[Free Download Killjoys
Jamar Lizarraga
This was the first year since the beginning of the pandemic that I was able to be in the same room with other feminists, sharing our work, our words, our struggles. It meant so much. Presenting our work virtually has allowed us to reach each other in ways that we had not been able to before. But there is still something special about being in the same room together.
I wrote The Feminist Killjoy Handbook as I wanted the feminist killjoy to be a shared resource; a handle, a hand. The figure of the feminist killjoy helps to make sense of how we become the problem for pointing out the problem, or how naming violence can mean we end up being treated as the cause of it.
Find other killjoys is a survival tip, yes. It is also a research method, a way of reading texts, of recovering histories, and a life method, a way of connecting with people at a party, of surviving institutions.
I could no longer speak. My voice could no longer hold or at least I feared that my voice, usually my friend, would not be able to say the words that needed to be said. I am still writing, for some reason words keep coming out that way, writing about hostile institutions, how to survive them or, writing as I am now, about writing. But in the past months I could not bring myself to participate in any events in which I would have to speak. I could go to demonstrations, express my solidarity with Palestine, amplify the voices of Palestinian activists and poets and scholars on social media, read their work, signs letters and protest statements: but speaking with my actual voice, no, not that.
I also include at the back of the handbook a recommended reading list for feminist killjoys. It includes many kick-ass books by Black feminists, Indigenous feminists and feminists of colour that have published since I first assembled my survival kit. They are in there now, doing their thing.
Several years later, the Feminist Killjoys Reading Group continues. Now there is a core group of five who meet regularly and organize monthly events at which anyone is welcome. It is a growing community. And creating this community is one of the ways of saying: it takes work to be a killjoy, and we need each other in order to be able to continue doing this work. In order for this work to exist, part of the work needs to be the work of finding solidarity and not parcelling each other up in the process.
I offer here some preliminary observations on problems that follow protecting religious or philosophical beliefs based on my analysis of decisions made by Employment Tribunals. It is my view that not only have some Employment Tribunals failed in the task of balancing different protections but the Tribunals are being misused as tools for the targeting and harassment of groups they should be protecting. My prediction is that this situation will only worsen without direct intervention such as a judicial review.
[14] I may return to how Stock used her position as expert witness in the following post. Stock makes confident but false claims about how racist speech in order to legitimate her confident but false claims about the neutrality of statements about trans people. The judge then treated these false but confident claims as if they were true.
[24] I will discuss examples of how this works in a follow up post. The challenge here is to explain the mechanism whilst preserving anonymity of sources, which is a challenge given the high-profile nature of some of the commentators involved.
For whom would poetry be a luxury? Lorde responds by saying that poetry is not that, not a luxury, that poetry is necessary, as necessary, perhaps, as bread. Poetry is what we need to sustain ourselves.
The past becomes alive with new meanings. You become estranged from the past; you rearrange it. To rearrange the past is more than rearranging furniture, although it can feel like that, creating a different sense of space.
We do what we can, where we can, by recognising our own limits, our capacities, and that can be a way of surviving politically, by which I mean, keeping hold of our commitments. Sometimes, then, withdrawal from a conversation or silence in a situation can be how we keep doing our work.
I do not want not to be shocked by what is happening right now, as I get up, move around, begin each day. I do not want not to be conscious of it, to let myself be distracted by this project or that. If I get distracted, which sometimes I do, I remember how that too can be a privilege, when you are not having to work just to stay alive.
But the marches are happening all over the world because people are seeing it, which also means that people, many, many people, many more, are making it harder for the violence not to be seen, the violence of colonial occupation
I am grateful for all the people who are doing that: sharing words and solidarity, Black feminist solidarity, getting themselves onto the streets, into train stations, Sisters Uncut, Jewish Voices for Peace, stopping the traffic, becoming the traffic, chanting for Palestinian freedom, speaking up, speaking out, sometimes risking their own livelihoods in doing so. I am grateful for podcasters who are doing that, speaking out, speaking up, for radical publishers (also here), who are doing that, sharing resources on Palestine, a history, ever present.
We need these resources. We need each other more than other to show up, turn up, however we can, in our queer ways, so they cannot contain it, the violence, the injustice, the sheer abject cruelty, the devastation of a place and a people, screen it out, the blinds down.
Decisions to cut aid for the terminally ill, for the elderly, for dependent children, for food stamps, even school lunches, are being made by men with full stomachs who live in comfortable houses with two cars and umpteen tax shelters. None of them go hungry to bed at night. Recently, it was suggested that senior citizens be hired to work in atomic plants because they are close to the end of their lives anyway.
Can anyone of us here still afford to believe that efforts to reclaim the future can be private or individual? Can anyone here still afford to believe that the pursuit of liberation can be the sole and particular province of anyone particular race, or sex, or age, or religion, or sexuality, or class?
I learn from Lorde and many others what it means to fight for change, to be in solidarity with Palestine, to form coalitions across our differences, keeping them in mind, making them meaningful, to march but not to a prescribed step, to fight, and to fight despair. We become vigilant for the smallest opportunities for change before they close like windows.
I write this post in solidarity with Palestine. I express my solidarity as a feminist killjoy, in my own terms, on this blog. To express solidarity with Palestine is to be a killjoy, wherever we are. We get in the way because of how we mourn, or who we mourn, becoming a problem because of what we point to or because of the violence we refuse to pass over, the violence of colonial occupation, the violence enacted right now against people in Gaza by the Israeli state.
I write this post as a no, made all the louder because of how it is shared with so many others, all over the world, no to the Israeli state, no to those standing in alliance with the Israeli state, no to those who justify the violence unleashed against Palestinians, no to the dehumanising rhetoric that has its own colonial history allowing that violence to be enacted, legitimated, by not being seen.
Such solidarity would not be safe in abstraction, warm and fuzzy, a way of feeling something without doing it. It would be a call to action and to attention, keeping at the front of our consciousness the reasons we need to be in solidarity, the violence, the material realities of suffering, ongoing colonial occupation, the brutality of state racism.
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