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.