There are two sentences in The Feminist Killjoy Handbook that are rather oddly placed in hindsight. Or maybe, it is more that I hear these sentences differently now. It can take time to hear what we are saying.
These sentences are about grief.
You grieve for a relationship you did not have.
You grieve for a relationship you will not have.
I was writing about the film, Everybody is Talking about Jamie (2021, dir. Jonathan Butterell), based on a play that was itself based on a BBC documentary, Jamie: Drag Queen at 16. Jamie’s mother loves and supports her queer son, who wants to be a drag queen. She says to her son, “I just want you to be happy,” not because she wants Jamie to straighten himself out by giving up his desires, but when Jamie learns that she has hidden from him his father’s rejection, by writing letters and sending flowers as if they were from his father.
She can’t stop the father rejecting their son. She can’t stop the father from being homophobic. So she tries to prevent her son from having to go through the pain of rejection.
She wrote the letters and sent the flowers because she wanted him to be happy.
The letters, the flowers: so much hidden by words and in a gift.
In happiness too, that unsafe refuge.
It does not work. Jamie finds out his mother wrote the letters and sent the flowers.
Not knowing you have been rejected does not stop you from being rejected.
There can be so much grief in rejection. Which is why: we need to grieve.
Before we can pick up the pieces, we need to know it’s broken.
Yes, it is not clear what it is.
We don’t always know what is broken.
When we know something is.
You grieve for a relationship you did not have.
You grieve for a relationship you will not have.
With these sentences, I was describing the need to go through grief, the queer grief of being rejected by a family member (that story for me is also personal, having been disowned by my own father when I came out). If I was describing being rejected by a family member, I wonder now if I was also describing rejecting an institution.
In No Is Not a Lonely Utterance, I have written much more about my own grief, how it felt to leave a post and profession I had loved.
When I worked with students who complained about sexual harassment (they were later to become my complaint collective, precious comrades), I began to hear more about what had gone before: earlier enquiries into sexual harassment, histories of harm wrapped up in silence or by it.
I heard not only of missing data, but missing people, those who had left because they could not take it. Nor should they.
What I heard led me to leave not just my post but profession. It was not that I had believed the institution was progressive before: I was already a killjoy at work, a feminist teacher, a woman of colour professor, offering critiques of diversity, organising conferences on sexism and racism.
I think at some level I had believed the institution would give me the space to do that work. But I had just been skimming the surface. I had been given space to do it on condition I would not do or say anything that would compromise the reputation of the college as a progressive institution.
I was not willing to accept these conditions. So I resigned in protest.
It might sound bold. It wasn’t. I wasn’t.
It was, in fact, a profoundly shattering experience.
I needed to be shattered, to pick up the broken pieces, each sharp piece, oh my heart.
You grieve for a relationship you did not have.
You grieve for a relationship you will not have.
Yes, I hear these sentences differently now. Yes, I did love my job. But no, I do not accept the conditions that came with it. And, if these are the conditions, I do not love it. I will not.
I did not have the job I thought I had.
Nor will I have it.
And so, in grievance, there is grief.
In telling more of my own story of complaint, I am not just sharing my own grief. One time, just after I had met with my complaint collective, a feminist colleague came to my office. I told her some of what the students told me. She burst into tears. She said something like, “after all of our work this still happens.”
There is so much feminist grief in this still, that the same things happen, despite everything, all that work, our feminist work, to try to change the culture of sexual harassment. We need time, also space, to express this grief, to turn it out and, sometimes, to turn it into complaint.
When I listened later to other people’s experiences of complaint, I heard the sound of grief, the many ways it can be expressed. I also noticed a pattern: so many people broke down in tears not when they were talking about the complaint, but what they had loved about their lives or their work before the complaint. They expressed grief for what they had lost not because of what the complaint did, but what it did not do, probably could not do, which is allow a return to how it was before it happened, what led to the complaint being necessary in the first place.
So yes, in grief there is a grievance.
Maybe it is true of the world too.
We do not have the world we thought we had.
We will not.
I know this we, wavers.
A killjoy truth is hard to hear.
And also, hard to speak.
What makes it difficult to speak is why we need to do so.
Yes, I hear Audre Lorde here.
A litany, a lament; a survival.
Do not stop speaking of Palestine.
Do not stop speaking of the genocide in Gaza.
We can’t stop speaking until it stops.
The following sentence was offered as a killjoy truth in The Feminist Killjoy Handbook.
There is only so much you can take on when there is only so much you can take in.
Sometimes we need to find a way to take on what we cannot take in. We can take on more, what is too much for each of us to take in, by taking it on together.
The more we are, the more we can take on.
Chicana-Palestinian feminist Sarah Ihmoud writes of speaking through grief, sharing exchanges with Mona Ameen, a young Palestinian scholar in Gaza. She asks Mona if she has any messages for women and feminists around the world. Mona answers, “Keep posting and posting and posting about us … keep us in your prayers.”
Ihmoud writes invite us to break out of “this غصة/ ghassa, this lump in our throat that keeps us from speaking, and to speak loud and courageously into the wind.”
When people use the expression “shouting into the wind” they often mean it is pointless to make noise against the flow of air.
Ihmoud teaches us that when the message is urgent, when it is an emergency, it is an emergency, there is always a point.
We have to counter the flow by becoming louder, finding ways to amplify each other’s voices.
And then: sound builds.
In sound, solace.
In sound, solidarity.
Not the quiet kind.
And so, we hear each other here.