No as a Noticeboard

Some reflections on taking No! on a mini-tour in the US

I want to begin by thanking Feminist Press for bringing No! out into the world and for supporting the book tour so I could share the work in person. And for making some t-shirts too! Thanks to my dear partner Sarah Franklin who was with me every step of the way. And thanks to my amazing conversational partners (see below!) and to my hosts and to everyone who came along and listened, filling the rooms with solidarity and more.

What better way to begin than with the sound of no?

It’s the first event of the tour at Harvard Book Store. I am seated alongside Durba Mitra who has just published a wonderful new book, The Future that Was, which gives a history of how third world feminists fought against authoritarianism.

A history can be in the room. What we are fighting against.

As Durba was introducing the book, she said no. She said it loudly, no in bold, as a bolt. And you heard it. Felt it. Movement. Like a jolt. The electricity, the snap, the sizzle; crackling. The energy seeping into the room, into each other

That’s what it felt like throughout the tour, energy seeping into the room, into each other.

It was super intense to be talking about refusing complicity with violence at a time of escalating violence.

Intense and necessary.

I loved how we spilt into Harvard Book Store, folks seated cross legged in front of other folks seated in chairs.

The book store is independent of Harvard University. But that neighbour loomed large, with its deep and increasingly well documented connections to Epstein and not just via disgraced former President Larry Summers. Disgraced should be the right word. The Conversation quotes from him, “‘Free of formal responsibility, as President Emeritus and a retired professor, I look forward in time to engaging in research, analysis, and commentary on a range of global economic issues,’ Summers said in a statement released on Feb. 25.” Yana van der Meulen Rodgers describes his “fall from grace” as “a soft landing,” and yes, for Summers “consequences” sound rather like freedom.

After asking Durba Mitra to be in conversation with me, I learnt that she had been denied tenure by Harvard. Durba is a brilliant and influential scholar. She was also the first full-time faculty member in the Women, Gender and Sexuality program at Harvard. As William C. Mao and Veronica H. Paulus note, “The denial also comes at a sensitive time for the WGS program, whose faculty worry whether their own work will eventually be a casualty of the Trump administration’s assault against diversity, equity, and inclusion and reinforcement of conservative beliefs on gender.”

That Harvard is so implicated in Epstein’s network is why it should be supporting its Women, Gender and Sexuality program (though this is not the only reason why). It is also why it probably won’t. Historian Joan Scott has pointed to the connection between the Epstein network and the attacks on Gender Studies. She notes, “Gender studies – feminist-initiated scholarly programs in schools and universities across the country – brought a critical lens to the biological determinism Trump invokes. And this critical lens extends to revealing how gender hierarchies enable the kind of abuses that some men in Epstein’s circle seemingly believed they had the right to commit. ” Look out for Durba Mitra’s forthcoming essay, “On Anticipatory Complicity,” in Feminist Studies for a sharp and illuminating critique of how institutional compliance with the Trump administration has led not only to the rapid dismantling of oppositional fields of study but to a sustained campaign of harassment against Black women and women of colour, as well as queer and trans students and scholars, no doubt in part because of what they can do, diagnose the falsity of conservative ideas about sex, race and nation.

Durba invites us to think about complicity as well as compliance, how feminist faculty working with limited resources and aware of the conditional nature of support for some programs might stress the “benefit of silence,” and a “tactic acceptance of poor working conditions.” In No! I discuss how many people are advised not to complain or be too critical of institutions until later when they are more established. The problem with later is that it usually comes too late. By the time people are given permission to be critical of institutions they seem to have lost the capacity or will to be so. If you acquire resources (including feminist resources) by saying yes to the institution, agreeing not to speak out about institutional violence, or stopping other people from speaking out, not saying no might be how you keep those resources.

Too many nos, endlessly delayed.

Whether we do our feminist work in the university or outside of it, now is the time for a loud collective no. But the time for such a no is also behind us. Now and then.

Because it was always the time to draw on our radical histories.

A no can be what we bring up. A no can be turning up. A no can be how we turn the volume up.

After Durba introduced our event by animating no, I read the first pages from the preface of the book (as I did in three of the events). My book begins with my own story of walking out of the institution because of the sexual harassment it buried and thus reproduced over decades. It was important to begin No! with a fuller account of what it felt like to be that person walking out of that job, using words like sad and tired and shattered to capture the experience, as I boxed my work up, leaving through the back door.

It was not just a sad story.

A back door, another path.

Leaving was how I came to do this work, giving not just complaints but myself somewhere else to go. I intend to write another post about leaving institutions because I was reminded on tour how much there is to learn not just from leaving but reactions to leaving. I commented in an earlier note that it is now 10 years since I left the academy. No wonder the tour felt like a loop.

Looping back, going over.

A no to an institution can be expressed through the withdrawal of labour from it. When you leave because of a complaint, you don’t just leave the problem behind. You leave a record of confronting that problem, which can be another kind of legacy although one that often has to be unburied by those who come after.

Leaving also meant I was freer to express myself. And that I had left allowed other people to be freer to share with me what happened to them when they complained. Hence a no can be loosening; when one no comes out, others follow.

I imagine that loosening of nos as the creation of a noticeboard. We create, also share, a surface upon which other people can post their complaints including old complaints they had not made before. A no noticeboard is rather like that complaint wall created by the ever-inspiring Guerrilla Girls, how I pictured the hopefulness of complaint.

The event at Harvard Book Centre was not planned as the first event of the tour. I was meant to give a public lecture at Vanderbilt the week before. I had to cancel that lecture when Vanderbilt failed to say no to Trump’s compact, claiming they were “giving feedback” instead. My solidarity with feminist, disabled, queer, trans, Black, and brown scholars and students at Vanderbilt. I am so sorry I could not speak to you, to share solidarity in opposition to fascism.

A yes can be the failure to say no.

A yes can stop a no circulating.

In the introduction to the second part of No! I reference Timothy Snyder’s critique of “anticipatory obedience.” When citizens obey in advance of an order, they teach “power what it can do.” Snyder also suggests we should, “Defend institutions.” But so many institutions function to teach people to obey, to say yes in advance of an order, not least because of how they reward compliance. Using Snyder’s logic, institutions are sowing the seeds of their own destruction, creating citizens ill-equipped to fight for them by fighting back against those who seize power by illegitimate means.

Institutions that reward compliance become compliant.

Any act of compliance, of not saying no to coercive regimes, widens the force of those regimes.

Complicity can mean: agreeing or pretending to agree that there are two biological sexes as if that’s science not ideology.

Complicity can mean: agreeing or pretending to agree that DEI is discriminatory rather than a tool for countering discrimination (and often not a successful one, given there is not always a will behind a policy).

And this is happening in the UK too, where at best “gender critical” feminists admit to being “uncomfortable” that they agree with Trump and other patriarchal fascists (whilst being quite happy to extend their attacks on trans people by speaking against EDI as if valuing equality and diversity compromises academic freedom).

The next day I headed to New York City, for a conversation at CLAGS with Roxane Gay. CLAGS is a breathing space in an academy that is becoming increasingly hostile to trans and queer people.

We need such spaces to keep going so we can!

I am so grateful they were able to host my first conversation with Roxane Gay. In truth, it feels like I have had many conversations with Roxane in the form of what I imagined a bad feminist and feminist killjoy would say to each other. This is what I had written about Roxane Gay in The Feminist Killjoy Handbook: “I am a mega-fan of Roxane Gay not only for her written work, fiction and non-fiction, but also for her public role in creating space for minority and marginal artists and writers, and her lively and fierce contributions to feminism through her social media presence. I think of the feminist killjoy and the bad feminist as close kin!” I was so delighted when Roxane included one of my essays on feminist killjoys in her best-selling collection, The Portable Feminist Reader.

You can watch our first actual conversation here. I was grateful for the questions from Roxane, and from the audience. I especially loved Roxane’s answer to a question about gossip (you can find it at 1.17.17). One of my favourite lines from Bad Feminist is “It’s hard to be told to lighten up because if you lighten up any more, you’re going to float the fuck away.” I learnt from Roxane that resistance to the patriarchal instruction to lighten up leads not to the loss but sharpening of humour.

Laugher can be in the critique.

Our conversation took place the same day Trump had threatened Iran and the world that a “whole civilisation will die tonight.” Imperial violence. Warmongering. Genocide. When the unthinkable becomes sayable. Doable.

To gather is to say no to the violence that is made sayable and doable. We call for free Palestine, we get called extremists.

We keep calling, keep gathering. In whatever pockets we make or find, fighting for each other’s freedom.

The next event was a conversation with queer academic, Heather Love in Philadelphia at Public Trust. Heather did more than share the time and space and words. We had been trying to secure a venue in Philly for a couple of months and had almost given up. But then Heather found this venue for us– so perfect for the launch given its commitment to public education.

I have drawn on Heather’s important book Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History in my own work especially in The Promise of Happiness. In No! I cite Heather in explaining how complaint can be a queer method:

“In her book Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History, Heather Love reflects on how queer critics have turned to the past for redemption: ‘In attempting to construct a positive genealogy of gay identity, queer critics have found themselves at a loss about what to do with the sad old queens and long-suffering dykes who haunt the historical record.’ Love suggests those figures who haunt our history should not be abandoned. A queer method might then not be the motion of looking forward but ‘feeling backward,’ going over what is hard and painful and difficult. Complaints too have a backward temporality. We go back over what isn’t over but is often treated as if it is” (page 209, No!, US edition).

It was a delight to be able to reflect together on the queer nature of at least some complaints. In the book, I note how many people use the language of coming out to describe the process of complaining (you have to come out as somebody this happened to). You can come out with a complaint only to end up in an institutional closet, a shadowy room, with the door shut.

We have to work to get complaints out not just of ourselves but institutions.

That work we do with others, so they cannot contain us in their little rooms.

We need doors to tell that story.

And wait, they will.

I then headed to Washington DC for a conversation with Soraya Chemaly at Politics and Prose. You can watch our conversation here. Thanks to Soraya for putting us in contact with the bookshop. I have been a committed reader of Soraya’s work since I read her wise and wondrous book, Rage Becomes Her. Soraya also just had a new book out, All We Want is Everything, which I highly recommend (and you can listen to her talking about it at Politics and Prose here). I especially love her generous citational practice. Soraya suggests that each new word or concept introduced by a feminist is an “act of sovereignty,” beginning with Saidiya Hartman’s “wayward women” and ending with Legacy Russell’s Glitch.

Generosity in critique: in order to dismantle the system of male supremacy, we find in each other’s words and concepts another way in. I was feeling a little tired on this day and Soraya picked me up in more ways than one.

I flew back to London the following day. But on the way, I stopped at Bol Coop, Washington’s first worker-owned radical bookstore for a final, more informal, community conversation. What a beautiful way to talk about the work of saying no to institutional violence in a space created by those who have said no to institutional violence! Because, after all, the more universities are complicit including with the police state, the more protest is criminalised, the more we need our own spaces for radical education. Another way of putting this: we keep no alive by moving it underground, working in the shadows.

I was reminded during the conversation how in protesting violence we search for ways to look out for each other, look after each other, acknowledging that some of us are more precarious, more at risk from the violence we are protesting. To share the costs of protesting violence, to protect the people most at risk, we create safer spaces including for nourishment. We protest and take care of each other at the same time because they are the same task, or at least they should be the same task (we don’t do either if we do one and not the other).

I was so nourished by sharing the work in this space and not just because they baked me a feminist killjoy cake!

I was invited to come to Bol by Mariam Durrani (as she put it, she “slid” into my DMs, for which I am so grateful). After I arrived and just before I began munching a samosa, Mariam told me that she too had resigned from her institution in protest, and that she had shared her resignation letter in public.

As soon I got home, I read Mariam’s letter. She describes how, as a tenure-track woman of color faculty member, her employment has been shaped “by a pattern of targeted harassment by right-wing elements in and around the College” and “a pattern of institutional inaction and gaslighting when I raise these concerns.” Mariam shows how institutional violence includes the violence of how institutions respond to violence. When violence is minimised and legitimated, it will keep happening, an expression of institutional will.

I remember how my former institution had responded to the targeting of a student of colour by racists as if said racists had raised “legitimate concerns.” One time, a senior administrator came up to me and said something like, “Sara, there is another side to the story.” She knew I was angry about the college’s response; just as she knew I was angry about how they were handling the sexual harassment cases by keeping a lid on the enquiries. I knew what she meant by “another side of the story.” She was going to be justifying the college’s actions by making the students the problem, again. She was going to imply racism was a problem with two sides. I turned away. She then grabbed my shoulder, her fingers pulling my sleeve. I did not say anything but pulled away firmly, even forcefully.

When I think back to that moment, I still feel emotional. It was a turning point even though I did not realise it at the time. I was not going to be pulled into discourse with the administration anymore. I was not going to be pulled away from the students. I relived that moment many times on the tour. The freedom of not being pulled back in. That is how I found the time and space to keep working on what was important to me, to keep hold of my feminist and antiracist commitments, all of my nos.

Back in 2017, less than a year after I resigned, I wrote a blog post with the snappy title No. It began with 10 nos, all in bold.

NoNoNoNoNoNoNoNoNoNo

We have to keep making the same complaints when the same things keep happening.

That broken record: we are heard as repeating ourselves.

The structure, what we point to, is not seen. So we are seen.

We push until we snap, that break, a connection.

Stories of resignation can be interwoven rather like stories of complaint.

Mariam told me she posted her resignation letter on her door. I was rather reminded of Viola’s testimony. Viola had read her resignation letter, which was also a complaint, out loud to her dean “in a performative kind of way.” It filled the room she left. But she wanted to do more, to put the letter on the wall, “I just thought, I am not the kind of person who would put my resignation letter on the wall, but I just wonder what it is that made me feel that I am not that kind of person because inside I am that kind of person, I just couldn’t quite get it out.”

Sometimes we have to help each other get our letters onto the doors and the walls, putting them in the places where they can be read, plastering them all over the surfaces that institutions use to contain our complaints.

Viola came to a lecture in which I shared words from her testimony. The words she gave to me, I gave back to her. “It was only after the lecture,” she wrote, ‘that I realized how undignified these complaint processes are, and how, yes, my dignity was stripped. In my dealings with the union, they had advised me at the time that my dignity at work had been breached, but that word did little then for me, as it felt like another procedural piece of jargon ‒ but when I felt a swell of pride at the lecture, indeed, when I felt a sense of dignity about it all, I realized that this must have been somewhat lost.”

Words can be emptied of meaning, becoming polish, how we are removed from our own stories. When we share our complaints with each other, giving them back to each other, they acquire meaning and value. As I travelled with all of your words, I felt the swell of your company.

When Mariam posted her resignation letter on the door, it was not just her letter than ended up on the door. Her letter soon had companions. Students posted notes in solidarity, of solidarity, until the door was covered by them.

A no can turn a door into a noticeboard.

A door, a tour, so beautiful, that gathering.

With thanks and my endless solidarity

to those complaining for a more just world

Sara xx

Ps some tour photos below

with Durba

with Roxane

with Heather

with Soraya

with Mariam

a feminist killjoy cake!