys-convictions-raise-child-protection-issues

“All of (Berry’s) behaviors were about controlling (his wife) and controlling the kids, and they were so obvious. Coercive control is more predictive of fatality than extreme violence. We know that. The stats are really clear. The fact that courts are still looking and saying, ‘Well, you’re not bruised, therefore you must be okay,’ is so archaic.” This quote is from an article in the UBC Law Review, a peer reviewed legal journal (Chambers, Zweep, & Verrelli, 2018). http://www.buildingabiggerwave.org/images/uploads/Paternal_Filicide_and_Coercive_Control_-_Cotton_v_Berry.pdf 

The authors go on to frame their article around two erroneous and dangerous assumptions made by family court in custody cases: (1) abuse towards the mother does not make men bad fathers, just bad partners; and (2) contact with fathers, even abusive ones, is assumed to be in the best interest of the children.

These beliefs are widely held among the public, lawyers, and the entire judicial system to the point where they are central factors in deciding family law cases. The result being that in what is labeled, “high conflict” cases, (i.e. cases where the woman has experienced domestic abuse) family law is discriminatory against women. Trying to “prove” family violence (the legal term for domestic abuse against a partner) is extremely difficult even if there are police reports documenting physical violence. Making a case for emotional or financial abuse from the father toward his female partner is nearly impossible and deemed irrelevant in custody cases. Let’s examine each of the assumptions above more closely:

Assumption #1: Abuse towards the mother does not make men bad fathers, just bad partners. Decades of social science research have revealed the long lasting harm done to children who witness domestic abuse against their mother. These children are at a greater risk for repeating the cycle as adults and becoming abusers themselves. A boy who sees his mother being abused is ten times more likely to abuse his female partner as an adult. A girl who grows up in a home where her father abuses her mother is more than six times as likely to be sexually abused as a girl who grows up in a non-abusive home.

Additionally, as described by psychologists Lundy Bancroft and Jay Silverman (2002), most abusive men are self-centered and manipulative and either use authoritarian parenting or have little involvement with their children. A man's abusive behavior fosters disrespect for their mother and undermines her parenting authority. Further (and this is something that the courts don’t acknowledge) men who are abusive toward their female partners do not stop the abuse once the relationship ends. Why? For abusers, separation means losing their sense of power and control. Therefore, they use the tools that they have at their disposal which very often are shared children. Two studies conducted by the American Bar Association revealed that abuser’s motivation to use their own children as a means to intimidate and control the child’s other parent, increases post separation.

Abusers ongoing attempts to gain control will play out first in court proceedings for custody and parenting arrangements. Abusive men will use the courts to control and harass their ex-partners by filing for full custody when they were disinterested in the children during the relationship. They often engage in smear campaigns and continue gaslighting the mother to present her as “crazy” while in court or if she mentions the abuse. In abusive relationships the men often control the finances and are more likely to be able to afford a good lawyer which puts women at a disadvantage during custody disputes. Further, ongoing court battles which deplete the mother’s funds are another method used to control women. Abusive men themselves will go into extreme debt in an actual battle to “win” i.e. control the mother by taking away that which is most important to her, her children.

Assumption #2: Children’s contact with the father, even abusive ones, is in the best interest of the child. This myth, has succeeded in convincing courts—and the public at large—that men are essential in children’s lives, even men who have a history of coercion and/or violence towards their female partners. The Divorce Act of Canada was amended to add the following provision:

Maximum Contact (10) In making an order under this section [custody], the court shall give effect to the principle that a child of the marriage should have as much contact with each spouse as is consistent with the best interests of the child and, for that purpose, shall take into consideration the willingness of the person for whom custody is sought to facilitate such contact.

The result being that abusive, coercive, and controlling fathers are given primary or shared custody in an alarmingly high number of cases (Chambers et. al., 2018). This addition of “maximum contact” to the Divorce Act is due, at least in part, because of the activism of the fathers’ rights movement. This is a group of primarily white, heterosexual conservative men with ties to the men’s rights movement who claim to be advocating for rights to the father in family law cases. The “movement” is really a backlash against feminism where it’s proponents attempt to discredit the experiences of female victims of intimate partner violence and roll back legal protections for all victims of domestic abuse.

When abusive men are awarded joint or full custody of the children, it means they will have access to the mother where the abuse will continue. Researchers from Safe Lives a domestic abuse advocacy organization report that abusive former partners use childcare arrangements to carry on targeting their victims in around a third of cases where children are cited as the reason for ongoing contact. Women are subjected to coercive control, manipulation, and physical and even sexual assault from their ex-partners when children are being picked up or dropped off. Such men will frequently deny the mother access to the children; engage in harassment, bullying, and stalking of the mother. They will elicit friends to follow the mother. They will stalk her on social media. Send excessive and invasive text messages and e-mail to the mother under the guise of discussing the children. Then there is the case of assault and murder. The numbers are staggering. In Canada alone, there is an average of 70 victims per year of domestic homicide with over 80% of adult victims being women.

Coming back to the article that started this piece. The authors urge us to recognize—and court decisions to reflect—that coercive, controlling, and angry behavior is not isolated, private, or simply between parents. Men who control and/or abuse their female partners cannot be good parents and present a serious risk to their ex-partners and their children.

Bancroft, L. &  Silverman, J. (2002). The Batterer as Parent: Addressing the Impact of Domestic Violence on Family Dynamics. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

Chambers, L., Zweep, D., & Verrelli, N. (2018). Paternal Filicide and Coercive Control: Reviewing the Evidence in Cotton v Berry. UBCL Rev., 51, 671.

To Be Believed...Revaluing Women and the Feminine

If you spend any time with young children, they invariably will tell you, one, two fibs. Their world of fantasy and fiction blur. Or so we think. We assume that they are not telling the truth.

Older children, youth, teenagers we really don’t believe them. Especially those who’ve acquired the unfortunate marking of “problem youth” because of being born into poverty, a racialized family, or are gender non-conforming. We don’t believe what they have to say.

A friend of mine, who has a chronic mental illness and a history of addiction, calls to tell me that once again “no one believes me, they think I’m making it up” in trying to receive medication for her severe shoulder pain.

Another friend, who’s African-American is going in to the clothing boutique that she co-owns, at night through the ally entrance and hears, “FREEZE. Put your hands up!” by a police officer pointing a gun at her. When she says, “this is my store,” he puts her in the patrol car and drives her to the station.  

Women identified people recounting details of rape, sexual violation, sexual harassment, incest, domestic abuse, intimate partner violence, they are not believed.

Why are certain people, particular identities not believed? One way of understanding it is to consider value, or the societal un-valuing of particular identities.

To be believed requires first being recognized as having an identity worthy of possessing value, and second as having accrued enough value so as to have the authority to speak.

To the first requirement: Why do some identities have value while others do not?

Class, race, gender, sexuality, ability are actually “classification systems” with different identities within them. They work by adding value to some bodies and not to “other” bodies. Meaning, that where one falls in the classification dictates how much value one has in society. For example, class as a classification system works in the interest of some, those who are middle or upper class, at the expense of others, those who are poor or working-class. The same can be said for race (white), gender (cis and masculine), sexuality (hetero), ability (typical/ ‘sane’). The identities in parentheses have value. This means that in a classification system, some people or bodies will be unvalued, negatively marked, irrespective of how they personally identify or what they personally think of their social location.

There is the case of Brooke Nevils, the former NBC news producer who has accused Matt Lauer of rape. It has been one year since Christine Blasey-Ford subjected herself to public scrutiny and humiliation in the Cavanaugh confirmation hearing. Fourteen women have accused Harvey Weinstein of rape and 87 others have accused him of sexual assault or harassment but he is going on trial in January for just 5 charges. The first two women in my example (and the vast majority of Weinstein’s victims) are wealthy, privileged, white women. And they are not believed. This fact should not be misconstrued to mean that gender as a classification system has some dominance in the ranking of oppression. No. Rather, what this highlights is the persistence and upholding of patriarchal masculine dominance by un-valuing and hating women and the feminine

This is how classification systems, gender in this case, work. Gender as a category was created to establish the dominance of men over women. Therefore, any fissures or disruptions to this structure will be met with force. Both literal force (violence against women) and symbolic force (the cultural un-valuing, disbelieving, and denigration of women and the feminine). Violence against trans women is a direct example of this. Trans women threaten male supremacy by “choosing” femininity. The backlash against women in response to the massive appeal of the #MeToo movement is another example.

As I frequently do here, in this forum, I write about the silencing of women when they speak out about the violence they’ve experienced and how this can be understood, and challenged, culturally.

Back to my thesis statement:

To be believed requires first being recognized as having an identity worthy of possessing value, and second as having accrued enough value so as to have the authority to speak.

In order to be believed one must have an identity seen as possessing value. Thus, recognizing which bodies or people do not have value, is a place to start. It is a place to begin the cultural shift required. As the British feminist theorist Beverly Skeggs writes, “…value comes from re-valuing that which is seen as unvalued.” Recognize who is unvalued in society, who is not believed, which bodies you do not value. This, directs action for social change.

Hysterical: A Feminist Killjoy in Bed with Masculinity

The Beginning

This is not about trauma narratives or sob stories. This is not about sexual harassment in the work place, pornography, unwanted advances, or rape. This is about good old fashioned domestic abuse. DV. Intimate partner violence. Remember that, Domestic Violence? “Discovered” in the 1970s by the radical feminists. They coined the phrase, “the personal is political.” Where did that go? It's not sexy or interesting. Displaced by the shining spotlight of male abuse of power in more public forms. Which, is most certainly an advance, but what happens when we think abuse at home is over, no longer an issue? That it's a problem just for poor, uneducated women who don't know any better. That it’s part of the "Other's" domestic culture.

What happens is we, the privileged, stop talking about it. But it never went away. Raising two generations now of young people to be weary of the sexual prowess of boys/men, that no means no, date rape is a thing, consent is sexy, report inappropriate sexual advances at work, school, college, and having the channels to do that---is one thing. But culturally we haven't prepared these same people to look out for the signs of controlling behavior in romantic relationships or even what abuse looks like beyond knives and fists.

So this is about heteropatriarchal white supremacist responses to intimacy that fuel masculinized violence, in the home, the bedroom, on a date. As told by me, a Western, highly educated, middle-class, white, queer, cisgendered woman from the seat of colonial power (America). I say masculinized violence to mean that it emerges out of a misogynistic, hetero-patriarchal capitalist society that hates women and the feminine. Thus, such violence exists in queer relationships and the perpetrators are not all cis-men. Yet, in this post, postmodern moment, where identity is seen as a free-floating signifier, it is important to name the category of difference that most often defines the victim, woman.

This is about identifying domestic violence. Revealing it, naming it, talking about it. We don't even call it violence. "Emotional abuse," emotional, feminine, that will make it disappear. The kind of violence that goes unrecognized for years, decades sometimes, until it has pick, pick, picked you apart and you're left walking around with entire pieces of yourself missing. 

We need to move beyond the limits of feminist theorizing on why men engage in violent behavior, toxic masculinity and the sort. Or why the abused stay in abusive relationships. I agree with Ashwini Tambe’s remarks that the massive appeal of the #MeToo movement is because it is about sexual coercion. And for privileged women, specifically white women, being coerced sexually goes against the middle-class norm of equating sex with self-hood.

This piece is about exposing the forms of coercion that happen in intimate relationships. Exposing the complex labyrinth of the abuser’s control that most often is not physical violence. It is about revealing the ways that the victim is shamed, pathologized, discounted, ignored, and used. She becomes a survivor just by living.

Class Matters and the Lone Mother

Recently, I had the opportunity to have a discussion with low income “lone” mothers. I put lone in quotes to indicate the challenge in what sort of title to put before the word mother.

Traditionally, this group is referred to as “single” mothers. Single. With this an emphasis on the marital status of the woman, mother. Highlighting first that this figure is not married indicates her flaw, her defect. The connotation is that the default position for a woman who has had a child is to be in a legally, state sanctioned relationship with a man. This archaic, heteronormative distinction is used to imply that raising children without a (male) partner puts emotional (and more importantly at the structural level) financial strain on the mother. However, what this really does is create another category of woman identified people for Western societies to disparage and hate.

I typed “single mother” into Google and the first 4 of 6 images were of black women and children. Every picture featured a smiling woman figure with a child either hanging on her back or in a loving embrace. “Single father,” interestingly, produced identical results. If the mother figure is a trope of “white” selfless unwavering devotion and magical virginal perfection, the “single mother” is a poor, depressed hag, selfishly living off of welfare or child support, if she is acknowledged at all.

Here is the reality of lone motherhood in British Columbia, Canada.

In BC, 82% of lone-parent families are female-led, with median annual incomes that are just 69% of male lone-parent families. This translates into half of all single mothers in BC are poor or in poverty. These women did not all start out low income. Research from the US reveals that when heterosexual unions end, across class lines, earnings go up 20% for men but down 40 – 60% for women. This does not mean that these men were financially supporting these women in some 1950s version of domesticity. Rather, gender, race, and class inequality intersect with patriarchal dominance to move formerly middle class women into poverty and keep low income women poor after the partnership ends.

First there is the issue of the feminization of labor. There is a workplace trend, with the rise of global capitalism, towards the greater employment of women. This is because of the gendered nature of work. Service work, the caring fields, domestic work are all gendered feminine. Gendering certain work as “women’s work,” then justifies the low status and low wages that correspond with such labor. Lone mothers and women in poverty get funneled in to feminized jobs by the government in an effort to put them in any job. However, these are low paying, part time, precarious, and seasonal jobs. Additionally, there are unique impediments to work that single mothers face.

Access to childcare is a primary challenge. In British Columbia there is a serious absence of quality, affordable child care. Child care fees in BC are among the highest in the country. Across metro Vancouver, fees consume between 27% and 35% of women’s average annual income. The high cost of child care puts it out of reach for low-income families. There is also a lack of child care availability in BC with a licensed space for only 20% of children who require one.  There is also non-existent childcare for shift work. Mothers who do shift work and work nights (which is a vast majority of the low wage feminized work that women get) have to rely on family or friends to watch their children. This is not an option for new immigrant mothers or for the mothers who had to move away from their home to leave an abusive relationship.

The lack of affordable housing is another impediment faced by lone mothers. The high cost, and lack of, rental properties in city centers, means that lone mothers frequently must move out to the suburbs away from job opportunities and support services. Not only does this contribute to the isolation experienced by single mothers, but it creates another barrier to employment. Transportation then becomes an issue as low income, lone mothers must rely on an inadequate public transit system. A virtually impossible, if not expensive, time crunch ensues of getting one’s children to childcare or school, getting themselves to work, leaving work in time to pick up the children, or arranging for after school care, and then home to start the third shift. All of this means that financial security for lone mothers requires much more than simply, “getting a job.”

Finally, there is the issue of intimate partner violence. A very high percentage of lone mothers have experienced some form of abuse from their former partner. This overlays all of the previously mentioned obstacles and is a primary factor in moving or keeping women in poverty. The details of how domestic abuse impacts lone mothers will be discussed in my next post.

Male Privilege

I am in a small neighborhood grocery market. The kind that has a lot of produce out front and inside select grocery items with a focus on a particular ethnic cuisine. For this one, that was Persian. I hear two voices at the front of the store, both speaking with non-English accents engaged in what sounds like an argument. One of the voices, a woman’s voice, is quite soft. I can not make out what she is saying. The other voice, a male voice, is escalating. It gets louder and louder. Soon this male voice is shouting at the other voice. Shouting at the woman. Suddenly my muscles tighten. I can feel the blood rushing to my head, through my muscles. My palms are sweaty. Images of my encounters with misogynistic and abusive men have entered my mind now.  I am scared and enraged. I want to rush to the front of the store to stop him. Stop him from hurting her. I see now that the woman’s voice belongs to a store cashier. The male voice belongs to a customer. I hesitate. Only because the man is a person of color. So too is the woman. I walk up to the man and say, “stop shouting at her! Leave her alone! Leave the store!” He starts telling me now about the wrong done to him, apparently not understanding where my allegiance lies. “Don’t shop here then if you have an issue with their policies. Stop shouting at her. Leave the store!” It took a lot for me to not go ballistic on him. None of the other customers said a thing. Sensing my rage building, I walked away.

A short time later the woman who was the direct target for this man’s aggression came and found me in one of the aisles. She appeared rattled, slightly, but was very calm and poised. This was a person familiar with male aggression, male violence.  She apologized to me for that man’s behavior, and started to talk about what she had done to warrant a verbal assault. I stopped her mid-sentence. “You did nothing wrong,” I say. “He was wrong for shouting at you.”

When I went to the front to pay for my groceries, the other cashier (a woman of color) was visibly upset and said something to me about the incident. “Ohh. I need an Advil now after that. I just bought these special $200 shoes because of my back pain and now my back is going to hurt all day.” Their fear and anger and shame was palatable. It hung in the store like thick smoke that you have to wade through to get out, to be free.

The establishment of women only spaces and then queer only spaces which followed, come out of second wave feminism and the need to publicly and personally declare the existence of “women” in cultural and social space. This was cis-gendered, middle class white women mind you. Thus, I’ve always been a bit suspect of such gatherings where “Women” is the headline. Yet, after this short 10 minute incident, I felt viscerally in my body, the need to not be around men. How triggering just hearing a male voice, can be.

I am not advocating for separatism. Rather, calling out an everyday instance of male violence against women. It needs to be called that, violence, to remove the socially sanctioned permissiveness of masculine aggression. Violence reveals the intention of the actor to cause harm. The ruthless taking of an Other’s humanity. It names a specific perpetrator(s) and victim(s). And naming it “male violence” puts the actions in the context of a structural attempt to maintain power and dominance. We must be careful, though, to not misconstrue the idea of “intent.” One might argue that this does not really constitute male violence as the perpetrator did not use physical force or prolonged psychological or mental mistreatment. However, this man was clearly intending to do harm in order to get his way with this woman through verbal intimidation. What is more important, though, is to pay attention to the social mechanisms in place that make this “everyday” display of male violence against women possible at all. If patriarchy is the institutionalization of cis-male white power, there are social mechanisms in place that maintain male moral and cultural dominance. One of these mechanisms is the permissiveness of men to be loud and aggressive in public. Further, it is the institutionalization of male aggression and violence, the cultural acceptance of it, the societal unwillingness to call anything but physical force violence that puts women, queer, and trans people in a constant state of vigilance and fear. This is why the two women clerks in the store did not “fight back.” They have learned that to fight back against male violence is to risk subjecting yourself to more violence. So women chose their battles. They reserve their energy to fight back against intimate male partners and male family members. What might seem like passivity or compliance to a male act of violence committed by a stranger, is actually silent resistance. We cannot see such people’s history of fighting back. We cannot see their sometimes daily endurance of male violence and aggression. This is why I’m highlighting it hear. It is the small daily occurrences of male violence that provide the opportunity for patriarchal dominance and control.

Yes. Domestic Violence is STILL a Problem

I woke up this morning to a text from a friend, a forwarded NYT headline that read: “An Extraordinary New Book Dismantles the Myths That Surround Domestic Violence.” My heart sang! and then went dark. The book, No Visible Bruises: What We Don’t Know About Domestic Violence Can Kill Us, by Rachel Louise Snyder looks excellent. The title alone “No Visible Bruises” implies that the author is highlighting at the forefront that DV is NOT about (or only) physical violence. From reading the reviews, Snyder takes on and then dismantles the common myths surrounding domestic violence that are un-feminist and victim blaming. Yay! And, perhaps most importantly, here is a book, reviewed in the New York Times, devoted to DOMESTIC Violence. The lack of discussion on the topic of DV in the popular discourse is discerning and deplorable. I have been saying this for a while, in the era of #MeToo intimate partner violence and DV are not sexy or interesting. They’ve been displaced by the shining spotlight of male abuse of power in more public and sensational forms. The highlighting of sexual assault and harassment is most certainly a social and political advance, but what happens when we think abuse at home is over, no longer an issue? That it's a problem just for poor, uneducated women who have no choice but to stay? That it is part of the "Other's" domestic culture. What happens is we, the privileged, stop talking about it.

But that is not happening here. And a place for Snyder’s book in the popular press is most certainly due, in part, because of the success of the #MeToo movement in highlighting gender based abuse. I began this piece saying my heart sang and then fell. That is because I have experienced domestic violence and I have, no visible bruises.

How I Became a Feminist…The first time

As a cis-woman in her early 40s, I thought that my gender would be relatively insignificant by this age. That I would be free from the daily confrontation with sexism. A naïve assumption I suppose, but also somewhat logical given that structured gender oppression (sexism) is most recognized at the individual level. Things like…cat calls, sexual harassment, constant comments on one’s appearance, being viewed as weak, emotional, fragile, pretty; coercion into sexual acts, sexual domination, physical assault, sexual assault, and the constant “on guard-ness” that any of the above will happen. Like most girls, I recognized from a very early age that being a “girl” was significant, in negative ways. The gender script was very limited and very binary. This was the late 80s remember. My political awakening, however, recognizing that my gendered experience was not unique and that gender benefited certain bodies over other bodies, did not fully come until age 21.

After I graduated from college I moved to Washington D.C. to start my ambitious desires of becoming a clinical psychologist. I had an internship with the A.P.A. and got a job as a research assistant in the epidemiology department at George Washington University Medical Center. Plus I had a waitressing job at night and late, late night partook in the now infamous D.C. 90s Indie rock scene. Oh the energy of youth! My research job entailed preparing final reports and presentations for physicians. I was working on a project for doctors in cardiology for a medical conference. I spent weeks reading through scientific data, writing drafts, final reports, making posters and flyers. It was the day I was going to present my efforts to the doctors. I was ready to wow them with my presentation. I walked into the room with all of my materials. There was four of them, white men. One of the doctors, with whom I had worked closely with, said, “Stephanie. Stop right there. Just stand there for a moment so we can look at you. Have you ever thought of being a model?” Stunned and mortified I mumbled out a timid, “…no?” I tried to regain my composure and I distinctly remember looking towards the exit in case I’d have to run out, quickly. Assault did not follow. I suppose I was “lucky” in that regard, but that was it. What The Fuck?!! Who did they think they were?! Discounting my knowledge! My weeks of effort, sleepless nights, doing their grunt work! Treating me as if I was their secretary! It wasn’t like I had had a pristine life up to that point. My short history was full of sexual harassment and even assault. But this was the first time that I experienced how my work and my intellect would be viewed first as that of a woman’s, and hence, less important than my appearance. Further, since what these men were reacting to was my youthful physique, I thought that with age it would eventually go away. 

But it didn’t and it doesn’t. That is part ll. 

What does Feminist Killjoy Culture mean?

I borrow/use the term Feminist Killjoy from the amazing Sara Ahmed. A queer, racialized, British feminist theorist and scholar. In her 2010 book, The Promise of Happiness, she examines the idea of the feminist killjoy—along with the unhappy queer, the angry black woman, and the melancholic migrant—to demonstrate how our Western obsession with acquiring and maintaining happiness can be problematic for those whose experience interrupts the happiness narrative. “To kill joy,” she writes, “is to open a life, to make room for life, to make room for possibility, for change.” Basically a feminist killjoy, as I interpret it, is someone who isn’t trying to be nice and polite or even feel nice and content because they are fighting against a culture and social structures that are actively working to diminish/destroy them.

Anyone who is a lover of social theory, or feminism (it is a theory!), or knowing your world will understand that feeling one gets when they read something that speaks to them. That describes their life experience. When someone is able to describe concisely what you, and therefore many others as well, are living and name it. That is social change. And that is the feeling I got when I read The Promise of Happiness and discovered the feminist killjoy.

I first discovered Sara Ahmed’s work with her concept of “Affective Economies.” I was conducting my doctoral research with working-class and racialized girls who were not in school and not working, i.e. “a social problem” and was looking for a way to talk about their strong emotional displays and “disruptive” behaviors as appropriate responses, given the oppression they experience daily. Ahmed suggests that emotions or affect are not individual psychological dispositions but rather, function as a bridge between the individual and the collective. She says that emotions are produced from the circulation of collective experiences, histories, and labor. Brilliant! [Link to my article on affect and girls]

Back to the feminist killjoy. Ahmed describes how this figure not only kills other people’s joy by, for example, pointing out everyday moments of sexism; but that the FK also by exposing how women and marginalized people’s oppression is erased under the guise of striving for happiness.

“Feminists do kill joy in a certain sense: they disturb the very fantasy that happiness can be found in certain places. To kill a fantasy can still kill a feeling. It is not just that feminists might not be happily affected by what is supposed to cause happiness, but our failure to be happy is read as sabotaging the happiness of others.” Sarah Ahmed (2010) Feminist Killjoys (And Other Willful Subjects)

The FK, thus, is a figure to be feared precisely because she brings down, kills the joy, of others in the room. What Ahmed is describing is nothing new in feminism. She references early second wave theorists while making her argument. Her brilliance comes from describing a truly intersectional feminist figure, and she highlights the major elephant in the room when talking about feminine performing people: the expectation that to be feminine is to be nice, emotionally restrained, and happy.

I am a feminist killjoy. To be one, to me, means… “To be willing to go against a social order, which is protected as a moral order, a happiness order to be willing to cause unhappiness, even if unhappiness is not your cause.” I am doing this now on the topic of intimate relationships and exposing the institutional and social arrangements that perpetuate and foster masculinized violence that becomes expressed in relationships as domestic abuse. I am calling the larger project, Feminist Killjoy Culture, because it is about changing cultural norms. Hysterical: A Feminist Killjoy in Bed with Masculinity

Yes, there is and will be backlash. Yes I am killing the joy of certain others in the room. This is what it takes, however, to create change. People, especially white middle-class people, have to be willing to expose the inner workings of their domestic life, their partnerships, their intimacies. Culture is created by people. We can change the cultural order.