Sara Ahmed, author, scholar, and one of our feminist heroes joins us to talk about her new book, The Feminist Killjoy Handbook!

Sara's work both as a scholar in the academy working on queer phenomenology, on post coloniality, and on emotions, as well as her work after she left the academy has been an inspiration. Her work, Living a Feminist Life, her work on Complaint, and her bold and powerful blog, Feminist Killjoys, taught me so much about how institutions functioned and helped me understand my experiences in the academy.

In this conversation, Sara and I talk about the book, but also talk about the aunties in her life and many other things.

Join us in the Academic Aunties Bookclub!

In December, we're going to gather some feminist killjoy aunties to talk about the book! So after listening to this episode, go out and buy a copy. And then stay tuned in December when we're going to have our very first Academic Aunties Book Club! If you'd like to contribute to the conversation, email us your thoughts or even a voice memo to podcast@academicaunties.com.

Related Links and Mentioned in the Episode

• The Feminist Killjoy Handbook
• Sara Ahmed's Website
• The Feminist Killjoy Blog
• The Cancer Journals, by Audre Lorde

Thanks for listening! Get more information, support the show, and read all the transcripts at academicaunties.com. Get in touch with Academic Aunties on Twitter at @AcademicAuntie or by e-mail at podcast@academicaunties.com.

I'm Dr. Ethel Tungohan, an Associate Professor of Politics at York University. This is Academic Aunties. Today, we are beyond excited to have Sara Ahmed, author, scholar, and one of my feminist heroes here to talk about her book, The Feminist Killjoy Handbook.

I first encountered Sara's work as a Women's Studies student, diving into her work on queer phenomenology, on post coloniality, and on emotions, which, as a professor today, I still love diving into with my students.

But it was actually Sara's book after she left the Academy that really and truly resonated with me. Her work, Living a Feminist Life, her work on Complaint, and her bold and powerful blog, Feminist Killjoys, taught me so much about how institutions functioned and helped me understand my experiences in the academy.

These works and more explain to me the icky feeling I get when I do diversity work for the university, or when I pursue proper university channels to complain about inequity and find myself constantly stonewalled by so called feminists, and when I feel frustrated about the absence of structural supports within the institution for racialized women.

I'm sure many of you have experienced these things.

Academic Aunties, in many ways, is a love letter to women of color who've spoken truth to power, like Sara Ahmed. I like to think that I and my fellow aunties, including our listeners, are feminist killjoys and not paper feminist killjoys, as we talk about in this episode, who hold institutions to account and who always try to do otherwise.

The Feminist Killjoy Handbook was revelatory. It provides us with killjoy truths, killjoy maxims, killjoy commitments, and killjoy equations. It thinks about the feminist killjoy as an activist, as a philosopher, as a cultural critic, as an artist.

When I read the book, I felt affirmed and emboldened to keep being a killjoy. In this conversation, Sara and I talk about the book, but also talk about the aunties in her life and many other things. After you listen to our conversation, go to academicaunties.com/killjoy and buy a copy. And then in December, we're going to have our very first Academic Aunties Book Club!

Woohoo! We'll have more details at the end of this episode. But in the meantime, please enjoy your conversation with Sara Ahmed.

I am so thrilled, so honored, so excited, and actually, quite frankly, a little bit nervous, because we have one of my feminist heroes, one of my feminist killjoy heroes, Sara Ahmed joining us today. And Sara Ahmed is a feminist writer and independent scholar who works at the intersection of feminist, queer and race studies.

She has published 10 books, including the cult classic, Living a Feminist Life, which I must say, having been in the throes of institutional indifference and institutional cruelty has been one of the books that allowed me to keep going. So welcome so much to Academic Aunties.

Oh, thank you so much, Ethel. I'm really, really pleased to be in conversation with you.

This is the honor of my life, like honestly. So one of the things we ask our guests to do in the podcast is we'll have them introduce themselves. And I guess the question I have is, you know, who are you outside being a writer, a scholar, What do you do for fun?

Well, my name is Sara and I do spend a lot of time with my beautiful dog companions. They're called Poppy and Bluebell. They're part of my killjoy survival. And I now live in a rural part of Cambridgeshire in England. So sometimes I'm like, how did I end up here? Um, but it's a beautiful part of the country and my life is very quiet.

I have lived with my partner, Sara, as well as our two dogs. And I enjoy just walking and being quiet and reading as well as writing.

That's beautiful. We did have an Academic Aunties episode about academic pets, uh, in honor of our beloved furry companions wzzho really are part of our family. So I love that.

They're very much part of my family and I learn from them every day. They're just an absolute delight.

That's gorgeous. So pivoting to the book, I, this is my dog eared copy, obviously our listeners can't see it. The Feminist Killjoy Handbook: The Radical Potential of Getting in the Way. What is the book about and why did you decide to write it?

Well the book is about the figure of the feminist killjoy and how we can reclaim that figure. And I have written about feminist killjoys before. That figure came up in an early book of mine, The Promise of Happiness. And then it came up again, the figure in Living a Feminist Life. But I wanted to give them a book of their own.

And that was partly because I wanted to write a feminist book that wouldn't be so much addressed to students in a feminist classroom, at least as it's traditionally understood. This would be a trade book that would be about reaching feminists wherever they are, maybe at home, in their offices, not necessarily connected to others.

It's a book about allowing the figure of the feminist killjoy, the one who gets in the way of happiness or who just gets in the way, to become a way of communicating feminist ideas. differently, so I knew I wanted to write a book for a wider audience. I'm no longer based in the university myself, and I thought what better way of doing that than with the Feminist Killjoy, because of all the figures I've written about, and I do tend to write about figures, the Feminist Killjoy is the one people seem to really get, because they seem to be able to connect it to experiences they've had, of being at the family table, or a conference table, and becoming a problem, because you point to the problem.

And I wanted to bring the feminist killjoy, that figure, that history into our lives in a kind of dynamic way. So that by recognizing ourselves in relationship to that history, we also feel part of a community. We feel companionship with others who've been there, who've been in that place.

Absolutely, and one of the things I truly adored about this book is you weave together personal narratives, but also stories from other feminist killjoys, whether, you know, real people, but also in books, in movies, and it's also beautifully woven together, and I did feel reading this that I am ensconced in this community of killjoys as well and, you know, I really, I really do appreciate that. And in Academic Aunties we spend a lot of time honoring the lineage of aunties in our lives who have shaped who we are today. And in this book, you spoke about your Auntie Gulzar as one of your killjoy touchstones and inspirations growing up.

I kind of love that section where you talk about this badass, right, who kind of flouted convention. And I wanted to ask, how was she a killjoy and how did she teach you or help you become one.

No, that's a great question. And, you know, I just, in evoking the figure of the Killjoy, I, I put her, uh, around the table, the family table, and that's my killjoy story. So often my early experiences of being a killjoy were with my mother and my father and my sisters at that table becoming the problem because I would point to problems of what my father was saying or doing, the sexism most often, in what he would say and how he would act.

And it can be a feeling of being really cut off, really alone, like you're the only one. That's how it can feel, even though you're not the only one, it can feel like you're the only one. We were brought up in Australia. Um, so my, my mother is English and my father is Pakistani, but we as a family went to Australia.

So we were very cut off from wider family connections and relations in our everyday lives. But I knew I had these aunties and not constantly, but every now and then Auntie Gulzar would come into my life and she would bring with her another path. It was just so important to me. She would bring with her books and ideas and a voice.

She would speak back to my father with eloquence and, and I just thought, you know, this is somewhere else I can go. This is someone else I can be. It was a connection. It was life saving. We didn't explicitly talk about being killjoys or anything like that. We didn't even necessarily explicitly talk about being feminists, but she talked a lot about women's liberation.

She talked a lot about injustice, about, you know, the challenges she'd had as a woman in politics. She talked as well about poetry. She was a poet and she gave me many of her poems and I read them and she really gave me a sense of being a person with a strong belief in social justice means not only standing against these forms of oppression wherever they manifest at home, at work, on the streets. But it also is about being creative. It's creating something for yourself. And I think it was that connection between poetry and activism that was for me really, really important about the Killjoy messages she imparted. And she, you know, she was a badass. She was willful.

She was obstinate. But she was also loving and generous. And you know, sometimes when those words are presented to us, at least my father would say I was wilful and obstinate. It's always within the language of what you have failed to be. But from her I learnt being willful and obstinate and not going with the flow can also be how you express a different kind of connection and relation to others.

And that, that to me is what the auntie can do. She can give us a different sense of what it means to be in relation where actually standing up and standing out is not just saying no to something. It's also affirming a connection and, and for that I will always have much killjoy gratitude.

I love that and I think it really does contextualize the different components of the book too, right? Like Feminist Killjoy is poet, Feminist Killjoy is philosopher. We're claiming that identity even if we're not identified as such, right? And I really, really profoundly appreciated that. And I guess, you know, as a follow up to that, is there a relationship between auntie-ing and being a killjoy?

Because one of the things I've noticed, and another thing that you've said, not just in this book, but in other works, is eye rolling as kind of...

Yeah.

...a form of connection. And I feel like the older I've become, the more I roll my eyes not even bother to hide it. Like it, sometimes, usually, happens in like department meetings or like different settings where I find the other feminists or the other feminist killjoys and we just kind of inadvertently share a glance and we roll our eyes and, you know, is there a relationship between kind of, you know, adapt, like just basically assuming this figure of being like an auntie but being a killjoy auntie and just like, you know, not really caring anymore.

And do you consider yourself an auntie?

Yeah. Oh, there's so many wonderful questions all in there. But, you know, I think you can definitely be a killjoy auntie. And there are many, many aunties in my life, not just Gulzar but also my Auntie Totie, my Auntie Julie, who's actually my, one of my English aunties, um, who, who give me killjoy inspiration.

But I think, in a way, the killjoy potential of the auntie is not necessarily about what the auntie says or necessarily the identity of being auntie. It is a relational thing. It is something that's made possible over time. I think with the killjoy there's always this hope or expectation within a traditional family that you'll grow out of it.

That, you know, growing up is growing out of it, that it's a phase that you're going through. And I think that the, the, the, the auntie, like the idea of the older person, who can impart to you some sort of commentary or wisdom. There, there is in that a kind of refusal. A kind of stubbornness, like the, the auntie who kills joy has shown you that she's not getting out of it, but she's right into it and she's going to become more of a killjoy in time.

And I think that's the potential. And I do think that kind of like the idea of the killjoy elder. you know, in general has a lot of potential and over time you accumulate killjoy experiences. You know, all those times of rolling eyes, they become your own personal genealogy.

Like you bring them with you wherever you go. I sometimes call it a feminist killjoy bag. Like you carry and accumulate all these experiences of having killed joy here or there at home or at work and so in the, so in a way the auntie, the killjoy auntie has a, has a really heavy back full of these killjoy experiences. And in a way the heavy bag can seem like weight, like you're weighed down but my experiences of being a killjoy over time is, is, is if anything becoming more of one is a kind of lightening of the load because you kind of have a sense of I've, I've done this work, I've rolled my eyes.

This time or that time, I will, will speak back, another time I might not. You have more of a sense of room that sometimes there is a point to saying no to somebody, to exercising your willfulness by what you say in a conversation. But I actually also think that Killjoy Auntie might be the promise of knowing when to actually step out of a conversation, when actually to put your energy somewhere else.

And I think that, in a way, the heavier bag is a kind of lightening of the load in the sense that you give yourself more room to respond in different ways. And I think the killjoy auntie then reminds us of the possibility of being quite creative. Like there are lots of different ways of killing joy sometimes by saying no in participating in a conversation, sometimes by withdrawing from that conversation because you are, you, you can tell that somebody's winding you up and there's no point being wound up by somebody who's winding you up.

And, you know, I, I think that the snappiness of the auntie might actually be that she, she can stretch us. She can stretch our sense of relation and allow us to know when it's worth trying to, you know, say no to something or when it's actually even more politically, full of more political potential to actually withdraw.

And withdrawal becomes quite an important part of what the Killjoy does.

And I think, I really love how you say that kind of the figure of the killjoy auntie helps us, have all of these different tools in our arsenal, in our bag, right. Because certainly I know , from prior experience that, maybe even like five years ago, I would just enter battle and be in battle mode.

But I don't know, the older I've gotten, the more exhausted I've become, but also the more I realize that perhaps it's, it's preserving time and resisting in a different way, not in that exact moment. Maybe that's kind of the pathway forward, right? And so that's actually one thing that I wanted to ask you about.

It was one of the last questions that I wanted to revisit, but I think now's the time to talk about it, which is exhaustion, right? So one of the ways that the book resonated with me is, you know, you, we do need to be vigilant, right? We, we take up the call to be vigilant. Uh, you see in the book that we don't look for battles, battles come to us .

Just reflecting on, I don't know, like institutional cruelty though, and how, you know, institutions are cruel, life is cruel, everyday life is cruel. For a lot of Indigenous, Black and women of color, it's almost like we're battling this like multi headed hydra where it's not just cruelty at work.

It's also cruelty at our children's school. It's also cruelty, uh, you know, through everyday encounters through microaggressions or macroaggressions, actually. So what would you say to, to those listeners, especially Black, Indigenous and women of color who were like, we really want to be vigilant. We really want to be feminist killjoys, but we're also exhausted.

So can we expect to maintain a consistent level of killjoy vigilance?

I, no... I mean, I think in a way the feminist culture has some connection to Roxanne Gay's Bad Feminist. And, you know, we're ambivalent, we feel mixed. Sometimes we love the things that we object to even. And, you know, there's no, there's no like clear line that tells you. what you must do in order to express your killjoy commitments.

In fact, it's sometimes very, very confusing. And when I made that point about withdrawal, what I actually wanted to say was, it's not so much that when you withdraw, you're simply preserving your energy. Sometimes you're expressing your refusal of a structure by not giving your time to it. Um, it, it, it sounds passive, but it's actually quite active.

And so I think that for, for me, what that suggests, I mean, uh, the word vigilant, I, it reminds me of, well, the way I quote it in the book, it, it comes from Lorde to be vigilant for the smallest opportunity for change. Which I just think is a very revolutionary statement. It comes after her description of revolution.

And I think it's a really interesting word. And I think , there's absolutely no doubt in my mind that it can be exhausting. And it can be exhausting even to be conscious of all of these forms of institutional cruelty. And in a way that sounds like an odd thing to say, but actually one way people handle cruelties and injustices is by trying not to attend to them.

And I think many of us do that. I sometimes call it filing systems. You know, you file away what's hardest to handle. And I really understand that. Why we would do that although it doesn't always works because you know handles can break and things can come in. But there is that there is a real really strong emphasis in the handbook on survival again in honor really of what I've learned from Audre Lorde in particular. In fact the second chapter is called Surviving as a Feminist Killjoy, and my first tip, on surviving as a Feminist Killjoy, is to become one.

Uh, second tip is to become more of one. But, you know, there are other tips, and one of them is remember there is only so much you can do. There is only so much you can do. There is only so much you can take on. Because there's only so much you can take in. So I think becoming aware of the limits of one's capacities is actually part of the project of changing the institutions that diminish our capacities.

And the best way, I think, of thinking about that, for me at least, has always been to think about the project as a collective or shared task. So, there's only so much you can do, there's only so much you can take in. There's only so much you can take on, but you can take on more by taking it on together.

And I think one of the things that for me about the killjoy, it's not so much the killjoy is who I am, I think of the killjoy as a companion. The killjoy is who I'm with. And the thing that I really noticed about talking about killjoys, especially to other women of colour has been that when we talk about that figure, we get energized by that figure.

There's something electric almost and snappy about having a name for the difficulty of being that person always rolling their eyes, pointing to problems and so on. And so it's not only that partly vigilance for me is attached to what puts us in connection to others who get it. It's also that in being put in touch with others, all that we do that might seem quite small becomes bigger.

Yes. Mm.

Becomes amplified.

So, so say in one instance where you're, I don't know, you're in a diversity committee, because you know, We tend to end up in those committees, and yeah, they are exhausting, but to be perfectly honest, I used to prefer being on a diversity committee than the research committee, because at least there'd be more likely to be another person of color on there.

And I just think the conversations were a little bit more interesting, however annoying it can be to be, to be on the diversity committee yet again. And so maybe on the diversity committee, there are actually quite strict ideas about what's appropriate to say and not to say on that committee. But sometimes, you know, it can just take putting a word. Like I talked to a woman of color about being on the diversity committee and she talked about how she started mentioning things to do with race, quote unquote

Mm.

how immediately they changed the portfolio of the committee and she was dropped. And she told me the story as a story of political despondency and actually she was really upset because she wanted to be on that committee, she wanted to take up that task of transforming the institution.

But she was dropped because of the word that she put there. But we were talking about it a little bit and I, and I was just sort of saying to her, you know, you don't know what putting that word into that committee did. You don't know, because sometimes when we say no. And no can be just a refusal to use the happy language of diversity. And no can be the words we bring. Race can be no. The word race can say no. No to the demand that we don't say a race. No to the demand that we erase ourselves. That we disappear from these communities. Just putting that word there, it, it is so important to somebody else who's on that committee. Like, you might not even know for whom that word being there changed their relationship to that institution.

And that, that's what I think of when I, when I, when I think about vigilance. I don't think about how much we have to do and the scale of it. And I don't think about even that there is a political requirement that we say or do something. I just think about how just that. The small task of putting a word there that reminds us of these histories can be something that can be heard by somebody else.

So it might be that you don't get the institution to hear you, but somebody in the institution can hear you. And that word then passes around, like electricity, snap, snap, sizzle. And so for me, when I think about being tired, I think about that. The energy of, of, of, of just the words we put out there, the thoughts, the wisdoms that we have and that we put out there and what they can do and what they can reach and who they can reach.

And then, and then I suddenly feel energized again. And I think that's partly how I would answer your question around, around vigilance is to, to really think about it in terms of how we inhabit the institutions that are so cruel and what we can do to create a connection to somebody else. And it's that connection that really matters and that becomes energizing rather than diminishing.

And hearing you kind of speak about this. I've become hopeful, right? Because I mean, earlier I'm like, I'm exhausted because I mean, you mentioned a diversity committee. Of course, I've been on several, right? And of course, you know, it's, it's, it's not even an invitation I'm given. It's just an expectation that, of course, I have to sit in on it.

And then sometimes, you know, I have said no to some of these expectations because I can see, I can see what they're trying to accomplish. And I disagree with that. But, just kind of reflecting on this, me not being there, I was like, well, clearly the institution can't hear me, but I think that did signal to others not to be part of it too.

And our erasure, our deliberate and intentional exit from this committee, I think, spoke volumes and the committee imploded, right? And I think, well, that's saying something, right? Like that, that in itself was an intervention.

And it's saying something and it's saying something to other people. I mean, I don't, I don't have any confidence that you will get heard by, quote, unquote, the institution, the senior management or administration or however we want to imagine the institution.

But you can be heard by others who have a history that brings them into the institution that in some way resonates with yours. And although I'm very, you know, like other people, skeptical about how institutions use diversity, by which I mean they use us.

Yes.

To create the appearance of doing something, I've also found from the conversations I've had with diversity practitioners, as well as other scholars and students of color in the British system, that actually when we do this work by bringing our critiques of it to it, that does something. And that critique can be like a no to the diversity committee.

It can be like, let the committee implode. But it can also be what we do when we're on it. Or it can be also be being forced out of it. You know, all of these different actions have ripple effects institutionally, and they can't control that. Because they can't control us, they can't stop us from talking to each other.

And, you know, when I think back, that's why I say when I think back to my participation on diversity committees, yeah, part of me wants to roll my eyes like, oh yeah, another diversity committee. But I also remember all the conversations I've had on those committees, including conversations about why those committees are so annoying.

And I actually don't feel so diminished by it. I actually feel like, actually, you know, yeah, we're taking something on. We're doing something with and for and to each other.

I also want to talk about the institution, and one of the things that you highlight in the book, killjoy commitment, I'm willing to snap a bond that is damaging to others, and I like put a lot of stars there, and one of the things that, I'm still grappling with and the sense I get from reading the book that that's something that you grappled with as well as how to resist the seductions provided by institutions.

And, you know, in the book you you highlight how, you had received an invitation to this super prestigious fellowship. And there was a moment where you pause and you were like, oh, that's, that's great. That's an honor. But you understood that with that invitation comes a promise, a promise that you don't necessarily want to be part of and I'll just read a part of a part of, you know, page 217 killjoy commitment, I'm willing to snap a bond that is damaging to others. And I want to kind of reflect on this with you.

Institutions offer their own promises of happiness. You are promised happiness in return for loyalty. Happiness might be offered in the form of that raise or that promotion or that time freed from less valued, more exhausting work. But a promise is also a warning.

So can we dive into that? Because I think that speaks to a lot of our dilemmas about institutions and being part of them and the promises they offer.

It does, and um, a lot of the reflections in that part of the book come from my own experiences of being involved in complaint. Specifically, supporting students who'd made a complaint about sexual harassment at my former institution. Which is what, in a way, led me to leave. That was a no to the institution actually, um, resigning.

But that's not always available as an option or possible for everyone. But, it was very, very clear to me that institutions reward those who say yes to them. If you say yes, you're more likely to progress and, you know, there are consequences and costs not only to saying no, but also to saying no publicly.

And one of the things that I was, um, understood to be when I spoke out about harassment in my institution was disloyal. But what was really striking, it was, you know, I kind of expected that because you expect the institution to sort of repair the damage to its reputation by saying how committed it is to diversity and equality, blah, blah, blah.

We're so familiar with that genre of speech act from institutions. But what I really learnt from, and this was the hardest lesson, to be perfectly honest, and it's still a hard lesson. I can't even talk about it without feeling like the harshness of this lesson. But that it was my feminist colleagues who became really angry because they understood this action of speaking out about harassment at the university, this university, to be compromising the feminist community there because they understood the feminist community, that, that, that it was, they had aligned it with the institution, that the resources that the institution were providing were the resources that we needed to do our feminist work. Or they were concerned that if it got out, that the institution had this problem of sexual harassment, that people would forget about all this critical feminist work, and there was a way in which we were told to be silent to promote the institution as a feminist institution, and I'm like, seriously?

So all of that silencing of complaint, the rendering of complaint into some sort of dirty laundry, that you know, you should show, that, that was done in the name of feminism. And um, it made me really aware of how some people who appear quite politically radical offer critiques of neoliberalism or whatever, when it comes to being in institutions they become very conservative. They advise you not to do certain kinds of work in order to maximise your own chances of doing well. And so what we're told we need to do to go faster or to get more from the institution is what reproduces it. And so we're learning the reproductive mechanisms, and that's really, really hard when we understand then the complicity of some, um, well, feminists academics, you know, in, in those various structures. But you can also sort of, at another level, if we were being more sympathetic, we can also see how that might work because you might be, for example, maybe you are a feminist in a program that is precarious, and maybe you worry that if the complaint becomes too public your program might be undermined and maybe you worry on behalf of future students who might need that program to have a future in the institution.

So you can see how the conservatism, it doesn't necessarily always take the form of an abandonment of principles. It can often be done on behalf of others, like, on behalf of the children.

Yeah, yeah,

Um, but it's a problematic deal. It's incredibly costly.

And then you end up in institutions where there are a lot of, you know, feminists doing feminist work, but there's also a lot of silence about institutional violence. And, you know, one of the killjoy truths is silence about violence is violence. And I, I think it needs to be part of the feminist job description, our feminist job description.

That we speak out about these institutional forms of violence and that might mean risking our position. So if they're, if we are too precarious, then we need to work together to make sure that those who are precarious don't pay too much. But the thing that I learned from my research on complaint is actually it's often the more precarious members of feminist communities who are doing this more institutionally challenging work.

Because I think the more people get promoted within institutions, the more conservative that they seem to become. I don't think it's inevitable. I think we can resist that process. But the killjoy becomes then a resource, a collective resource that we need to help us resist that process.

Absolutely. And I think as you were speaking, I was like, well, obviously, liberation can't be achieved within institutions, right? Like, that's not, you know, that's not what we're here for, if we're all feminists invested in kind of liberation, right? Like, it wouldn't be within the university, although I'm also quite torn because the university also, at least in terms of the way the thinkers that I love, that I adore, see learning, like, bell hooks, right?

Teaching to transgress. You do plant the seeds for dissent. So it's almost like there are two parallel universities, two parallel sites here, right?

Yeah, well I, think, I think they're really complex, complex and complicated environments. For me it's, it's not about like trying to liberate the university or imagine liberation or, or contain our, our vision of liberation to the university. And yet the, it's, the university is one place we go for learning. One place that holds so many histories of dissent and we do what we can to create spaces within the university in which we can flourish. And I think, you know, I'm, I'm writing a complainers handbook right now. Um, and the subtitle is a guide to building less hostile institutions. And, you know, I, I think it sounds unambitious, less hostile institutions. But it, but it's not. And I think, like, thinking quite practically about how we do that work, and partly what I'm, uh, it's, it's sort of following along the lines of my book Complaint, but it's not so much about the university. It's about what happens when we make complaints about abuse and harassment across different workplace environments.

One of the things I've been really thinking a lot about is how sometimes we do have to address the institution, we have to work on policies and procedures, we have to speak back and speak out by asking for more, by naming and identifying institutional violences and cruelties, just as we've been describing.

But sometimes we just have to address each other. And in the spaces we create, we talk to each other, we have those killjoy conversations. And it's there that I think we plant the seeds. You know, to evoke bell hooks work on teaching to drug addicts. It's there that we plant the seeds, that we incite the riots.

And um, that's, those spaces are, are really, really important. So I think we need to do both things at the same time. Address each other and address the institutions in which those conversations sometimes take place.

I love it. I'm, I'm getting chills as, as you speak. I mean, I think I'm excited to see and read this and cite this and learn from it when it comes out. And I think thinking about institutions as well, one of the things that you mentioned that I'm like, oh my gosh, this is completely landing is your section talking about why happiness and wellness are dangerous goals.

And the reason I mentioned that is because, and whatever, I mean, I have tenure so I can say this, but like, when at the height of COVID, you know, when all of us were experiencing tremendous loss, but also, you know, compounding caring responsibilities, right? One of the solutions that my institution had was to have like a newsletter called wellness Wednesdays, right?

Where they would suggest, okay, why don't you drink a glass of water? Right? Like stretch, take a walk, which in itself is fine. But a lot of us who would receive this would be like, okay, well, rather than suggesting that we take a glass of water, why don't you rejig tenure and promotion requirements so those of us with more caring responsibilities won't have to worry about catching up to the white male colleague who was seeing COVID as a writing retreat, right?

And who had said as much in conversation. And so you mentioned that happiness and wellness, this seems to be anathema to society because everyone wants to be happy, right? There are freaking academics who've branded themselves as the happy academic and inevitably white guys, right? So why are they dangerous goals?

Why is this not part of the Killjoy ethos?

I, I think they, they can be very, very, um, problematic ways of thinking about our relationship to the world. Like when it comes about doing what you can to be happier, that can often mean avoiding what compromises your happiness, which actually in many cases are the very forms of structural violence that gives some people the freedom to be happy at the expense of others.

You know, I think it's partly happiness and wellness as problematic goals within these institutional environments, but it's also the, the, the transformation of, of sort of social problems into individual ones. And I, I remember when we were involved in the complaint, you know, the project of Dismantling the institution, which is what Complaint ends up being about, that they kept wanting to, they kept saying to me, oh Sara, we can give you therapy. Like, and I'm like, I don't want fucking therapy. I want change, you know? But it's also like, they want you to be, they want it to be about your trauma. Like, we want, and it can even look caring. Oh, we will give you therapy, Sara.

We will give you therapy, Sara. We want to support you, Sara. And I'm like, that is not how you will support me. You'll support me by listening to this complaint and by dealing with the issues of violence and institutional complicity that it reveals. But, no, they'd prefer to talk about traumatized subjects who need to feel better than they would institutional injustices that require changing the way in which the institution is working through promotion structures, as well as other distributions of work, for example, um, who does what, who doesn't do what, you know.

So that, I mean, I think that's, that, that, that kind of like, um, the transformation of a social institutional problem into a personal one is partly what we're talking about here. And yeah, my critique of happiness, which, you know, in a way came from doing the diversity project. I just became so interested in how diversity practitioners talked about diversity to quote from one petitioner as a shiny, happy apple.

It all looks wonderful, she said, but the inequalities aren't being addressed. I became really interested in what happiness was doing as an idea or as an ideal and the way it can be about distracting us from ongoing relations of structural injustice. And, and when I wrote originally on happiness in The Promise of Happiness, and I was very interested in the etymology of happiness, how it came from the Middle English word, hap, and what happens. And I was quite interested in how happiness had lost its hap. It becomes not what happens, but what you earn for living your life in a good way. But the person who really influenced how I began to think about that was Audre Lorde again. I think her critique of happiness in the Cancer Journals. It's just the most important, one of the most important feminist works of our time, the Cancer Journals. It's such an extraordinary, uh, text. And one of its very powerful descriptions is precisely of the consequences of the idea that our first responsibility is to our own happiness. And the ways in which then also illness, poverty, forms of violence can be made the product of one's own failure, like the failure to be positive about your situation.

And the kind of violence that follows making the individual not only the problem but the solution. I mean, when we're talking about critiquing happiness, that's exactly the kind of text we need to go to. That's my go to Killjoy text for Cancer Journals.

I will put that in the show notes. And I think everything you're saying about how the institutions now want all of us to be happy, but yet atomizes us and individualizes the problem makes us the problem, right?

Another thing on that note that I wanted to hear about from you is this notion of paper feminism, right? Cause I was like, I really, really love this. Cause I remember in my department, there was a point where people would put on their walls, or on their doors, I am a feminist, this is a feminist office, right?

Some of them were administrators, and yet their actions were like, not really feminist in my opinion, and I think, paper feminism is also tied to white feminism. Right. And so I kind of wanted to ask about why was it important for you to contrast being a killjoy with white feminism and paper feminism?

Mm-hmm.

Yeah, I mean, I, uh, want to recognize here a woman of color who I spoke to for my complaint project. The idea of paper feminism came from one of her descriptions. She was talking to me about a colleague, in another department. She'd been experiencing bullying and harassment in her department and she was looking for another department to go to. Like as a, as a, as an alternative. And she described to me the, the, the white feminist who was the head of that department. And she said, it's easy to be radical on paper. But her feminism was all about promoting her own career and not changing the landscape for women. That was her description. It was a very, very powerful description.

And, you know, I really heard the paper in her story. Like the paper feminists, feminists on paper, paper feminists, because, you know, I experienced a lot of paper feminists in my time, particularly as a student, when I was a PhD student. There were a lot of people who were writing books on feminist theory, but they weren't acting in feminist ways.

They weren't. We weren't challenging patriarchy, they were organising their teaching around the idealisation of certain texts and they were reading their texts in a way that was entirely reproductive of very old patriarchal value systems. So that kind of like, ways in which you can be feminist on paper, it can kind of, it can be a screen that stops people seeing how you're doing things in the same old way.

And um, and I think that a lot of paper feminism and white feminism seems to be entangled in the same kind of phenomena really because you're doing what you can to advance your own career. That kind of like white, um, whiteness as vertical, the promise of vertical mobility. That you move up by distancing yourself from the killjoys, those who talk about institutional problems. Those who are slowed down by the institution because they're not willing to give up their critiques of it. And so I think, you know, paper feminism and kind of a bourgeois white feminism are part of the same kind of problem. But I was also really aware here, and I do need to say this as a note to self, that If you can be a paper feminist, you can also be a paper feminist killjoy.

And you know, paper feminist killjoys are killjoys on paper. You know, and when I write that, I'm like, it is a note to sell because you know, I have a feminist killjoy t shirt. I have a feminist killjoy blog. I've written a book on feminist killjoys. And there's, it's easy for it to become another marketing strategy.

And it to be about what you say and what you don't do. Because I've also learnt that some of the people who speak out loudly in public against things don't necessarily do so behind closed doors. When they're called upon, for example, to give support to a student who's making a complaint about sexual harassment, perhaps about a colleague of theirs.

And so there's kind of like, a radicalism becomes another kind of screen that doesn't necessarily change how people Inhabit or the institutions in which they are working and as such can be reproductive of the very institutional power structures that in public they speak against. And, you know, there was one instance where a woman of color wrote to me.

We communicated in letter, not by talking to each other. But she wrote to me about how there was a man, academic, who'd been the object of multiple complaints by women of color, who had a feminist killjoy sign on his door. You know, and I, I often think that we need to sort of, we need to sort of evoke the, the radical rudeness of Black feminists like Stella Nianzi or, or feminists of colour like Mona Altaoui and, and say, get the feminist culture sign off your fucking door.

But we know that that sign could then be taken out as a placard, you know, in a demonstration against the very violence that's being enacted behind that door. So, so this is why talking about feminist killjoys on paper or paper killjoys really does matter. Because it's asking more of us than what we say publicly.

It's also about how we act. And that means sometimes being willing to be inconvenienced, being willing to listen to somebody else's killjoy story. Even if that story challenges the investments you might have, whether those investments are in a person or a project or an institution. And I, I, I take that as one of my killjoy commitments.

So there's two that are really related. The first is, um, I'm willing to be inconvenient, you know, to get in the way of your happiness or just get in the way. But I think the even harder one is I'm willing to be inconvenienced. And, and that means, you know, To be a feminist killjoy actually means sometimes we have to kill our own joy.

No, and I think as you're talking, I'm like, I would be willing to take the hit, right? Because a lot of people are like, well, you know, I I'm an ally, provided that I don't suffer from it, or I don't potentially have face any repercussions, right? But look, so my mind is kind of exploding right now.

And I just I wanted to ask you, how does how is this making you feel the fact that, you know, you are you are associated with being a feminist killjoy to hear that there are now paper feminist killjoys that that must... That must be messed up. Like, I mean, you know,

It is messed, yeah, yeah, it is messed up, but that, but that, you know, all the words and terms that we introduce, you know, we want them to go out there. We want them to reach people, but we don't own them. They do things on their travels and the more sometimes travel, I mean, sometimes travel more because they do less like diversity.

And any word that begins, you know, as a kind of stereotype, as an insult, which is, you know, the origin of killjoy is something that you don't want to be. That's a way of sort of saying that feminists are just miserable. They, they, they want, they only talk about injustice because they're kind of unhappy and they want us to be unhappy.

So we reclaim that because we want to redirect that negativity. We want to use that negativity, say no to the institutions that cast us in that light. But of course. We put that word out there and it can lose that negative energy, it can become another buzz term and I'm, I'm conscious of that and I, I've also been talked to by a number of people of color, women of color especially have talked to me about, you know, what it's like to be amongst their white colleagues where they use terms from femmes of color or Black feminists or Indigenous feminists in such a way that almost like takes ownership of those terms.

And I know that people can do and have done that with, you know, concepts in terms that I introduce and of course, it's incredibly annoying. I can't stop it But I want people to know that I know that's being that's being done and I know who I'm writing to. I'm writing to women of color who see that. You're who I'm writing to so yes, they're gonna misuse our terms and turn them into another word on their door.

We're gonna tell them to take it off their door. They won't they will we don't know but we are still addressing each other and that and that's how I understand it. I'm addressing you. I'm not addressing them. I'm addressing you.

I love it. And this is the perfect segue to our final question, because what I loved about this is that you trace the lineage of Killjoys through the examples primarily of Black Indigenous and women of color feminists. And I love kind of the shout out towards the end of the book where you're like, here are my recommended readings.

Actually, it's not just me. You should read bell hooks, Audre Lorde, Nikki Kendall, right? And so, you know, why is it important for you to honor this lineage? Why is it important for you to say, listen, we need to honor the lineage of Black, Indigenous, women of color feminists who were killjoys? Why was that important to end on?

Oh, so in so many ways, I mean, I mean, I know I'm just really conscious that of how I couldn't do the work that I'm doing without those who came before me, without all the paths that have been laid by those who didn't do what they were told they should often. Do what they told would promise happiness, but created their own queer trails, and I feel really profoundly aware of the debts I have.

I think, you know, when I'm thinking about, like, being in institutions, we talked a lot about institutional cruelty and violences, and we know how important it is not to be on your own, like, partly because you know that it, that it can be really important to have somebody to witness what you, what you witness.

To see what you see so that you don't feel like it's just in your head because they can often make you feel like it's just in your head. Like, if there's something wrong, if you keep finding something wrong, then there's something wrong with you. And so we need each other to bear witness to say, yes, that, that is, there it is.

It's there, not here, it's there. And I think the lineage for me is another way of thinking about witnessing. Because witnessing is not always about being in the same room at the same time. Sometimes we bear witness partly because we inherit other people's actions. One of the reasons I think it's important, I mentioned in the second chapter on survival, um, the work of Avta Bra, I'd like to call her my auntie, I hope she wouldn't mind me saying that, I love her so much.

One of her really early pieces in the classic text, Charting the Journey, is called Journey to Nairobi. And she's talking about going to some of these really early, uh, women's liberation meetings. I think the one she's referring to is in Bristol. I can't, I won't give you the date because I'll get the date wrong.

But it's a long time ago. And she's talking about how she and another woman of colour made the point that anti- racism should be a core feminist demand. Um, so they were, made that point in a little workshop. And then after the workshop everyone joined together for the big event. But the person who represented what their workshop had said, had come up with, didn't mention their point. And I use the word blanked for that. Apparently it's a British word. But in the UK we would use the word blanked. You're, you're blanked. Someone doesn't recognize you were there, that you're there. They blank you. They ignore you. They ghost you. And um, and so it's like so they made that killjoy point. But the point wasn't recorded.

So one of the ways in which everybody, the lineage matters is because partly the lineage gets broken in the mainstream version, in the space that we call women, the women's liberation movement at that time, in that space in that time. The feminist killjoy point, the feminist of color killjoy point, that anti- racism should be a core feminist demand, which changed the very nature of the feminist demands that would have been made, because all the other ones were demands to the state, not critiques of the state.

But it wasn't recorded. So it was as if they weren't there, but they were there and what's really important to me about that is that the Feminist Killjoy, that lineage they were already there. Before we entered the room, they were already there, but we don't always know. We don't always know because of who is doing the recording.

And so actually, to actually get a sense of that lineage, you often have to look in the margins. Maybe the aunties matter here too, the, the figure that's apparently in the margin, to, to get a sense of those who came before. So we had to keep saying it because they kept doing it. But the record of us saying it is broken.

And so it's very, very important for me to restore something. And I think part of what... makes Black feminists, Indigenous feminists, and feminists of color work so important. It's a, it's a kind of, it's not a restoration project in the sense of restoring the institution. It's actually bringing together, pulling together all those broken pieces so that we can put that record together, that record which is a bearing witness in time to these forms of violence that feminism itself has historically reproduced.

So the lineage really matters to me. That's why in Living a Feminist Life, I talked, I had the line citation as feminist memory. And it's feminist of colour memory and Black feminist memory and Indigenous feminist memory especially. Because of who was and was not telling the story of what happened at the time that it happened.

Absolutely. I really, really, really love that because I mean I think when reading that, when you wrote that, a part of me, and then it took me a few years, but then it finally clicked and I was like, for me as an academic, I've started seeing my citations as love letters, right? I no longer cite because I have to, right?

Like citing defensively, citing to show why my work is important, which is like really gross, right? Like, oh, I'm filling in a gap, but you know, kind of in that spirit, citing as a way to show that, you know, these are the people, primarily women of color, Indigenous and Black women that I'm in conversation with.

And citation is, part of our way to resist and to fight back and to also show, listen, like these lineages are important.

They are so important and, um, you know, like anything, citation can be done in a, in a surface way. Like you can, you can name someone, but when I think about, you know, Feminism on Colour as a kind of citational, um, generosity, I think really about bringing someone into the text, that who is already there, you know, who's already there, and it's that attention to all of the ways in which the work we do is made possible by those who came before.

I mean, that, that, I mean, I, it really matters to me as a kind of first principle of how I do my work to recognize all those who made it possible to even start a sentence.

I love it. Thank you so, so much. This has been such an honor and I will say that at a future episode of the podcast, we are going to do your feminist killjoy reading group. We're like, we're gonna have a reading club and we're just gonna like, do all, like answer all the questions or try to at least, because I think it also shows the continuity of killjoy work.

So...

Yeah, that's great.

Thank you so much.

Oh, thank you so much for giving me the time and the wonderful questions. I really appreciated them.

I want to thank Sara Ahmed for sitting down to speak with us today. She was so amazing to talk to, and I'm so honored she was able to make some time for us. As we mentioned at the top of the episode, we're going to have our first ever Academic Aunties book club. So this is how it will work.

First, get the book, The Feminist Killjoy Handbook. Go to academicaunties.com/killjoy for all the places you can get it. At the end of the book, there are some really great book club questions, and we'd love to hear what you think about it. Send your thoughts, or even better, a voice memo to podcast@academicaunties.com and we might feature you on the show.

And then stay tuned for a future episode where we will convene a group for own feminist killjoy aunties to talk about our reactions to the book. Make sure to follow or subscribe to Academic Aunties on your favorite podcast app to find out as soon as the episode drops. I'm so excited.

And that's Academic Aunties.

Today's episode was hosted by me, Dr. Ethel Tungohan and was produced by myself, Wayne Chu, and Dr. Nisha Nath. We're online at academicanties.com and follow us on social media.

Tune in next time when we talk to more academic aunties.

Until then, take care, be kind to yourself, and don't be an asshole.