Notices by Alyssa (claude_cahun@kolektiva.social)

"Are you [a feminist killjoy]? How do you know? Ask yourself these questions: Do you refuse to laugh at jokes you find offensive? Have you been called divisive when you point out a division? Have you been told 'Smile, love, it could be worse,' or 'Cheer up, love, it might not happen'? Do you just have to open your mouth for eyes to start rolling? Does the atmosphere become tense when you turn up or because of what you bring up? If you answered yes to any or all of these questions, you too might be a feminist killjoy."

[Sara Ahmed, The Feminist Killjoy Handbook, 2023]

There's specific language in a subsection of Laura Mulvey "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema" (1973) titled "Destruction of Pleasure as a Radical Weapon" that I find really useful:

"It is said that analysing pleasure, or beauty, destroys it. That is the intention of this article."

I'm doing her a disservice by taking this little passage so severely out of context, but I want this portion in particular because it's been meaningful to me as a killjoy, and it's meaningful to me because I've been taking it out of context (I do not support psychoanalysis, a subset of psychiatry, and I'm opposed to projects that incorporate it, even as a metaphor-based framework). I do like, regardless of context, that Mulvey asserts her project as a killjoy project. If it ruins your fun at the cinema to be made more aware of how centrally it relies on the objectification of women, then you can die mad about it. (I'm not not thinking here of people who respond to feminist and other social justice-related critiques of popular media with an accusation that the critic is ruining their fun. Then suffer!)

I can't not think here of Fiona Apple, from Fetch the Bolt Cutters (2020):

I told you I didn't want to go to this dinner /
You know I don't go for those ones that you bother about /
So when they say something that makes me start to simmer /
That fancy wine won't put this fire out, oh /
Kick me under the table all you want /
I won't shut up

From The Feminist Killjoy Handbook: "My aim is not to rescue us from the feminist killjoy but to give her a voice. If we try not to be feminist killjoys, to claim distance from them, we would miss what they can tell us, about ourselves, the kind of work we do, and why we do it. To reclaim this figure is to recognize a truth in her."

Ahmed talks in The Feminist Killjoy Handbook and elsewhere about dinner tables and ruined dinners. This is from Living a Feminist Life (2016):

"Around the table, a family gathers. [...] We are having polite conversations, where only certain things can be brought up. Someone says something you consider problematic. At first you try not to say anything. But they keep saying something. So maybe you respond, carefully, perhaps. You say why you think what they have said is problematic. You might be speaking quietly, but you are beginning to feel wound up, recognizing with frustration that you are being wound up by someone who is winding you up. The feminist killjoy appears here: when she speaks, she seems wound up. I appear here. This is my history: wound up."

From The Feminist Killjoy Handbook:

"A snap is often understood as a sudden break or a quick movement. Snap can be used to refer to a sharp sound. You might hear the sound of a twig snapping. You might not have noticed the twig before, not noticed the pressure on the twig, how it was bent. When it snaps, it catches your attention. You might hear the snap as the start of something. A snap is only the start of something because of what you did not notice, the pressure on the twig. You might hear someone when she shouts, because she shouts; at that moment a voice is raised it is heard over everything else. It does not mean she starts off by shouting.

KILLJOY TRUTH: If you have to shout to be heard, you are heard as shouting."

One of the things I love best about Ahmed's writing is how she incorporates other texts, but it can sometimes make it difficult to excerpt. Just before the following passage, Ahmed introduces Rachel Cusk's novel Arlington Park and sets up a scene: a man at a dinner table has said that he intends to fire a pregnant employee if she doesn't return to work immediately after giving birth, and a woman at the table eventually builds up the nerve to say to him, "That's illegal."

"It is Juliet who is heard as sharp. Matthew responds: 'You want to be careful.' And then, 'she saw how close she was to his hatred: it was like a nerve she was within a millimetre of touching. "You want to take care. You can start to sound strident at your age."' It is because she speaks up, speaking up as not taking care, that she comes close to his hatred. That hatred was already there, in the background, like a nerve. To be a feminist killjoy is *to live in proximity to a nerve*."

From The Feminist Killjoy Handbook:

"KILLJOY TRUTH: To expose a problem is to pose a problem.

I think of this killjoy truth as a *core truth*, a truth from which so much else follows. If you expose a problem, you pose a problem; if you pose a problem; you become the problem. The management of a problem becomes the management of a person. In other words, one way of dealing with a problem is to stop people from talking about it or to make the people who talk about it go away. If people stop talking about the problem, or the people who talk about it go away, it can then be assumed that the problem has gone away. I hear an instruction here. We are being told to stop talking about problems or go away."

From The Feminist Killjoy Handbook:

"If pointing out sexism or racism means being judged as snapping a bond, as cutting yourself off from friends or family, it does not mean that was the aim. Rather, your experience of snapping teaches you about that bond; how it comes with conditions. We often learn conditions by failing to meet them. You realize that sustaining a bond might mean not saying certain things, not doing certain things, not noticing them, even. So even if you did not aim to snap a bond, when a bond snaps as a consequence of what you say or do, snapping can teach you why you need to snap; you snap; you get out of the room, you can breathe.

When a bond requires overlooking violence, overlooking racism, overlooking ourselves, we might need to snap the bond. Perhaps that is what a killjoy is doing or saying: she is showing that she is unwilling to meet the conditions for being with others."

"An off-duty Houston cop saw a man with a face mask walking around and fired a shot at him. Police cannot explain why the shot was fired except the cop found the face covering suspicious. Man fled, unknown if injured."

The cop in charge of the press briefing refers exclusively to this victim of gun violence as a "suspect," and the press follow suit, similarly using "suspect" to refer to someone who ran away when a random guy started firing bullets at him. When asked what crime the "suspect" would be charged with if he's found, the cop in charge said he didn't know.

https://twitter.com/IncarcerNation/status/1754149489894436914

References to purity when discussing voting (as in, "leftists need to stop their purity seeking and vote Biden") just read as genocide denial and apologia to me at this point. Perhaps you think that it is strategically necessary to hold your nose and vote for Biden. But saying that people who don't agree with you on the strategic necessity of voting for a genocide enabler are seeking purity is such an obvious distortion of reality that a person might start to wonder if you actually *are* holding your nose. Maybe he smells just fine to you.

People are complicated, but I don't think a person can understand and feel even a portion of the impact of Biden's continued material support for Israel and say that people who won't vote for him are seeking purity. *Purity.* The word choice itself is cruel. In my opinion, personally.

@YKantRachelRead "meanwhile her accuser gets off with a 'teehee oopsie'" -- along with compliments for the ostensible bravery of admitting unavoidable facts. Smearing a trans woman turns out to be an opportunity for demonstrating your own worth, even (especially?) when the smear is shown to be false. How fantastic to have the opportunity to be the bigger person.

I don't think I've ever heard "divisive" used in a political context where it wasn't a signal that the person using it just wants you to shut up and to pretend that it is not useful (necessary, even) to distinguish between people who agree with you on a substantive issue and people who don't.

@MakBerberovic I'm not going to address all that tbh. I have things to do today and, as stated previously, I'm interested in working with like-minded people. We disagree fundamentally on some key points, from personal ethics and political beliefs to predictions about what makes for effective strategy. Suffice to say, I think it's notable that you didn't bother to defend the efficacy of mass movements, as though it should be taken as a given, and that you're speaking as though mass movements haven't been attempted, which means that you're therefore ignoring the histories that point to their failures and pitfalls. It's unserious punditry. Cable news sort of stuff. I'm not interested.

I've been feeling so aimless since I finished my most recent project, which isn't surprising given that this project took up so much of my life for a very long time, but it is a bummer. I need a new project, but I need a break first. I'm looking for recommendations for (fiction) books, movies, TV, music, (cheap) games, etc. I like sci-fi and horror (especially commodification sci-fi horror a la Alien and Nope); I'm willing to try fantasy concepts; I'm not interested in stories that focus on romance, although I'll make some exceptions for lesbian romance subplots. I'm open to any music recs, but rn I especially like songs with lots of percussion and horns. I don't play games where characters have guns, otherwise I'm open to anything cheap that I can play on a switch, 3ds, or non-gaming laptop.

Help me have fun, please! I'm no good at it!

@MakBerberovic You're presuming a few things here: that like-minded people aren't already working together to solve problems in ways that aren't oriented towards respectability and that therefore don't dilute political messaging and goals (why do I need to convince a skeptic and alienate an ally rather than just working with the ally?); that a mass movement is necessary for effecting change, even if it requires diluting political messaging and goals (are we going to take a vote or something? why do I need a mass movement even at the cost of being unable to openly name my beliefs and goals?); and that it is possible to create a meaningful mass movement by naysaying political messages and goals you ostensibly agree with in the service of not offending potential recruits (what happens when my mass movement is filled with people who disagree with me after I publicly disavow my own beliefs and goals?).

I'm kind of surprised you're on the anarchist server with this sort of approach negl. If recruitment and respectability are essential, even above actual political commitments, the word "anarchy" shouldn't be in your vocabulary except as something to distance yourself from.

Increasingly disinterested in the "no one will be on your side if you talk like that" stance of people who say that they share my concerns and goals but who speak as though what our ostensibly shared concerns require most is commentary on the PR effects of any action taken to further our goals.

@miiamustang Isn't there a call for a boycott? I'm unaware of boycotts that involve consuming but complaining about it while you consume. I think that's just regular consumption.