Notes From A Feminist Killjoy

Winner of the Atlantic Book Awards 2017 Margaret and John Savage First Book Award Winner of the East Coast Literary Awards 2017 Evelyn Richardson Non-Fiction Award Finalist for the 2017 Atlantic Book Award for Scholarly Writing Erin Wunker is a feminist killjoy, and she thinks you should be one, too. Following in the tradition of Sara Ahmed (the originator of the concept "feminist killjoy"), Wunker brings memoir, theory, literary criticism, pop culture, and feminist thinking together in this collection of essays that take up Ahmed's project as a multi-faceted lens through which to read the world from a feminist point of view. Neither totemic nor complete, the non-fiction essays that make up Notes from a Feminist Killjoy: Essays on Everyday Life attempt to think publicly about why we need feminism, and especially why we need the figure of the feminist killjoy, now. From the complicated practices of being a mother and a feminist, to building friendship amongst women as a community-building and -sustaining project, to writing that addresses rape culture from the Canadian context and beyond, Notes from a Feminist Killjoy: Essays on Everyday Life invites the reader into a conversation about gender, feminism, and living in our inequitable world. Praise for Notes From a Feminist Killjoy: "Wunker renders the label "feminist killjoy" one that readers can be proud to wear." --Becky Robertson, Quill and Quire (starred review) "Women reaching out to one another, telling each other our stories. This is astructural tactic. It is also crucial to the work of justice and social change. Let us take Wunker's core message to heart and continue this messy, complex, and vital conversation." --Julia Feng, The Fem "Erin Wunker's first book is a useful navigational tool even for those steeped in the precepts of women's studies. Her Notes represents a smorgasbord of reflection." --Sarah Murdoch, Toronto Star and Metro Canada (Toronto) "Notes from a Feminist Killjoy is an answer to what is needed now--a selfconsciously contingent rejoinder to the question of "who needs feminism?" --Christina Turner, rabble.ca

Winner of the Atlantic Book Awards 2017 Margaret and John Savage First Book Award Winner of the East Coast Literary Awards 2017 Evelyn Richardson Non-Fiction Award Finalist for the 2017 Atlantic Book Award for Scholarly Writing Erin Wunker is a feminist killjoy, and she thinks you should be one, too. Following in the tradition of Sara Ahmed (the originator of the concept "feminist killjoy"), Wunker brings memoir, theory, literary criticism, pop culture, and feminist thinking together in this collection of essays that take up Ahmed's project as a multi-faceted lens through which to read the world from a feminist point of view. Neither totemic nor complete, the non-fiction essays that make up Notes from a Feminist Killjoy: Essays on Everyday Life attempt to think publicly about why we need feminism, and especially why we need the figure of the feminist killjoy, now. From the complicated practices of being a mother and a feminist, to building friendship amongst women as a community-building and -sustaining project, to writing that addresses rape culture from the Canadian context and beyond, Notes from a Feminist Killjoy: Essays on Everyday Life invites the reader into a conversation about gender, feminism, and living in our inequitable world. Praise for Notes From a Feminist Killjoy: "Wunker renders the label "feminist killjoy" one that readers can be proud to wear." --Becky Robertson, Quill and Quire (starred review) "Women reaching out to one another, telling each other our stories. This is a structural tactic. It is also crucial to the work of justice and social change. Let us take Wunker's core message to heart and continue this messy, complex, and vital conversation." --Julia Feng, The Fem "Erin Wunker's first book is a useful navigational tool even for those steeped in the precepts of women's studies. Her Notes represents a smorgasbord of reflection." --Sarah Murdoch, Toronto Star and Metro Canada (Toronto) "Notes from a Feminist Killjoy is an answer to what is needed now--a selfconsciously contingent rejoinder to the question of "who needs feminism?" --Christina Turner, rabble.ca

"Erin Wunker is a feminist killjoy, and she thinks you should be one, too. Following in the tradition of Sara Ahmed (the originator of the concept "feminist killjoy"), Wunker brings memoir, theory, literary criticism, pop culture, and feminist thinking together in this collection of essays that take up Ahmed's project as a multi-faceted lens through which to read the world from a feminist point of view. Neither totemic nor complete, the non-fiction essays that make up Notes from a Feminist Killjoy: Essays on Everyday Life attempt to think publicly about why we need feminism, and especially why we need the figure of the feminist killjoy, now. From the complicated practices of being a mother and a feminist, to building friendship amongst women as a community-building and -sustaining project, to writing that addresses rape culture from the Canadian context and beyond, Notes from a Feminist Killjoy: Essays on Everyday Life invites the reader into a conversation about gender, feminism, and living in our inequitable world."--

In Living a Feminist Life Sara Ahmed shows how feminist theory is generated from everyday life and the ordinary experiences of being a feminist at home and at work. Building on legacies of feminist of color scholarship in particular, Ahmed offers a poetic and personal meditation on how feminists become estranged from worlds they critique—often by naming and calling attention to problems—and how feminists learn about worlds from their efforts to transform them. Ahmed also provides her most sustained commentary on the figure of the feminist killjoy introduced in her earlier work while showing how feminists create inventive solutions—such as forming support systems—to survive the shattering experiences of facing the walls of racism and sexism. The killjoy survival kit and killjoy manifesto, with which the book concludes, supply practical tools for how to live a feminist life, thereby strengthening the ties between the inventive creation of feminist theory and living a life that sustains it.

In Complaint! Sara Ahmed examines what we can learn about power from those who complain about abuses of power. Drawing on oral and written testimonies from academics and students who have made complaints about harassment, bullying, and unequal working conditions at universities, Ahmed explores the gap between what is supposed to happen when complaints are made and what actually happens. To make complaints within institutions is to learn how they work and for whom they work: complaint as feminist pedagogy. Ahmed explores how complaints are made behind closed doors and how doors are often closed on those who complain. To open these doors---to get complaints through, keep them going, or keep them alive---Ahmed emphasizes, requires forming new kinds of collectives. This book offers a systematic analysis of the methods used to stop complaints and a powerful and poetic meditation on what complaints can be used to do. Following a long lineage of Black feminist and feminist of color critiques of the university, Ahmed delivers a timely consideration of how institutional change becomes possible and why it is necessary.

In What’s the Use? Sara Ahmed continues the work she began in The Promise of Happiness and Willful Subjects by taking up a single word—in this case, use—and following it around. She shows how use became associated with life and strength in nineteenth-century biological and social thought and considers how utilitarianism offered a set of educational techniques for shaping individuals by directing them toward useful ends. Ahmed also explores how spaces become restricted to some uses and users, with specific reference to universities. She notes, however, the potential for queer use: how things can be used in ways that were not intended or by those for whom they were not intended. Ahmed posits queer use as a way of reanimating the project of diversity work as the ordinary and painstaking task of opening up institutions to those who have historically been excluded.

The Promise of Happiness is a provocative cultural critique of the imperative to be happy. It asks what follows when we make our desires and even our own happiness conditional on the happiness of others: “I just want you to be happy”; “I’m happy if you’re happy.” Combining philosophy and feminist cultural studies, Sara Ahmed reveals the affective and moral work performed by the “happiness duty,” the expectation that we will be made happy by taking part in that which is deemed good, and that by being happy ourselves, we will make others happy. Ahmed maintains that happiness is a promise that directs us toward certain life choices and away from others. Happiness is promised to those willing to live their lives in the right way. Ahmed draws on the intellectual history of happiness, from classical accounts of ethics as the good life, through seventeenth-century writings on affect and the passions, eighteenth-century debates on virtue and education, and nineteenth-century utilitarianism. She engages with feminist, antiracist, and queer critics who have shown how happiness is used to justify social oppression, and how challenging oppression causes unhappiness. Reading novels and films including Mrs. Dalloway, The Well of Loneliness, Bend It Like Beckham, and Children of Men, Ahmed considers the plight of the figures who challenge and are challenged by the attribution of happiness to particular objects or social ideals: the feminist killjoy, the unhappy queer, the angry black woman, and the melancholic migrant. Through her readings she raises critical questions about the moral order imposed by the injunction to be happy.

Hundreds of years of ridicule, persecution, erasure, misunderstanding, and institutionalization could put anyone in a bad mood. Killjoy invites you into her kastle for a queer exorcism and celebration of the past. Lesbian feminist histories can have a haunting effect on the present. This book explores the making and experience of Killjoy’s Kastle, an immersive walk-through installation and performance artwork (by Allyson Mitchell and Deirdre Logue). Inspired by Evangelical Christian hell houses, the exhibition has been staged in three cities so far – Toronto, London, and Los Angeles – engaging thousands in interactive encounters with the spirits that haunt feminist and queer history. Where traditional hell houses set out to scare and convert, Killjoy’s Kastle cheekily aims to provoke and pervert. Inside Killjoy’s Kastle extends and reflects on the theoretical and political legacies of the installation in chapters by queer and feminist scholars and in vignettes by participating artists. The many colourful photos in the book also bring the kastle to life, offering an important visual context.