I am posting below a link to an audio of a lecture I gave a earlier this year at Amsterdam. The lecture was entitled ‘Things that get Stuck: On will, walls and willfulness’ and the workshop was ‘Dislocating Agency – Moving Objects’.
[http://asca.uva.nl/conferences/dislocating-agency-moving-objects/disloacting-agency-and-moving-objects.html]
I am currently working on a paper, ‘Not in the Right Mood’ (not a surprising title for an affect alien with alien affects!) for a special issue of a journal on mood, and it has taken me back to the question of ‘non-attunement’ or misattunement that I addressed in my discussion of social will in the first chapter of my forthcoming book, Willful Subjects. I open the possibility (and it was just an opening) of thinking of clumsiness as a queer ethics. I want in this paper to exercise and thus develop this thought!
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Willing together can be an experience of being in time. Things run smoothly; we might be moving in unison. What happens when we concur but we do not achieve this unison? When we are out of time, we notice the other’s timing and pace; in noticing the other the other might appear as awkward or clumsy. Or we might turn toward each other in frustration, as we bump into each other yet again. Clumsiness can be how a subject experiences itself: as being “in the way” of what is “on the way,” as being in the way of herself as well as others. A body can be what trips you up, or catches you out. Indeed the feeling of clumsiness can be catchy: once you feel clumsy, you can become even clumsier, or at least feel yourself becoming so, which is hard to separate from becoming so. You end up tangled up; you seem to lack the coordination to coordinate yourself with yourself let alone yourself with others. If we are in motion, clumsiness can be registered as what stops a movement or flow (the word “clumsy” derives from the word “kluma” to make motionless). And if moving in time feels good, no wonder a clumsy subject can feel herself a killjoy: your own body can be what gets in the way of a happiness that is assumed as on its way.
Perhaps the experience of willing together then also involves the experience of non-attunement: of being in a world with others where we are not in a responsive or harmonious relation. The problem with attunement – a term of endearment in critical literatures of all kinds – is not that it does not happen (it most certainly does) but that it can easily become not just a description of an experience but also an ideal: as if the aim is harmony, to be willing in time with others. When attunement becomes an aim, those who are not in tune or who are out of tune become the obstacles; they become the “non” attuned whose clumsiness registers as the loss of a possibility. This “non” is saturated: those who are assumed to cause the non-attunement become the non they are assumed to cause; and they become it “quickly,” so fast that it can be hard to keep up.
Perhaps we could create a queer ethics out of clumsiness, an ethics that registers those who are not attuned as keeping open the possibility of going another way. Or perhaps we can think of the experience of being out of tune as a way of staying attuned to otherness. Rather than the experience of “bumping” into each other being a sign of the failure of a relationship, or even the failure of someone in a relationship to be responsive, it can understood as a form of relationship in which bodies have not simply adjusted to each other. When bumping is understood as a form of relationship, it is no longer experienced as that which must be overcome. The bumpier the ride could be an expression of the degree to which one style of embodiment has not determined an ethical or social horizon. Rather than equality being about smoothing a relation perhaps equality is a bumpy ride.
It is always interesting to reflect as a writer and researcher on how you end up on certain paths. One of the experiences that led me on the path to writing about happiness as a path, was seeing the film Bend it Like Beckham. I actually find this film fascinating, and used to teach with it at Goldsmiths (on my course, Media, Ethnicity and Nation, which I have renamed this year, Race, Empire and Nation). It was the happy ending that caught my attention: I found it really annoying! Typical feminist killjoy moment I guess
🙁 (:)) [translation: a cross face puts the smile in brackets]
I am posting below my reading of the film that formed part of the journal article, ‘Multiculturalism and the Promise of Happiness,’ which I originally wrote in early 2005, and which was published in New Formations in 2008. A longer reading of the firm then appeared in a chapter “Melancholic Migrants” in The Promise of Happiness in 2010 (http://www.dukeupress.edu/The-Promise-of-Happiness/). Lots of people (including some of my former students) disagree with my critique of the film. Do feel free to share any disagreements!
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JUST HAPPINESS
Happiness is not only promised by certain objects, it is also what we promise to give to others as an expression of love. I am especially interested in the speech act, ‘I just want you to be happy’. What does it mean to want ‘just’ happiness? What does it mean for a parent to say this to a child? In a way, the desire for the child’s happiness seems to offer certain kind of freedom, as if to say: ‘I don’t want you to be this, or to do that; I just want you to be or to do “whatever” makes you happy’. You could say that the ‘whatever’ seems to release us from the obligation of the ‘what’. The desire for the child’s happiness seems to offer the freedom of a certain indifference to the content of a future decision.
Take the psychic drama of the queer child. You could say that the queer child is an unhappy object for many parents. In some parental responses to the child coming out, this unhappiness is not so much expressed as being unhappy about the child being queer, but about being unhappy about the child being unhappy. Queer fiction is full of such moments. Take the following exchange that takes place in the lesbian novel, Annie on My Mind (1982) by Nancy Garden:
‘Lisa’, my father said, ‘I told you I’d support you and I will… But honey…well, maybe it’s just that I love your mother so much that I have to say to you I’ve never thought gay people can be very happy – no children for one thing, no real family life. Honey, you are probably going to be a very good architect – but I want you to be happy in other ways, too, as your mother is, to have a husband and children. I know you can do both….’ I am happy, I tried to tell him with my eyes. I’m happy with Annie; she and my work are all I’ll ever need; she’s happy too – we both were until this happened.[i]
The father makes an act of identification with an imagined future of necessary and inevitable unhappiness. Such an identification through grief about what the child will lose, reminds us that the queer life is already constructed as an unhappy life, as a life without the ‘things’ that make you happy (husband, children). The desire for the child’s happiness is far from indifferent. The speech act ‘I just want you to be happy’ is directive at the very point of its imagined indifference.
For the daughter, it is only the eyes that can speak; and they try to tell an alternative story about happiness and unhappiness. In her response, she claims happiness, for sure. She is happy ‘with Annie’; which is to say, she is happy with this relationship and this life that it will commit her to. She says we were happy ‘until’ this happened, where the ‘until’ marks the moment that the father speaks his disapproval. The unhappy queer is here the queer who is judged to be unhappy. The father’s speech act creates the very affective state of unhappiness that is imagined to be the inevitable consequence of the daughter’s decision. When ‘this’ happens, unhappiness does follow.
One of the most striking aspects of the film Bend it like Beckham is how the conflict and obstacle of the film is resolved through this speech act, again addressed from father to daughter that takes the approximate form: ‘I just want you to be happy’. How does this speech act direct the narrative? To answer this question, we need to describe the conflict of the film, or the obstacle to the happy ending. The film could be described as being about the generational conflict within a migrant Indian Sikh family living in Hounslow, London. Jess the daughter is good at football. Her idea of happiness would be to bend it like Beckham, which requires that she bends the rules about what Indian girls should do. The generational conflict between parents and daughter is also represented as a conflict between the demands of cultures: as Jess says, ‘anyone can cook Alo Gobi but who can bend the ball like Beckham’. This contrast sets up ‘cooking Alo Gobi’ as common place and customary, against an alternative world of celebrity, individualism and talent.
It is possible to read the film by putting this question of cultural difference to one side. We could read the story as being about the rebellion of the daughter, and an attempt to give validation to her re-scripting of what it means to have a good life. We might cheer for Jess, as she ‘scores’ and finds happiness somewhere other than where she is expected to find it. We would be happy about her freedom and her refusal of the demand to be a good girl, or even a happy housewife. We might applaud this film as showing the happiness that can follow leaving your parent’s expectations behind and following less well trodden paths. Yet, of course such a reading would fall short. It would not offer a reading of the ‘where’ that the happiness of this image of freedom takes us.
We need to think more critically about how cultural differences are associated with different affects: we have a contrast between the open space of the football pitch, where there is movement, sound, and laughter, and the domestic interiors of Jess’s home full of restrictions, demands and conflict. In other words, these two worlds are not given the same affective value. The happiness promised by football is over-determined. The desire to be like Beckham has a narrative function in the film. In the opening humorous shots, presented as Jess’s fantasy (she stares at a poster of Beckham before the scene unfolds), Jess takes up a place beside Beckham on the football ground, and is the one who scores the goal. Football signifies not only the national game, but also the opportunity for new identifications, where you can embody hope for the nation by taking a place alongside its national hero. By implication, the world of football promises freedom allowing you not only to be happy, but to become a happy object, by bringing happiness to others, who cheer as you score. The inclusion of Jess in the national game might be framed as Jess’s fantasy, but it also functions as a national fantasy about football, as the playing field which offers signs of inclusion and diversity, where ‘whoever’ scores will be cheered.
In her other world, Jess experiences frustration, pain and anxiety. The shots are all of domestic interiors: of dark and cramped spaces, where she Jess has to do this or do that, where freedom is lost under the weight of duty. In her Indian home, she is the object of parental shame. Her mother says to her: ‘I don’t want shame on the family. That’s it, no more football’. For Jess, playing football means having to play in secret, which in turn alienates her from her family. What makes her happy becomes a sign of shame, whilst her shame becomes an obstacle to happiness. In this secretive life she forms new bonds and intimacies: first with Jess who gets her on the girl’s team, and then with Joe, the football coach, with whom she falls ‘in love’. In other words, this other world, the world of freedom promised by football, puts in her in intimate contact with a white girl and white man. In this narrative, freedom involves proximity to whiteness.
For Jess, the dilemma is: how can she be in both worlds at once? The final of the football tournament coincides with Pinkie’s wedding. Again, this coincidence matters: Jess cannot be at both events at once. Unhappiness is used to show how Jess is ‘out of place’ in the wedding: she is unhappy, as she is not where she wants to be: she wants to be at the football match. We want her to be there too, and are encouraged to identify with the injustice of being held back. At this point, the point of Jess’s depression, her friend Tony intervenes and says she should go. Jess replies, ‘I can’t. Look how happy they are Tony. I don’t want to ruin it for them’. She accepts her own unhappiness by identifying with the happiness of her parents: she puts her own desire for happiness to one side. But the father is not happy with her being unhappy, even though she wants him to be happy. He lets her go because he wants to see her being happy. As he puts it: ‘Pinkie is so happy and you look as if you have come to your father’s funeral. If this is the only way I am going to see you smiling on your sister’s wedding day then go now. But when you come back I want to see you happy on the video’ Jess’s father lets her go because he wants her to see her happy, which also means he wants others to witness the family as being happy, as being what causes happiness.
Jess’s father cannot be indifferent to his daughter’s unhappiness: later he says to his wife, ‘maybe you could handle her long face, I could not’. At one level, this desire for the daughter’s happiness involves a form of indifference to the ‘where’ that she goes. From the point of view of the film, the desire for happiness is far from indifferent: indeed, the film works partly by ‘directing’ the apparent indifference of this gift of freedom. After all, this moment is when the father ‘switches’ from a desire that is out of line with the happy object of the film (not wanting Jess to play) to being in line (letting her go), which in turn is what allows the film’s happy ending. Importantly, the happy ending is about the co-incidence of happy objects. The daughters are happy (they are living the life they wish to lead), the parents are happy (as their daughters are happy), and we are happy (as they are happy). Good feeling involves these ‘points’ of alignment. We could say positive affect is what sutures the film, resolving the generational and cultural split: as soon as Jess is allowed to join the football game, the two worlds ‘come together’ in a shared moment of enjoyment. Whilst the happy objects are different from the point of view of the daughters (football, marriage) they allow us to arrive at the same point.
And yet, the film does not give equal value to the objects in which good feelings come to reside. Jess’s happiness is contrasted to her sister Pinkie, who is ridiculed throughout the film as not only wanting less, but as being less in the direction of her want. Pinkie asks Jess why does not want ‘this’. Jess does not say that she wants something different; she says it is because she wants something ‘more’. That word ‘more’ lingers, and frames the ending of the film, which gives us ‘flashes’ of an imagined future (pregnancy for Pinkie, photos of Jess on her sport’s team, her love for her football coach Joe, her friendship with Jules). During the sequence of shots as Jess gets ready to join the football final, the camera pans up to show an airplane. Airplanes are everywhere in this film, as they often are in diasporic films. In Bend it Like Beckham, they matter as technologies of flight, signifying what goes up and away. Happiness in the film is promised by what goes ‘up and away’. In an earlier scene, the song ‘Moving on Up’ is playing, as Jess and Jules run towards us. They overtake two Indian women wearing shalva kamises. I would suggest that the spatial promise of the ‘up and away’ is narrated as leaving Indian culture behind, even though Jess as a character articulates a fierce loyalty to her family and culture. The desire to play football, to join the national game, is read as leaving a certain world behind. Through the juxtaposition of the daughter’s happy objects, the film suggest that this desire gives a better return.
In reading the ‘directed’ nature of narratives of freedom, we need in part to consider how the film relates to wider discourses of the public good. The film locates the ‘pressure point’ in the migrant family; who pressurises Jess to live a life she does not want to live. And yet, many migrant individuals and families are under pressure to integrate, where integration is a key term for what they now call in the UK ‘good race relations’. Although integration is not defined as ‘leaving your culture behind’ (at least not officially), it is unevenly distributed, as a demand that new or would be citizens ‘embrace’ a common culture that is already given,[ii] ,locating the promise of happiness in the aspiration to become British. In this context, the migrant daughter who identifies with the national game is a happy object; she becomes a sign of the promise of integration. The unconventional daughter of the migrant family may even provide a conventional form of social hope.
MELANCHOLIC MIGRANTS
The happiness of this film is partly that it imagines that multiculturalism can deliver its social promise by extending freedom to migrants on the condition that they embrace its game. Multiculturalism becomes in other words a happy object. I want to quote from one film critic, who identifies the film aptly as a ‘happy smiling multiculturalism’:
Yet we need to turn to the U.K. for the exemplary commercial film about happy, smiling multiculturalism. Bend it like Beckham is the most profitable all-British film of all time, appealing to a multicultural Britain where Robin Cook, former Foreign Secretary, recently declared Chicken Tikka Massala the most popular national dish. White Brits tend to love Bend it like Beckham because it doesn’t focus on race and racism — after all many are tired of feeling guilty.[iii]
What makes this film ‘happy’ is in part what it conceals or keeps from view. What makes this film happy might precisely by the relief it offers from the negative affects surrounding racism. You might note that the negative affects are not attributed to the experience of racism, but to white guilt: the film might be appealing as it allows white guilt to be displaced by good feelings: you do not have to feel guilty about racism, as you can be ‘uplifted’ by the happiness of the story of migrant success. The film ‘lifts you up’.
And yet of course to evoke ‘happy multiculturalism’ in the United Kingdom is to use a political language that is already dated. Multiculturalism is increasingly evoked as an unhappy object, as a sign of the failure of communities to ‘happily integrate’. Multiculturalism has even been declared dead.[iv] We do need to register this political shift as a shift. But we also need to register what stays in place through this shift.
I would argue that integration is what keeps it place as a place holder of national desire. Earlier multiculturalism was read as a sign of integration, but is now being read as a symptom of its failure. For example, in the reports on the ‘race-riots’ in the North of England in 2001, multiculturalism is described as failing to deliver its promise of integration and harmony amongst others. The report argues there is nothing wrong with people choosing ‘to be close to others like themselves’, but that: ‘We cannot claim to be a truly multicultural society if the various communities within it live, as Cantle puts it, parallel lives that do not touch at any point’[v]. Multiculturalism is here associated with integration, with the very points at which lives would touch. So without integration, ‘we cannot claim to be a truly multicultural society’.
In more recent policy frameworks, multiculturalism becomes an unhappy object by being associated with segregation. In his preface to the Commission for Racial Equality’s Guide, Good Race Relations, Trevor Phillips suggests that: ‘Multiculturalism no longer provides the right answer to the complex nature of today’s race relations. Integration based on shared values and loyalties is the only way forward’.[vi] Integration becomes what promises happiness (if only we mixed, we would be happy), by converting bad feelings (read un-integrated migrants) into good feelings (read integrated migrants). Integration is read not only as promising happiness, but also as a matter of life and death. The heading for Trevor Phillips’s preface reads: ‘Integration is not a dream: it is a matter of survival’. Bend it Like Beckham gives us a story of integration as being a dream and a form of survival. This film, released in 2001, could be read simultaneously as dated, insofar as it gives us an image of happy multiculturalism that has now been given up, and as anticipatory, insofar as happiness is promised as the reward for integration.
Although the film Bend it Like Beckham seems to be about the promise of happiness, I would argue that injury and bad feeling play an important narrative function in the film. As you know, I am interested in how bad feelings are converted into good feelings. What are the conversion points in this film? We can focus here on two speeches made by Jess’s father: the first takes place early on in the film, and the second at the end of the film:
When I was a teenager in Nairobi, I was the best fast bowler in our school. Our team even won the East African cup. But when I came to this country, nothing. And these bloody gora in the club house made fun of my turban and set me off packing….She will only end up disappointed like me.
When those bloody English cricket players threw me out of their club like a dog, I never complained. On the contrary, I vowed that I would never play again. Who suffered? Me. But I don’t want Jess to suffer. I don’t want her to make the same mistakes her father made, accepting life, accepting situations. I want her to fight. And I want her to win.
In the first speech, the father says she should not play in order not to suffer like him. In the second, he says she should play in order not to suffer like him. The desire implicit in both speech acts is the avoidance of the daughter’s suffering, which is expressed in terms of the desire not to repeat his own. I would argue that the father is represented in the first speech as melancholic[vii]: as refusing to let go of his suffering, as incorporating the very object of own loss. His refusal to let Jess go is readable as a symptom of melancholia: as a stubborn attachment to his own injury, or as a form of self-harm (as he says: ‘who suffered? Me’). I would argue that the second speech suggests that the refusal to play a national game is the ‘truth’ being the migrant’s suffering: you suffer because you do not play the game, where not playing is a read as a kind of self-exclusion. For Jess to be happy he lets her be included, narrated as a form of letting go. By implication, not only is he letting her go, he is also letting go of his own suffering, the unhappiness caused by accepting racism, as the ‘point’ of his exclusion.
The figure of the melancholic migrant is a familiar one in contemporary British race politics. The melancholic migrant holds onto the unhappy objects of differences, such as the turban, or at least the memory of being teased about the turban, which ties it to a history of racism. Such differences become sore points or blockage points, where the smooth passage of communication stops. The melancholic migrant is the one who is not only stubbornly attached to difference, but who insists on speaking about racism, where such speech is heard as labouring over sore points. The duty of the migrant is to let go of the pain of racism by letting go of racism as a way of understanding that pain.
It is important to note that the melancholic migrant’s fixation with injury is read not only as an obstacle to their own happiness, but also to the happiness of the generation-to-come, and even to national happiness. This figure may even quickly convert in the national imaginary to the ‘could-be-terrorist’. His anger, pain, misery (all understood as forms of bad faith insofar as they won’t let go of something that is presumed to be already gone) becomes ‘our terror’.
To avoid such a terrifying end point, the duty of the migrant is to attach to a different happier object, one that can bring good fortune, such as the national game. The film ends with the fortune of this re-attachment. Jess goes to America to take up her dream of becoming a professional football player, a land which makes the pursuit of happiness an originary goal. This re-attachment is narrated as moving beyond the unhappy scripts of racism. We should note here that the father’s experience of being excluded from the national game are repeated in Jess’s own encounter with racism on the football pitch (she is called a ‘Paki’), which leaves to the injustice of her being sent off. In this case, however, Jess’s anger and hurt does not stick. She lets go of her suffering. How does she let go? When she says to Joe, ‘you don’t know what it feels like’, he replies, ‘of course I know how it feels like, I’m Irish’. It is this act of identification with suffering that brings Jess back into the national game (as if to say, ‘we all suffer, it is not just you’). The film suggests that whether racism ‘hurts’ depends upon individual choice and capacity: we can let go of racism as ‘something’ that happens, a capacity that is both attributed to skill (if you are good enough, you will get by), as well as the proximate gift of white empathy, where the hurt of racism is re-imagined as a common ground.
The love story between Jess and Joe offers another point of re-attachment. Heterosexuality becomes itself a form of happy return: promising to allow us to overcome injury; heterosexual love is what heals. It is worth noting that the director of the film Gurinder Chadha originally planned to have the girls falling in love. This decision to drop the lesbian plot was of course to make the film more marketable.[viii] We can see here the importance of ‘appeal’ as a form of capital, and how happiness can function as a moral economy: only some scripts can lead to happy endings given that happiness is both a good that circulate as well as a way of making things good. In Bend it Like Beckham, the heterosexual script involves proximity to queer. Not only does the film play with the possibility of female rebellion as lesbianism (girls with short hair who wear sports bras are presented as ‘could be’ lesbians rather than as ‘being’ lesbians), it also involves the use of a queer male character, Tony, in which an alternative set of desires are deposited. As Gayatri Gopinath notes, the film ‘ultimately reassures viewers that football loving girls are indeed properly heterosexual by once again using the gay male character as the “real” queer character in the film’.[ix] Indeed, we could argue that the narrative of bending the rules of femininity involves a straightening device: you can bend, only insofar as you return to the straight line, which provides as it were our end point. So girls playing football leads to the male football coach. Narratives of rebellion can involve deviations from the straight line, if they return us to this point.
Heterosexuality also promises to overcome the injury or damage of racism. The acceptance of interracial heterosexual love is a conventional narrative of reconciliation as if love can overcome past antagonism and create what I would call ‘hybrid familiality’: white with colour, white with another. Such fantasies of proximity are premised on the following belief: if only we could be closer, we would be as one. Proximity becomes a promise: the happiness of the film is the promise of ‘the one’, as if giving love to the white man, as the ego ideal of the nation, would allow us to have a share in this promise.
The final scene is a cricket scene: the first of the film. As we know, cricket is an unhappy object in the film, associated with the suffering of racism. Jess’s father is batting. Joe, in the foreground, is bowling. He smiles as he approaches us. He turns around, bowls, and gets the father out. In a playful scene, Joe then ‘celebrates’ and his body gestures mimics that of a plane, in a classic football gesture. As I have suggested, planes are happy objects in the film; associated with flight, with moving up and away. By mimicking the plane, Joe becomes the agent that converts bad feeling (unhappy racism) into good feeling (multicultural happiness). It is the white man who enables the father to let go of his injury about racism and to play cricket again. It is the white man who brings the suffering migrant back into the national fold. His body is our conversion point.
Such conversions function as displacements of injury from public view. We need to get beyond the appeal of happy surfaces. And yet, some critics suggest that we have paid too much attention to melancholia, suffering and injury and that we need to be more affirmative. Rosi Braidotti, for example, suggests that the focus on negativity has become a problem within feminism, and calls for a more affirmative feminism. She offers a bleak reading of bleakness: ‘I actively yearn for a more joyful and empowering concept of desire and for a political economy that foregrounds positivity, not gloom.’[x] In her more recent book, the call for affirmation rather than negativity involves an explicit turn to happiness. Braidotti suggest that an affirmative feminism would make happiness a crucial political ideal. As she argues: ‘I consider happiness a political issue, as are well-being, self-confidence and a sense of empowerment. These are fundamentally ethical concerns. The feminist movement has played the historical role of placing these items at the centre of the social and political agenda: happiness as a fundamental human right and hence a political question’.[xi]
What concerns me is how much this turn to happiness actually depends on the very distinction between good and bad feelings that presume bad feelings are backward and conservative and good feelings are forward and progressive. Bad feelings are seen as orientated towards the past; as a kind of stubbornness that ‘stops’ the subject from embracing the future. Good feelings are associated here with moving up, and getting out. I would argue that it is the very assumption that good feelings are open and bad feelings are closed that allows historical forms of injustice to disappear. The demand for happiness is what makes those histories disappear or projects them onto others, by seeing them as a form of melancholia (you hold onto something that is already gone) or even as a paranoid fantasy. These histories have not gone: we would be letting go of that which persists in the present. To let go would be to keep those histories present.
I am not saying that feminist, anti-racist and queer politics do not have anything to say about happiness other than point to its unhappy effects. I think it is the very exposure of these unhappy effects that is affirmative, which gives us an alternative set of imaginings of what might count as a good or at least better life. If injustice does have unhappy effects, then the story does not end there. Unhappiness is not our end point. If anything, the experience of being outside the very ideals that are presumed to enable a good life still gets us somewhere. It is the resources we develop in sharing such experiences that might form the basis of alternative models of happiness. A concern with histories that hurt is not then a backward orientation: to move on, you must make this return. If anything we might want to reread the melancholic subject, the one who refuses to let go of suffering, and who is even prepared to kill some forms of joy, as offering an alternative model of the social good.
[i] Nancy Garden, Annie On My Mind, Aerial Fiction: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 1982, p.191.
[ii] For an analysis of integration as ‘the imperative to love difference’ see chapter 5, ‘In the Name of Love’ in Ahmed, Cultural Politics, op.cit.
[iii] McNeil, Daniel (2004). ‘Dancing Across Borders’, http://www.brightlightsfilm.com/44/pan.htm
[iv] The death of multiculturalism is linked to how multiculturalism has been associated with death, for instance, by being attributed as the cause of the London bombings in July 2005. As Paul Gilroy describes ‘Multiculturalism was officially pronounced dead in July 2005’, ‘Multi-Culture in Times of War, Inaugural Lecture, London School of Economics, May 10 2006.
[v] Home Office, Community Cohesion: A Report of the Independent Review Team, 2002, p.13. For a more detailed analysis of this document see Ahmed, Cultural Politics, op.cit, 133-140.
[vi] Commission for Racial Equality, Good Race Relations Guide, 2005: http://www.cre.gov.uk/duty/grr/index.html.
[vii] For excellent readings of racial melancholia see Anne Anlin Cheng, The Melancholia of Race: Psychoanalysis, Assimilation and Hidden Grief, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001; and David L. Eng and Shinhee Han, ‘A Dialogue on Racial Melancholia’ in David L.Eng and David Kazanjian (eds), Loss: The Politics of Mourning. Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2003.
[viii] For a discussion of this decision see Sarah Warn, ‘Dropping Lesbian Romance from Beckham the Right Decision’, http://www.afterellen.com/Movies/beckham.html
[ix] Gayatri Gopinath, Gayatri, Impossible Desires: Queer Diasporas and South Asian
Public Cultures. Durham: Duke University Press, 2005, p.129.
[x] Rosi Braidotti, Metamorphoses: Towards a Materialist Theory of Becoming..
Cambridge: Polity, 2002, p. 57.
[xi] Rosi Braidotti, Transpositions: On Nomadic Ethics. Cambridge: Polity, 2006, p. 230.
I am posting a short segment from the first chapter of my book, On Being Included: Racism and Diversity in Institutional Life, which was published by Duke University Press last year (https://www.dukeupress.edu/Open-to-the-Public-49485/). As the new academic year approaches, and events and workshops are being announced, I keep noticing how easily whiteness gets reproduced. Below is one example of coming up against whiteness….
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What does it mean to talk about whiteness as an institutional problem or as a problem of institutions? When we describe institutions as being white, we are pointing to how institutional spaces are shaped by the proximity of some bodies and not others: white bodies gather, and create the impression of coherence. When I walk into university meetings that is just what I encounter. Sometimes I get used to it. At one conference we organize, four Black feminists arrive. They all happen to walk into the room at the same time. Yes, we do notice such arrivals. The fact that we notice such arrivals tells us more about what is already in place than it does about “who” arrives. Someone says: “it is like walking into a sea of whiteness.” This phrase comes up, and it hangs in the air. The speech act becomes an object, which gathers us around. When an arrival is noticeable, we notice what is around. I look around, and re-encounter the sea of whiteness. I had become so used to this whiteness that I had stopped noticing it.
If we get used to inhabiting whiteness (it can be a survival strategy to learn not to see it; to learn not to see how you are not reflected back by what is around), it does not mean whiteness does not still affect us. One of the pleasures of doing this research was going to policy events on equality and diversity where I did not encounter a sea of whiteness.[i] I encountered a sea of brownness. I am well aware of the dangers of what Gayatri Spivak calls – in the context of a critique of the assumption “transformativity” of global feminism – “the body count” (2000: 128, see also Alexander 2005: 135). But numbers can be affective. It can be surprising and energizing not to feel so singular. When you inhabit a “sea of brownness” as a person of colour you might realise the effort of your previous inhabitance, as the effort of not noticing what is around you. It is like how you can feel the “weight” of tiredness most acutely as the tiredness leaves you. To become conscious of how things leave you is to become conscious of those things. We might become even more aware of whiteness as wearing, when we leave the spaces of whiteness.
The labour required to leave whiteness is also worth noting: in some institutional contexts, it is hard work not to reproduce the whiteness of events. I attended a conference on sexuality in 2011 that was a very white event (this is not unusual for academic events in the UK – whiteness is the usual). So yes, I looked around the audience and encountered a “sea of whiteness.” The event was also structured around whiteness; all the plenary speakers were white. I had pointed out the problem with having all white plenary speakers to the conference organizers in advance of the event in the hope they might do something about it (but as I note in my conclusion to this book, being asked to make up numbers after an event has been advertised can be a problem: we need not to be in the position of making such points or making up the numbers in the first place). When I turned up at the event, all the plenary speakers were white (is there a still before this white? Is whiteness something that can be described as still?). I was relieved that a Black Caucus had been set up by someone in the organizing team who was an activist of colour; although at the same time, I was cautious. Did the people of colour being given a space allow the space of the event to stay white? The caucus was explicitly framed as an event for all participants of colour; and, whatever my caution, I was relieved to have the space when the time came, as it can be tiring, all that whiteness.
What happened? Who turned up? All in all, ten people came to the Black Caucus; four of whom identified themselves as white. The organizer handed out a description of the event which made explicit that the event was for people of colour. No one left after reading the description. The organizer for understandable reasons did not want to insist on anyone leaving. We sat in a circle and took turns to speak about why we had come to the event. I was very uncomfortable; hot and bothered. I had expected this time and space to be a chance to talk to other people of colour. It felt as if the one space we had been given – to take a break from whiteness – had been taken away. From the accounts offered, it was evident there were different reasons that white people had given themselves permission to turn up at a Black Caucus; being interested in questions of race; a sense of solidarity, alliance and friendship; a desire to be at a workshop rather than a traditional academic session; a belief that race didn’t matter as it shouldn’t matter. Those of us of colour tried hard – in different ways – to speak about why we wanted this event to be a person of colour event. A colleague mentions that it was interesting that a Black caucus would have forty percent white people; she used percentages, I think, because numbers can be affective. I talked about the relief of entering queer space after the fatigue of being in straight space, as a way of making an implicit analogy, as an appeal for recognition. Eventually, a white person leaves in recognition – and gives recognition – that we needed a space of relief from whiteness. A second person follows, but aggressively, saying we had made her unwelcome; forced her to leave. One by one the white people leave, each offering an account of leaving, and a different account of why they had come. When the Black caucus became itself, such joy, such relief! Such humor, such talk!
What I learned from this occasion, was the political labour that it takes to have spaces of relief from whiteness. I also realized the different ways that whiteness can be “occupying.” Although the aggressive way of leaving was the most obviously difficult to deal with, we also need to account for the more sympathetic or caring ways of leaving the space. They may help us to explore how whiteness can be occupying through or as care (what we might call simply a caring whiteness or even a sorry whiteness). I was struck how apology can be a form of permission: how apologizing for turning up at a person of colour event as a white person might be a way of giving oneself permission to turn up at a person of colour event. The struggle against the reproduction of whiteness is a struggle against these forms of permission.
References
Alexander, Jacqui M. (2005). Pedagogies of Crossing: Meditations on Feminism, Sexual Politics, Memory and the Sacred. Durham: Duke University Press.
Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty (2000). “Claiming Transformation: Travel Notes with Pictures” in Sara Ahmed, Jane Kilby, Celia Lury and Maureen McNeil (eds.), Transformations: Thinking Through Feminism, London: Routledge. pp.119-130.
[i] These events as policy events in the UK were for all public sectors, that is, they were not specific to Higher Education, where it is much harder to encounter a “sea of brownness.” I have attended some academic events that were experiencable as “seas of brownness” in the UK. They included: inaugural lectures for women of colour professors, as well as events that are specifically on race or racism, or that are addressing the work of scholars of color.
I have recently completed a book, Willful Subjects, which is forthcoming with Duke University Press. I am sharing with you some fragments from the draft of the fourth chapter of this book, ‘Willfulness as A Style of Politics,’ on feminist killjoys.
And: if you want to share any feminist killjoy stories, please do! We have so many stories to tell. This blog can be a gathering of killjoys!!
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Understanding how willfulness is an affective judgment has given me a new handle on the figure of the feminist killjoy. Previously, I have written about my experiences of being a feminist daughter at the family table (Ahmed 2010). Those experiences involve rolling eyes (the rolling eyes might be how some body parts in their expression register the willfulness of others). You are at the table and someone says something you find problematic. Do you say anything or do you say nothing? When nothing becomes a decision, it can feel like something you say. When a decision is required because of how you hear what you hear, the situation can be experienced as hesitation, even as crisis.
It is so familiar that scene. And it can be empowering to find that scene elsewhere, in other words, not only to have your own memories handy but to be reached by the hands of others. I have been collecting “feminist killjoy” scenes. I consider this part of the work of being a killjoy: collection. One scene in Rachel Cusk’s novel Arlington Park touches my feminist killjoy heart.[i] There is a dinner. And if there is a dinner, there is a table, around which friends gather. One character, Matthew is speaking. He: “talked on and on. He talked about politics and taxes and the people who got in his way” (2006: 15). He complains about women who take maternity leave. He relays a story of a woman he is going to sack unless she comes straight back to work after having a baby. One woman, ‘you want to be careful’ and ‘She saw how close she was to his hatred; it was like a nerve she was within a millimeter of touching. “You want to take care. You can start to sound strident at your age”‘ (17). Juliet, is silent at first. But eventually she can’t stand it anymore; she cannot let her silence imply she is in agreement. She says “That’s illegal.” She says “she could take you to court” (16). Illegal: how a word can cut through an atmosphere like a knife. It is Juliet who is heard as sharp. Matthew responds: “You want to be careful.” And then, you come up against it, that wall of perception: “she saw how close she was to his hatred: it was like a nerve she was within a millimeter of touching. ‘You want to take care. You can sound strident at your age.’”(17).
Note how to become a feminist killjoy can be an aging assignment (“at your age”). The woman who speaks out becomes an old hag, a woman who does not take care or does not care, who willingly removes herself from the sphere of male interest. I am reminded of Mary Daly’s treatment of the haggard in Gynecology: “an intractable person, especially: a woman reluctant to yield to wooing” (1978: 15). Mary Daly points out that “willful” is one of the “obsolete” meanings of haggard. Indeed Mary Daly’s radical feminist reclaiming of the haggard (which she calls hagiography) could be considered an important predecessor to my attempts to reclaim the figure of the feminist killjoy, along with other willful subjects. Daly elaborates: “haggard writing is by and for women those who are intractable, willful, wanton and unchaste, and especially those who are reluctant to yield to wooing” (1978: 15-16). Willfulness is often used to diagnose “reluctance to yield” as a problem of female character. Women who do not yield to men’s advances are judged as unyielding.
Feminist killjoys: living in proximity to a nerve. We can hear what is as stake in how women who speak out are heard. To sound strident is to be heard as loud, harsh or grating. Some styles of presentation, some points of view, are heard as excessively and unpleasantly forceful. You know from what you are called. You know that other voices can be saying the same thing over and over again, even saying those things loudly, and not be heard as strident. They can be saying wrong things, unjust things and not be heard as strident. But you become a problem if you even dare to say that what they say is a problem. Oh the frustration of being found frustrating! Oh the difficulty of being assumed to be difficult! You might even begin to sound like what they hear you as being like: you talk louder and fast as you can tell you are not getting through. The more they think you say the more you have to say. You have to repeat yourself when you keep coming up against the same thing. You become mouthy. Perhaps we are called mouthy when we say what others do not want to hear; to become mouthy is to become mouth, reduced to the speaking part as being reduced to the wrong part.
The feminist killjoy is the one who flies of the handle, an expression used to indicate the suddenness of anger. She is viewed as too full of her own will, as not empty enough to be filled by the will of others. To be filled “with will” can be to be emptied “of thought” as if speaking about injustice, about power, about inequality, is just another way of getting your way. Those who “get in the way” are often judged as “getting their own way.” It is as if she disagrees because she is disagreeable; it is as if she opposes something because she is being oppositional.
Feminism: a history of disagreeable women! If we hear this sentence as an exclamation it can sound empowering. And yet, to be given the content of disagreement is how others do not hear the content of your disagreement. There is a “not hearing” at stake in the figure of the feminist killjoy. And there is no doubt that some of these experiences are wearing, even when we convert that figure into a source of energy and potential. And there is no wonder in the repetition of what we come up against, we might snap. I am thinking of this as “feminist snap,” the kind of energy and movement required to break the long thread of a connection.
Willfulness thus becomes an assignment in another sense: a project or task that we can take up in our everyday negotiations with the world. Willfulness is pedagogy: if I was given this assignment, I have learnt so much from it. I have learnt how whatever you say can be swept up and swept away by the charge of willfulness. The sweeping seems to become more vigorous when what you are saying is about the politics of saying. Becoming aware of how willfulness is an unjust assignment can be a lesson in the grammars of injustice. I am not only referring here to a sense that we might have that willfulness is false as a charge, an unfair dismissal, though this sense can be acute: we can feel a falsely. The experience of being attributed as willful can also heighten your consciousness of the work required to keep social surfaces shiny; the work required to keep up the signs of getting along. When we don’t keep up, so much can surface. The experience of being assigned as willful can be a mobilizing experience.
When we are not willing to adjust, we are maladjusted. Perhaps willfulness turns the diagnosis into a call: don’t adjust to an unjust world! As with other political acts of reclaiming negative terms, reclaiming willfulness is not necessarily premised on an affective conversion, that is, on converting a negative into a positive term. On the contrary, to claim willfulness might involve not only hearing the negativity of the charge but insisting on retaining that negativity: the charge after all is what keeps us proximate to scenes of violence. Consider Eve Sedgwick’s powerful reflections on the term “queer.” She writes: “it is a politically potent term…because far from being detached from the childhood scene of shame, it cleaves to that scene” (1993: 4). Willfulness might be a style of politics precisely insofar it too cleaves to that scene. The experience of being that willful subject can be a crucial part of political mobilization. The scene is not only a childhood one: there are many scenes of being seated at a table with others, meeting tables, in which willfulness becomes a charge that is taken up or taken on by those who are charged. Have you been charged?
A charge can be carried by words, by bodies. Oh how many of our histories are histories of willful words! Let’s think about the word “assertive.” How often minority subjects are called assertive! In being called assertive we have to become assertive to meet the challenge of this call. We might have to assert our existence in order to exist. We might have to insist to be. Audre Lorde has taught me this: how caring for one self can be “an act of political warfare” as a form of self-preservation not self-indulgence (1988: 131). There are “those of us,” she reminds us, who were “never meant to survive” (1978: 32). If some have to be assertive just to be, others are given freedom from the necessity of self-assertion. It is the effort “just to be” that might give us a different way of being. For some, willfulness might be necessary for an existence to be possible. When willfulness is necessary another world becomes possible.
References
Ahmed, Sara (2010). The Promise of Happiness. Durham: Duke University Press.
Cusk, Rachel (2006). Arlington Park. London: Fable and Fable.
Daly, Mary (1978). Gynecology: The Metaethics of Radical Feminism. Beacon Press: Boston.
Lorde, Audre (1988). A Burst of Light, Essays. Ithaca, New York: Firebrand Books.
———————-(1978). Black Unicorn. New Rork: W.W.Norton.
Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky (1994). Tendencies. London: Routledge.
[i] I found this novel because reviews compared it to Mrs Dalloway, a novel I wrote about in The Promise of Happiness (2010: 70-75). As with Mrs. Dalloway, we have a whole life depicted in a single day; in this book too, unhappiness seems to seep into the tasks of that day. I should add that the scene in this book that I am describing as a feminist killjoy scene is quite unlike any in Mrs. Dalloway, perhaps because Mrs. Dalloway as a character is too busy caring for the happiness of others: so careful that does not speak of the causes of her grief or speak in a way that might cause others grief.
This short essay copied below was commissioned and published by the magazine Bang and translated into Swedish by Ulrika Dhal in 2012. A shorter version will be published in the magazine Bildpunkt and translated into German by Sophia Schasiepen later this year. So I thought I would post the original in English here!
The Bond of Belief:
From Nervous to Happy Nations
How do we bond through beliefs? In my 2004 book The Cultural Politics of Emotion, I explored how the language of fascism is written in the language of love. Love is made into the primary quality of attachment, what motivates individuals into fascism: “we hate foreigners because we love our country.” We have in recent times witnessed a proliferation of fascisms in which love remains sticky, like glue, a bind, a bond; love articulated as a struggle for national survival against what is often narrated as the “death threat” of Islam. Many of these new groups (such as the English Defense League) transform love into a defense system: as if to say, “we must defend our people, our jobs, our future (our women, our gays, our children), that is, defend what and who we love, or appear to love, against that which endangers them, those who endanger them.” Love has an enormous political utility: transforming fascist subjects not only into heroic subjects, but also into potential or actual victims of crime as well as those who “alone” are willing to fight crime. Fascist subjects become freedom fighters, willing to stand against the “swamp” or “tide” of the incoming others, who themselves are narrated as hateful: as being not only worthy of our hate, but as full of hate for what we are and have.
If love is what binds, then it also involves what I have called an “affective economy.” An affective subject of love is created, as various figures circulate, from bogus asylum seekers, to “Islamic terrorists,” as objects of hate, accumulating negative value. The proximity between these figures creates a sliding impression that converts swiftly into narrative: such that the “bogus asylum seeker,” becomes (like) the “Islamic terrorist,” the one who threatens the nation from without. Or the very proximity between words (“Islamic” and “terrorist” or “bogus” and “asylum seeker”) creates an equivalence between these words (Islamic = terrorist, asylum seeker = bogus) without an explicit argument ever having to be made, or even as a way of countering an explicit argument (a speech can claim that Islam does not equal terrorism, whilst repeatedly using the expression “Islamic terrorist” as if these terms belong together: I have called this rhetorical strategy “problematic proximities”).
One of my key arguments in The Cultural Politics of Emotion (2004) is that multiculturalism operates as a form of national love. Multiculturalism becomes an injunction that the “would-be” or “could-be” citizens love the nation and its values (law, liberty, tolerance, democracy, modernity, diversity and equality — all these terms are presented as if they are attributes of the national body). Multicultural love allows a national body to cohere, whilst obscuring the effects of this coherence. This idea that the national body acquires coherence through a systems of belief only appears to separate the nation from race. For these beliefs become “ours” and even if this “ours” seems open (to others who might share our beliefs) it is only possible as a gift, as what we already have and “they” must acquire, often through force or compulsion. The national body can then appear to be in love with its diversity at the very same time as requiring those who embody diversity give their allegiance to its body (where allegiance remains predicated on giving up other kinds of allegiances that cannot be incorporated into this body – hence a nation can love diversity whilst demanding that Muslim women unveil).
Today this idea of loving multiculturalism seems far removed from political vocabularies regularly exercised across Europe. Multiculturalism has itself been sentenced to death: as if the act of welcoming diverse others has endangered the security and well-being of the nation. When the British Prime-Minister David Cameron called for a “muscular liberalism” in 2011, echoing and echoed by other political leaders, we could witness a narrowing of the gap between mainstream and fascist uses of political love. It is out of love, according to Cameron, that we must exercise our muscles; that we must stand up against those who have stopped us from standing up, those forms of political correctness, that have prevented us from defending our values and beliefs.[1] And here Cameron re-attaches beliefs quite explicitly to race: “So, when a white person holds objectionable views, racist views for instance, we rightly condemn them. But when equally unacceptable views or practices come from someone who isn’t white, we’ve been too cautious frankly – frankly, even fearful – to stand up to them.” Racism becomes understood as something that is “rightly” condemned. But the immediate implication is that the tendency to condemn racism in white people is the same tendency as the one that does not object to what is unacceptable in “someone who isn’t white.”
The speech carefully creates the impression that racism in white culture is not acceptable (thus obscuring the very ordinary nature of acceptable racism) whilst implying again that “our tolerance” of others has stopped those others from being more tolerable, more acceptable in terms of their beliefs. This nervous white subject who is unable to stand up to the non-white others becomes a national subject: “A passively tolerant society says to its citizens, as long as you obey the law we will just leave you alone. It stands neutral between different values. But I believe a genuinely liberal country does much more; it believes in certain values and actively promotes them. Freedom of speech, freedom of worship, democracy, the rule of law, equal rights regardless of race, sex or sexuality. It says to its citizens, this is what defines us as a society: to belong here is to believe in these things. Now, each of us in our own countries, I believe, must be unambiguous and hard-nosed about this defence of our liberty.” Note the repetition of belief: to belong is to believe in what I/we believe, I believe. A muscular liberalism is the one who is hard about belief: who demands that other believe as we do. And we note the nervous slide between the individual and collective subject: it is the nervousness that creates a bond, implying that the national subject is the white subject, the one who must regains its nerves, must not lose his nerve, by becoming more “hard-nosed” about others. I opened my book, The Cultural Politics of Emotion (2004) with an interrogation of the metaphor of the “soft touch nation,” a metaphor that allows the nation to be imagined and felt as a body that is easily bruised by incoming others. Softness and nervousness become what the nation has suffered from; what they must give up. That this is a rewriting of the history of British race and national politics is obvious: this is a fantasy that is being used to justify belief itself as a security project; belief as becoming “hard about belief.”
At the time of the speech the security minister Baroness Neville-Jones said to the Today radio programme on BBC 1: “There’s a widespread feeling in the country that we’re less united behind values than we need to be.” Speeches like Cameron’s are affective because they pick up on feelings, and give them form. In giving them form, they direct those feelings in specific ways. Feelings of nervousness or anxiety might be prevalent, that might even be widespread (we are living in times which make such feelings make sense). Political discourse transforms feeling by giving that feeling an object or target. We could call this projection: negative feelings are projected onto outsiders, who then appear to threaten from without, what is felt as precariously within. But projection is not quite the right word insofar as it implies an inside going out. I think these feelings are already out and about. They circulate at least in part through being understood as in circulation. The speech act which says the nation feels x does something; it becomes an injunction to feel x such that fulfillment of an injunction becomes a confirmation (that the nation feels x).
Let’s take a social situation. How often we experience that situation through or as atmosphere. It can be tense. But in naming or describing that atmosphere, whether to ourselves or others, we give it form. If there is tension we might search for an explanation: someone or something becomes the cause of tension. When attributions “take hold” they become shared explanations for an event or situation. We might agree with that cause. Once someone or something becomes the cause of tension, then shared feelings are directed towards that cause. Something “out there” which is sensed and real, but also intangible, is made tangible. In “finding” a cause feelings become forceful. Political discourse is powerful as it can turn intangible feelings that are shared into tangible things that you can do things with. If we feel nervous, then we can do something by eliminating what is agreed to be the cause of our nerves. I think the Marxist model of commodity fetishism helps us to describe these mechanisms: feelings come to reside in objects, as if magically, but only by cutting those objects off from a wider economy of labour and production. It is then as if fear originates with the arrival of others whose bodies become containers of our fear.
When a feeling becomes an instrument or a technique it is not that something is created from nothing. But something is being created from something: a wavering impression of nervousness can strengthen and straighten its hold when we are given a face to be nervous about. To track how feelings cohere as or in bodies, we need to pay attention to the conversion points between good and bad feelings. As I have suggested a politics that directs hatred towards others (that creates others as objects to be hated as well as feared) often presents itself as a politics of love. But there are many other kinds of conversion points. It was noteworthy in the UK that when anger about cuts to public spending (justified under the affective language of austerity – of shared peril) moved people to march onto the streets, the government responded by calling for a happiness index.[2] Is happiness here a technique of distraction, a way of covering the nation with a warm blanket?
And then there was announcement of a Royal Wedding. It might be that this announcement was from the point of view of government just good timing. But however we can understand the “co-incidence” of the announcement of the wedding with the widening of protest it was explicitly framed as a national treat. The Prime Minister said immediately “everyone would want to put on record the happy news that was announced yesterday” and opened for public debate whether there should be a national holiday.[3] Happiness became a gift to the nation, one that was given as a counter-gift, a way of countering a sense of national exhaustion and misery (and note even the idea of a tired miserable nation was a way of pacifying the potency of the signs of rage).[4] Those who did not participate in this national happiness were certainly positioned as killjoys or what I called in The Promise of Happiness (2010) “affect aliens,” alienated from the nation by virtue of not being affected in the right way.[5]
Like all weddings, this one was always meant to be a happy occasion; a celebration of this straight couple and the bond of their love (this is a love we can believe in, a love we are happy to love). And not just any couple of course: an especially shiny white couple. In anticipation of the event one commentator noted: “They will help form our collective imagination. They are now part of what we are as a nation, how we define ourselves as individuals, and how we are seen by foreigners.” The love for the couple becomes a form of national membership resting quite explicitly on a self-consciousness about how we appear to those deemed “foreigners.” To love the couple is want their appearance. The same writer concludes his article with a flourish: “But the monarchy is also about magic. It sets Britain apart. It reminds us that this is a very antique nation, with a history and an identity which goes back for thousands of years. Just as a royal funeral is a moment of collective national sadness and mourning, a royal wedding is a moment of overwhelming joy and renewal. We all share in it. When the marriage itself takes place on an as-yet-unspecified date next year, the nation will take to the streets, rejoicing.” [6] An institution that has been reproduced over time becomes magic: cut off from the labour of its own reproduction. And note as well how description (this is a happy occasion) becomes evaluation (this is good for the nation) and command (be happy, rejoice!). To share in the body of the nation requires that you place your happiness in the right things.
The wedding in 2011 was followed this year by the Royal Jubilee: and the flags came out again. In both national events, the cause for celebration took us back to history, to class as heritage, to class as continuity, to class as solidarity rather than antagonism. Commentators again claimed in advance that the event would be a day of national happiness: “It will be marked by great national happiness – and hopefully by good weather.[7] If good weather can only be hoped for (in the UK, much happiness is gained by moaning about weather), great national happiness is given the safety and wisdom of prediction. And this happiness is tied directly to the singularity of a Royal body, a body who has survived the comings and goings, the ups and downs, of national democratic time: “The jubilee is an opportunity to have a party amid hard times, but it should also be an opportunity to debate the institution more thoughtfully – because it defines this country and it will have to change after Elizabeth II’s reign is over. Yet it would be churlish not to acknowledge that the principal public feeling this weekend is respect for a woman who has done her strange, anachronistic and undemocratic job with tact and judgment for far longer than most of the rest of us could ever contemplate doing ours.” The singular body becomes an object of shared feeling, a way the national body can cohere in recognition of the longevity of a history it can call its own.
The investment in national happiness has much to teach us about the emotional politics of citizenship. Citizenship becomes a requirement to be sympathetic: as an agreement with feeling. To be a sympathetic part is to agree with your heart. After all, who could fail to be touched by the endlessly repeated images of the young queen coming to the throne after the death of her father? Who could fail to be touched by the memory of the young prince following the coffin of his dead mother? Here being touched into citizenship is to be touched by the trauma of a past and the prospect of its conversion. Not to feel happiness in reaching these points is to become not only unsympathetic but also hostile, as your unfeeling masks a disbelief in the very good of the nation. To be part of the nation is to remember these histories of national trauma: to recall them on the route to national pride. To be part of the nation, to participate in the national body, was to right a wrong, to feel right having felt wronged. National feeling was predicated not only on happiness but on the happiness of this conversion.
A bond of belief still turns upon a body, one that can concretize or “hold” that belief and convert it into memory. A national belief system became belief in a Royal Family, such that their bodies come to represent most perfectly our own. Belief has become a primary bond. Belief has become the thing we can say we love, a way of performing and masking “the we” that we love: we love the nation because of its beliefs; we love “the we” who believes in the nation. Beliefs have become a polite or masked form of racism: a way of loving what appears as open (the other can become acceptable by believing in our beliefs). Openness has itself become a quality assumed to reside in some more than others, a way of making some loveable, and not others. To be involved in anti-racist politics requires becoming unlovable. You have to lose sympathy. But it is risky. It can be dangerous.
[1] For the written copy of Cameron’s 2011 Speech see: http://www.number10.gov.uk/news/pms-speech-at-munich-security-conference/
[4] The pacification of the potency of rage has been an important part of the media and political response to the protests. The “anger” was typically projected onto militant outsiders, those who were intent on destroying the march for others, rather than being understood as what compelled people to march in the first place. It is almost as if the media “willed” the marches to be of tired rather than angry feet.
The presentation below was from a symposium ‘revisiting feminist classics’ that took place earlier this year in which we reflected on Ann Oakley’s important and ground making work, Sex, Gender and Society, first published in 1972. Ann attended the event and responded generously to the presentations. I hope to return to the question of how to take care of feminist intellectual histories in Living a Feminist Life. And we hope to have future events that re-visit feminist classics. Please do make suggestions of texts that you think would be good to re-visit!
This presentation is dedicated to all the feminists who made Women’s Studies at Lancaster University such a hand-changing experience!
Changing Hands: Some reflections on Ann Oakley’s Sex, Gender and Society
Sara Ahmed
Presented at the Revisiting Feminist Classics Symposium, Cambridge University
May 17 2013
It is my pleasure to be here today to talk about Ann Oakley’s feminist classic, Sex, Gender and Society, first published in 1972, and also to visit the question of what it means to revisit feminist classics. I was part of the Feminist Classics reading group held in Women’s Studies at Lancaster that Sarah Franklin just mentioned. In fact this opening panel today, with Beverley Skeggs as well as Sarah alongside me, feels a little bit like a Lancaster reunion: and that of course is what feminism can be about, the creation of relations and connections that we can take with us even when we leave places behind. This reading group was one of my favourite experiences of feminist intellectual life thus far. I loved the labor of going over materials that might now tend to be passed over, of finding in them some abundant resources, concepts, and words that I often think of as life-lines, with the ability to pull you out of a situation that is murky or unclear. I think is important to think of our task here as giving time: what is behind us is worth going over, worth putting in front of us, as a way of pausing, of not rushing ahead, of not being seduced by the buzz of the new, a buzz that can end up being what you hear, blocking the possibility of opening our ears to what came before.
What I also really enjoyed too in the reading group was the attention to the books themselves as material objects. Each of us had different copies, some of them tattered and well-read, worn and as it were lived in (you can, I think, live in books, how many feminists began their feminist lives living in books!). It made me very aware of how feminist community is shaped by passing books around, such that sociality of their lives becomes part of the sociality of ours. There are so many ways that feminist books change hands; in passing between us, they change each of us.
Going back to early books is also a way of re-inhabiting the world from which books emerge; and there are many worlds. For some here today, you would be reading of a time that you were not in; about debates you were not part of, as you were not old enough, possibly not even born. A book can be before us in many different senses. And to read a book can be like visiting somewhere; a wandering in a place that might be familiar because you have been there before; or unfamiliar as you are travelling there for the first time; or because you have not been back for a while. Reading a much-read text can be like becoming a stranger; and like any experience of being a stranger, a body not quite at home, the process can be revealing.
What I was reminded of in revisiting this feminist classic was the mobility required by investigation of sex and gender: its use of such a range of materials from the science of hormones, anthropological writings, psychology as well as historical texts. I think it is interesting to think of this book in terms of its own archives: what it gathers. I was also rather fascinated by the reference to the pamphlet from 1620, “Hic Muler” which Ann describes “reads rather like a modern protest against the masculinity of the liberated women; it was a criticism of the Elizabethan woman’s independent behaviour, which many people feared would dissolve marital and domestic happiness.” This quote caught my attention just because it allowed me to hear, and I often think of the importance of history as giving us an ear, how modern anxieties about who threatens what are echoes; history as what repeats. I think it is worth making a more general point here: offering an analysis of sex and gender as social phenomena requires pulling from so many varied sources. Different materials become tools that allow Ann to show different aspects of how sex and gender work; for example, anthropological materials help to show variation, and whilst it might seem obvious to us today why variation matters, it is worth reflecting on why “variation” had and has utility in making feminist arguments: if what it means to be female varies across space and time, then the idea that being female has to mean being or doing x loses foundation.
This book is a good reminder of the important of writing about social categories such that they lose their foundation. Thinking about the archives assembled by this book was a very helpful exercise for me: in Chapter 6, “Sex and Gender,” Ann refers to the work of John Money who develops his approach to sex and gender through his treatment of intersex patients. I am picking out this detail out as it shows how feminist archives were from the beginning queer archives, derived from the case studies of those whose bodies do not line up. I think this is important, and I speak here as someone located in queer as well as gender studies, because, work in queer studies often seems to forget earlier feminist work in gender studies. My point would not be “one way” (asking for these earlier materials to be remembered) because work in queer studies – and on intersexuality more specifically – would allow us to revisit Money’s own work much more critically. So perhaps one way feminist and queer studies could learn from each other’s histories would be to think in terms of their shared materials or archives. Immediately then our understanding of “materials” would broaden to include not just texts and documents, and not just case histories (an individual transformed into a document) but also bodies and lives. That our bodies become part of a feminist and queer archive should not surprise us, just as it should not surprise us that feminist and queer theories have tended to think from and with those bodies who trouble existing sex and gender assignments. We often learn about assignments from those who fail to fulfil them.
So when I think of “feminist classics,” I think not only in terms of how some books have been received but also of feminist labour, which is not only intellectual labour but also manual and physical labour (feminist work as handiwork, changing hands requires working with hands). We can think then of gender as a feminist product, of how gender as a concept is “made out” of materials. The work required to work on gender is a reflection of the work of gender: how gender as it were gets everywhere not only as an assignment of value to person but also as a complex and rather successful social system of distributing values. In a later essay, “A Brief History of Gender” (1997) Ann describes her project as “to trace the rise and fall of gender as a tool for understanding women’s position”. I think this is an interesting approach not only for how gender is treated as a tool or as a means to an end (a way of understanding women’s social position) but also for how gender is given a career, with its ups and downs, its trials and tribulations. It is interesting way of reflecting on a concept: as having its own life story, one that is entangled with the story of a political movement, and also individual stories of those of us who are part of this movement. Ann suggests in the same essay: “the history of feminism and the history of gender are so intertwined” (29). This “intertwining” means we cannot treat the history of gender simply as the history of an idea. Gender is rather “sticky”: it carries with it what has been done with it. Or as Ann later describes in the same essay: “Gender has collected a history of both uses and abuses, of political purposes and deviations, of slippages and confusions; and it brings this history along with it wherever it goes” (53).
I was reminded of Jennifer Germon’s 2009 book on gender which gives a history of how the idea of “gender” enters feminism (the subtitle of Germon’s book is “a genealogy of an idea”). Germon’s book was recently cited by Gayle Rubin in Deviations a reader of Rubin’s early and more recent work in feminist anthropology. Germon speculates that Rubin in her feminist classic “The Traffic in Women,” which was published three years after Sex, Gender and Society in 1975, in developing her concept of the sex-gender system, was influenced by John Money’s work (this is speculation because unlike in Sex, Gender and Society, Money was not cited by Rubin). I think Germon’s work, partly because she is keen to establish the significance of Money’s contribution, does risk ending up with a rather conventional intellectual genealogy, in which male authors are positioned as originary. I was thus struck with how Gayle Rubin confirms Germon’s speculation about the influence of Money by noting that gender as an idea was “in the air, the water, the conversations” (2012: 14-15). Concepts are not simply inventions from nothing; nor do they originate with individuals. They can be around in the atmosphere, what we breathe in, and breathe out, what is said and moves around. I like this way of approaching concepts as it allows us to avoid what we could call simply “concept fetishism”: how a concept can be treated as having a life of its own by being separated from the bodies and labour of the many involved in its creation. I like to think of feminist concepts as “sweaty concepts,” concepts that show the bodily work or effort of their making. I first began thinking of “sweaty concepts” in relation to Audre Lorde’s work, her Sister Outsider published in 1984 is another important feminist classic, for how she developed arguments through describing situations in which she found herself as a black lesbian woman in a white straight male world. It is how Lorde describes her experience of racism that gives us a concept of racism that allows us to return to those experiences in new ways. If concepts in some sense come from bodies, they can return to them, allowing us to re-inhabit the body with new understandings.
If feminist history includes history of ideas, it is hard and it should be hard to separate those ideas from our own bodies; ideas may become as worn as we do, change in the passing of time. In the course of Ann’s writing a shift on how gender and sex are understood took place. In Sex, Gender and Society sex and gender are clearly separated, as the separation of biology from culture, with sex referring to biological differences, visible difference of genitalia, difference in procreative function and latter “a matter of culture” that refers to the social classification into “masculine” and “feminine”’ (16). Of course there were good reasons for this separation: this separation had its uses, as a way of showing that actually much of what gets identified as natural, or biological, as necessary and inevitable, is made or constructed. As an aside here I would like to note that the first feminist text I read which critiqued the “sex/gender” distinction from a feminist point of view was not actually Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble (1990), which is probably the best known example of such a critique (which I read as a PhD student for the first time towards the end of 1991) but an article by the Australian feminist philosopher Moira Gatens, entitled, “A Critique of the Sex-Gender Distinction,” which was published in a book, Beyond Marxism: Interventions after Marx, in 1983. I am giving you this biographical detail partly as it shows how our feminist journeys — how we arrived this or that text or concept or argument – depends on our historical and social situation, of where we find ourselves. This critique within feminism of the sex-gender distinction was made by many feminists across different national contexts (it was integral as I am sure many of you know to French materialist feminists such as in the work of Christine Delphy) such that this critique of the distinction between sex and gender within feminism can be considered as part of the feminist history of gender.
Perhaps we can witness in this history a gradual loss of hope in “gender” as a category that could somehow save us (which is not to say that this hope was ever universal, it most certainly was not), which also I think involve less certainty about the concept of “de-gendering.” It might be interesting to read work in queer and transgender studies through this lens: to ask whether some of what gets called “gender queer” is a way of living out feminist hopes of de-gendering, often through the proliferation of genders rather than through disappearance of gender as such. Whatever has happened to gender, whatever new and unexpected styles of gender have come into being, I do think it is harder to invest feminist hope in de-gendering, possibly as gender cannot be contained by or as culture, going as it were all the way down (which is not to say that when I re-read the final chapter of Housewife, “Breaking the Circle,” which calls an ideological revolution, for the abolition of the family as well gender roles, I didn’t have that rush for excitement that follows that thought!). I don’t think it is a bad thing to lose confidence in some of our own terms: losing confidence is often the occasion for new thought. And partly the loss of hope in gender or de-gendering is simply a reflection of the fact that even our concepts and words have lives other than the ones we give them: we all know how easily “gender” can become a form of polite speech, a way not saying a more troubling word like “sex” or in the context of the academy a more troubling word like “women.” I was one of those who fought to keep the “women” in Women’s Studies because I knew the trouble it caused (as a feminist rebuttal, as a way of saying no to the universal of the university). I have always been suspicious of any move that is about causing less trouble!
We can certainly note a shift in Ann’s work such that by “A Brief History of Gender,” she writes: “the distinction between sex and gender does not call into question how society constructs the natural body itself” and “sex is no more natural than gender given that our speaking of both is mediated by our existence as social beings” (30). The concepts we use to explain what we are up against are constantly being revisited; and in the process they even lose their integrity. When the distinctions we make (and in making we use) no longer hold it does not mean those distinctions did not or even do not have utility (in certain situations a distinction can be handy even if we do not believe in it). Perhaps the metaphor that Ann uses of gender as a “building block” is helpful, the concept of gender is like a brick, it helped to build the apparatus, or even the dwelling that is feminist theory. The brick has its place, but it also needs to be surrounded by other bricks.
I think I also took from revisiting the sense, how gender is not only an idea or a set of ideas but how gender is a social system supported by ideas. Sex, Gender and Society shows how “ideas” take hold or even keep their shape. We might think of these ideas as ruling ideas within a feminist historical materialist framework. A lot of feminist theory has in a way been trying to explain how ideas hold, how for people become invested in the very ideas (the idea of femininity for instance) that seem to secure their subordination. So while recent work on affect and emotion within gender studies might seem far removed from the milieu of Sex, Gender and Society I would propose we think of a genealogy: a strand in feminist theory that has been trying to explain why norms without proper foundation, norms that seem to be about the loss of possibility, or proximity to and acceptance of violence, end up becoming attachments, what is hardest to give up. This actually helps us place the concern with affect and emotion not as something new but as what comes out of a much longer feminist materialist concern with explaining the difficulty of transforming relations of structural inequality. Emotions can often keep us invested in what we might have otherwise have give up. This suggestion is implicit in Sex, Gender and Society. Ann notes on page 16: “Arguments long believed in have an alarming tendency to remain suspended in thin air by the slender spring of passionate, often irrational conviction.” Passionate conviction can hold up what reason puts into suspense. Indeed thinking about how Sex, Gender, and Society could be read alongside recent feminist work on affect and emotion made me aware of the important of feminist sociology as an approach, a way thinking how even apparently intangible and psychological phenomena such as feelings can be understood as social forms (with patterns, regularities). And I would argue that now in a world of deepening inequalities, what we need more than anything is this kind of structural analysis even within sociology: when the sociologist Zygmunt Bauman describes liquids as “an apt metaphor for our times” because of their “intrinsic inability to hold their shape” (in Gane 2010: 19) I feel like saying no, actually, institutions and social forms have been remarkably “good” at keeping their shape. Perhaps if feminist sociology was more recognised within sociology proper, not just as a subfield but as changing the terms of the field, different “apt metaphors” would come to mind.
Reading Ann’s work has really helped me to realise how the techniques of anti-feminism can be the same as techniques of gender. Of course this should not be surprising: you defend x by attacking those who challenge x. We can thus learn from versatility of the forms of anti-feminism something of the mechanisms whereby gender works. There are two words I noticed in the book, two words that caught my attention. One was “efficiency,” the other “happiness.” The second word I always noticed because having written a book on happiness which I had actually been struck by just how much of feminist intellectual history had involved substantial critiques of happiness. We can place some of Ann remarks on happiness (both in this book and her even stronger critiques of happiness as a form of false consciousness in Housewife) within a long feminist intellectual genealogy. We could for example return to Wollstonecraft’s Vindication where she challenges how Rousseau’s use of happiness to sentence Sophie to death in his classic Emile (1975: 43): this remains a very interesting text for feminists as it associates female imagination, with girls reading too many books, with unhappiness, an association I would argue that has stuck (see Ahmed 2010: 54-59). Or we might think of Simone de Beauvoir who noted in The Second Sex “it is always easy to describe as happy the situation in which one wishes to place” others (1997: 28) and also including amongst many others Betty Friedan’s critique of the image of the happy housewife in The Feminine Mystique (1965) and Audre Lorde’s powerful critique of how happiness becomes a justification for turning away from what would compromise happiness in The Cancer Journals (1997).
Another word that caught my attention was “efficiency.” I had been puzzling in the context of my own work on diversity within higher education about how and why organizations that are generally so inefficient can be so efficient at reproducing themselves. As summary: I was puzzling about the efficiency of social reproduction (that I was puzzling this point whilst based at Cambridge University last term might not be surprising). So this quote on page 192 stood out for me: “The argument for the ‘social efficiency’ of our present gender roles centres around woman’s place as housewife and mother. There is also the more vaguely conceived belief that any tampering with these roles would diminish happiness, but this type of argument had a blatantly disreputable history and should have been discarded long ago. ‘Happiness’ can be a cover-term for conservatism, and countless evils can be sanctioned in the name of some supposed short-term psychic gain.” Here “efficiency” and “happiness” almost belong in the same sentence; they become arguments for conserving what is. So it is not only that social reproduction is efficient, but the efficiency becomes an argument for reproduction, one that can be placed alongside happiness. I think feminist theory needs to engage with the history of anti-feminism, of how happiness and efficiency becomes techniques for justifying the maintenance of gender as a social system through attacks against those who challenge that system. In public discourse today, one of the main arguments against equality is that it would be inefficient. One of the main attacks against feminism is that it makes women unhappy. We have to in remember these texts to take up their challenge: we have to argue against arguments without foundation, but arguments that have appeal, by appealing to another world.
And I do think it is important for us to register the resurgence of interest in feminism internationally as evidence of its appeal. Feminism for many is appealing. The academy should provide a place to go to find out about feminist histories. We need these texts to stay part of our conversations; they can be handy. I always try and teach earlier feminist work in my own courses because I think it is too easy to lose this resource. So whilst I think canonisation is a risk (that in giving some texts status as classics we forget others, though I am sure all of us have different texts that are classics for us, because of our reading trajectories: a mini task for each of you would be to write a list of your top ten feminist classics) but I think the bigger risk is a generalised forgetting. Certain styles of feminist work are often considered “dated,” as having lost their relevance. At Goldsmiths we are launching a new Centre for Feminist Research and one of our launch events will be a workshop on Sexism (on May 9th, 2014, save the date!). Within the academy, as with most institutions, “sexism” is routine and everyday. I call some forms of academic sexism “critical sexism”: the kind of sexism that gets reproduced by individuals and/or institutions who thinking of themselves as critical and thus not implicated in sexism. I even had one leftist male colleague defend an all male reading list for a course on the history of social thought because he said that it couldn’t be helped that men (Marx, Weber, Durkheim) were the origins of Sociology! And yet I suspect words like “sexism” are heard as dated, as part of the tool-kit of old style feminism; it is certainly not a word that is exercised with much regularity in recent feminist theory. We have to wonder about this: are we losing the word only to keep the thing? Revisiting this feminist classic has given me renewed sense of the importance of being stubborn about feminist attachments: of why we need still to use the words if the worlds they describe are still with us.
And just finally: I have been thinking with this book about the generation of feminist knowledge. I have focused possibly too much on “concepts,” as the building blocks of feminist theory. But I also think our experience of being in the world as feminists is how we generate knowledge. Being a feminist does involve its own pedagogy, as you witness the reactions of others. I have thought of this in terms of the rolling eye syndrome: how if you are a feminist or even the feminist at the table people tend to roll their eyes before you even say anything. In the rolling eyes is an expectation that you will be difficult. There can be nothing more difficult than the assumption you will be difficult! An assumption can be a cramping of space. I have in my own work been exploring this familiar figure of the feminist killjoy – the one who gets in the way of happiness or just the one who gets in the way – as a site of critical potential and even agency. You can become willing to get in the way of happiness! It can be a life project. And actually when we ask the question of what it means to revisit feminist classics, it is also worth reflecting on what it means to live feminist lives. We come up against what we are against. And there are costs in this history: for many of the women who wrote the texts that were to become feminist classics the costs were personal and high. But going back is also to be energised: and to be reminded that a feminist life was and is full of joy, as worlds are opened up, as connections are made, as possibilities are not given up in advance of their loss. And also think of how much we know, here in this room, think of all the knowledge and understanding that is here with us in this room. No wonder some fear the consequences of feminist gatherings! They should be scared, who knows what we could do! And if each of us arrives here with our own histories that are particular, it is those histories have led us here, to share in this project of revisiting a feminist classic. If a feminist classic is a book that circulates amongst feminists, such that its words and concepts become part of a shared horizon, then a feminist classic is also like a friendly greeting, or a hand reaching out: a way of opening a conversation, a way of feeling less alone.
References
Ahmed, Sara (2010). The Promise of Happiness. Durham: Duke University.
Beauvoir, Simone de (1997). The Second Sex, trans. by H.M.Parshley. London: Vintage
Books.
Butler, Judith (1990). Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge.
Friedan, Betty (1965). The Feminine Mystique. Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Gane, Nicholas (2004). The Future of Social Theory. Continuum: London.
Gatens, Moira (1983). “The Critique of the Sex/Gender Distinction” in Judith Allen and
Paul Patton (ed), Beyond Marxism: Interventions After Marx. Sydney:
Interventions.
Germon, Jennifer (2009). Gender: A Genealogy of an Idea. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Lorde, Audre (1997). The Cancer Journals. Aunt Lute Books: San Francisco.
———————(1984). Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches, Trumansburg: The
Crossing Press.
Oakley, Ann (1997). “A Brief History of Gender,” in A. Oakley and J. Mitchell (eds) Who’s afraid of feminism?, London: Hamish Hamilton; New York, NY: The New Press.
———————–(1972). Sex, Gender and Society. Maurice Temple Smith.
———————- (1990). Housewife. Penguin (new edition).
Rubin, Gayle (2012). Deviations: A Gayle Rubin Reader. Durham: Duke University Press.
Wollstonecraft, Mary (1975). A Vindication of the Rights of Women. New York: W.W.Norton.
The presentation copied below was from a Black feminist event that took place in 2012 at the Trafford Rape Crisis Centre (http://traffordrapecrisis.com/Conference.html). It was an extraordinary event for me, one of the very few events that I have been to where I did not look out and encounter a “sea of whiteness” and it was probably at this event that I realised I needed to speak more to different audiences: ie not just speak at academic conferences! There was such an energy in the room. We can be connected by what we come up against.
Some of these talks go over similar material. Some things are worth going over, I hope. I suspect that I’m making the same points, over and over again, rather insistently. Or as one diversity practitioner said to me, “we have to keep saying it because they keep doing it.”
Presentation ‘On Being the Problem,’ Declaring the Activism of Black Feminist Theory Convention,’ March 9 2012
Sara Ahmed
Introduction: Life-Lines
I am thinking of those moments when a life line is thrown out to you. Sometimes we only know such a moment has happened after it has happened; the moment when what was given to you was what gave you a chance, a breathing space. A life line can be anything or perhaps it is always something: the quiet words of an encouraging friend, an unexpected alliance with a stranger, the sounds of a familiar landscape, or of an unfamiliar one; it can be a revelation that comes to you when you are seated quietly trying to escape from the busyness of a world; or it can be when you are caught up in the buzz of a pressing intense sociality and are caught out by a thought. A life-line can be the words sent out by a writer, gathered in the form of a book, words that you hang on to, that can pull you out of an existence, which can, perhaps later, on another day, pull you into a more liveable world. That’s what it was for like for me, reading Audre Lorde’s words, gathered as poems, in prose, the essays collected in Sister Outsider, her memoir Zami. What was it about you Audre that allowed your words to reach me? This presentation is a discussion of the reach of Black feminism, how in describing what it is like to be the problem, we can become the problem we cause. This presentation is me at my most optimistic: trying to think through what it means, and what it can do, to turn towards rather than the away from the worlds that make it difficult for us to exist. I want to dedicate this paper to all those Black feminists who taught me this: who taught me to turn towards a difficulty even if that turning seems to make life, at least in the first instance, more difficult.
But why focus on being the problem? How can making a life difficult, by accounting for the difficulty of a life, be optimistic? I am of course in having this focus inheriting a focus. Black writers have shown us over generations how the experience of racism is the experience of being the problem. Du Bois taught us that the “real question” is “How does it feel to be a problem” (2003: 8). Du Bois is writing specifically of the experience of black folk in a country shaped by the historical present of slavery. We need to attend to this specificity. At the same time, this sense of “being the problem” comes up again and again as a reference point for making sense of the senses of racism. Philomena Essed for instance, explores how the discourse of discrimination makes those who experience discrimination into the problem: “they not only have a problem, they also become a problem for others” (1996: 71). When those who experience racism are treated as the problem, then racism does not become the problem. If to talk about racism is to be heard as making rather than describing the problem, then to talk about racism is to become the problem you pose. And it is this becoming the problem we cause that is for me the grounds for optimism.
Strangers
I want to begin by turning to the figure of the stranger. Well maybe not quite with this figure. I first have to get there. I think one the of the strengths of Black feminism has been the willingness to give an account of our histories, not simply as histories of this or that person, of ourselves as persons, but as institutional histories of inhabiting worlds that do not take your body as the norm. It took a long time for me, I would say, to get to the point where I could even describe how race and racism had structured my own world. I was brought up in Australia in a very white neighbourhood. I went to a very white school (is there something very “very” about whiteness). There was just a few of us of colour; we didn’t quite know what to do with each other, even though we knew we had something to do with each other. I had a white English mother, and a brown Pakistani father who had kind of let go or almost let go of his own history in order to give us children a chance in the new world. We had no Pakistani friends, but there was an occasional visit to Pakistan, and visits from Pakistani aunties. But they were occasional, fleeting moments, ones that did not leave me with a possibility I could grasp. I went to a very white school (is there
something very “very” about whiteness?). There were just a few of us of colour;
we didn’t quite know what to do with each other, even though we knew we had
something to do with each other. I was brown, visibly different but with no real account of that difference; no real sense of where it or I was coming from. I kept feeling wrong, being treated as in the wrong, but I did not know what was wrong. Something was wrong. How to acquire the words for this something?
Much later, when writing my PhD on the relatively safe topic of feminist theory and postmodernism (not on race, I was not ready for race) I recalled an experience I had when I was 14 years old, walking close to home, along a street in Adelaide. Two policemen in a car pulled up next to me: one asked ‘Are you Aboriginal?’ the other one quipped, ‘or is it just a sun tan’. It was an extremely hostile address, and it was an unsettling experience at the time. It was an experience of being made into a stranger, the one who is recognised as “out of place,” as the one who does not belong, whose proximity is registered as crime or threat. The racialization of the stranger is not immediately apparent, disguised we might say, by the strict anonymity of the stranger who after all, we are told from childhood, could be anyone. My stranger memory taught me that the “could be anyone” points to some bodies more than others. This “could be anyone” thus only seems to be an open possibility, stretching out into a horizon, in which the stranger appears as the one who is always lurking in the shadows. Frantz Fanon (1986) taught us to watch out for what lurks, seeing himself in and as the shadow, the dark body, who is always passing by at the edges of social experience. In detecting the stranger, we are most certainly detecting someone; in some cases, we are detecting ourselves.
In some cases, we are detecting ourselves. When I read Audre Lorde’s account of racism on the subway in New York City, on her way to Harlem in Sister Outsider I was of course reading an account of a place and a time I did not inhabit. But there was so much I recognised from her description. She remembers a white woman in a fur hat, staring at her. She remembers how as a child she looks down at herself, wondering if there is something on her coat that can explain the white woman’s horrified reaction. What does it do to oneself to look to oneself to explain a horrified reaction: to ask oneself: Is there a roach between us? And then: or is it me? Am I the roach the forces her to move away? Stranger danger: to be recognised as a stranger as to become the cause of the other’s fright. Stranger danger: to become a stranger as to inherit the fright you are assumed to cause.
And then in Zami, when Audre Lorde shares with us another memory, a memory of people spitting at her in the streets, I understood something. An experience of racism can involve the loss of the words to explain what is going on. It was a memory of her mother explaining to her that people were spitting into the wind because they were ill-mannered and rude, because the mother wants to protect her black child from the knowledge that those people are spitting at her, because she is a black child. I understood something. I understood that racism can be what happens right in front of us – in the direction of violence towards some of us – but also that we learn not to see it. We might learn not to see racism as a way of being protecting from racism: but of course we are not protected. We might not learn the word ‘racism’ or learn not to say that word ‘racism’ as if by not saying it, it might go away. Not naming racism as if racism is not going-on keeps racism on-going. This is why, in naming racism, we are always doing something. We need to find the words. Black feminism can be a way of finding the words.
Institutional Whiteness
Working at an institution or walking down a street can mean inhabiting whiteness. It can be tiring, all that whiteness. Sometimes you only realise how tired you are when you leave a situation that is tiring. It is because all that whiteness is so tiring that we need spaces like these, events like these, which can allow us to take a break from whiteness. A black feminist event can be a life line. Just being in a sea of brownness can be such a relief.
We might need some relief if we are to make whiteness an object of our collective thought. Let’s think about institutional whiteness. Institutions are spaces in which some bodies more than others are at home. Institutions create strangers, as well as establish a direction towards them; those bodies who are recognised as out of place, as not belonging. I want to draw now from a project I completed on diversity work and diversity workers in educational institutions (including higher education, further education and adult and community learning) with a team of colleagues based at Lancaster. I mean diversity workers here in two senses. A diversity worker can be someone appointed by institutions with an explicit aim of transforming and diversifying them (which might include being appointed by an institution or being appointed onto a diversity committee or equality task-force); or a diversity worker might be someone who does not quite inhabit the norms of an institution. People of color are often diversity workers in both senses, although the both can be obscured: given institutions take whiteness as their somatic norm, we are assumed to be diversity, to add color; and because we are assumed to be diversity we are often given the task of doing diversity, as if this doing is an expression of our being. As Nirmal Puwar has noted diversity has come “overwhelmingly to mean the inclusion of people who look different” (2004: 1). The very idea that diversity is about those who “look different” shows us how diversity can keep whiteness in place. If diversity becomes something that is added to organizations, like color, then it confirms the whiteness of the already in place.
It is certainly the case that the languages of diversity are increasingly used by institutions. The language of diversity certainly appears in official statements (from mission statements, to equality policy statements, in brochures, as taglines); and as a repertoire of images (collages of smiling faces of different colours: how important that these images are instantly recognisable as images of diversity!). We might even conclude that there has been an institutional will to diversity. And yet, a common expression that came up in a number of my interviews was of the institution as a wall. As one practitioner describes “so much of the time it is a banging your head on the brick wall job.” How interesting that a job description is a wall description! The feeling of doing diversity work is the feeling of coming up against something that does not move; something solid and tangible. The institution becomes that which you come up against. The official will to diversity does not mean that institution is opened up; indeed, the wall might become all the more apparent, all the more a sign of immobility, the more the institution presents itself as being opened up. This wall describes something very difficult for diversity workers, something even more than the tangibility of institutional resistance to change. For those who don’t come up against it, the wall simply does not appear: the institutions seems committed and diverse, as happy as its mission statement, as willing as its equality statement.
Diversity can be offered as a happier view of the organisation, one that can entice us to take part. Diversity as a viewing point can be a way of not seeing walls: don’t you know you are welcome? Come in, come in! A commitment to diversity translates into a speech act sometimes made explicit as tagline, sometimes not: “minorities welcome.” Diversity is offered as invitation: a way of inviting people of colour to become part, to add color to the body of the institution. What does it mean for the participation of some to be dependent on an invitation? People of color in white organizations are treated as guests, temporary residents in someone else’s home. People of color are welcomed on condition they integrate into a common organizational culture, or by “being” diverse, and allowing institutions to celebrate diversity. We are asked to smile, to ease the burden of our arrival. If we are cross, if we talk about walls, we would be heard as very ungrateful.
To be welcomed into whiteness does not necessarily mean they expect you to turn up. What happens when a person of color turns up? Oh how noticeable we are in the sea of whiteness : “When I enter the room there is shock on peoples’ faces because they are expecting a white person to come in. I pretend not to recognize it. But in the interview there is unease because they were not expecting someone like me to turn up. So it is hard and uncomfortable and l can tell that they are uneasy and restless because of the way they fiddle and twitch around with their pens and their looks. They are uncomfortable because they were not expecting me – perhaps they would not have invited me if they knew l was black and of course l am very uncomfortable. l am wondering whether they are entertaining any prejudice against me” (Ahmed 2012: 40-41) They are not expecting you. Discomfort involves this failure to fit. A restlessness and uneasiness, a fidgeting and twitching, is a bodily registering of an unexpected arrival.
The body that causes their discomfort (by not fulfilling an expectation of whiteness) is the one who must work hard to make others comfortable. You have to pass by passing your way through whiteness, not by becoming white, but by minimizing the signs of difference. I think of this labor as a form of “institutional passing.” As a woman of colour describes: “I think with a person of colour there’s always a question of what’s this woman going to turn out like… they’re nervous about appointing people of colour into senior positions….Because if I went in my Sari and wanted prayer time off and started rocking the boat and being a bit different and asserting my kind of culture I’m sure they’d take it differently” (Ahmed 2012: 158). Some forms of difference are heard as assertive, as “rocking the boat.” Some forms of difference become legible as trouble, as if you are only different in order to cause trouble. The pressure not to “assert your culture” is lived as a demand to pass and to integrate not necessarily by becoming white, but by being more alike. Note how this pressure can be affective: you experience the potential nervousness as a threat; you try and avoid the nervous glance by not fulfilling its expectation. Passing can be an attempt to avoid the consequences of being the problem. Sometimes it works; sometimes not.
Anti-Racism as a Willful Politics
Sometimes we have to fulfil an expectation. Sometimes we have to become the trouble we cause. I want to think of willingness to cause trouble as a politics of willfulness. Alice Walker defines a womanist in the following way: “A black feminist or feminist of color… Usually referring to outrageous, audacious, courageous or willful behavior. Wanting to know more and in greater depth than is considered ‘good’ for one… Responsible. In charge.” (2005, xi, emphasis Walker’s). Walker gives an emphasis to willful as a primary way of referring to certain kinds of behavior. Willful seems to convey what being a feminist of colour is about.
Let’s take a typical definition of willfulness: “Let’s take a typical definition of willfulness : “asserting or disposed to assert one’s own will against persuasion, instruction, or command; governed by will without regard to reason; determined to take one’s own way; obstinately self-willed or perverse” (OED). Being called obstinate and perverse because you are not persuaded by the reasons of others? Is this familiar to you? Have you heard this before? As we can note from this definition, willfulness usually takes the form of charge. Recall the woman who wonders whether wearing a sari will be perceived as rocking the boat. How often people of colour are charged with willfulness, as if we are only different because we are insistent on being different!
Can what we are charged with become a charge in Alice Walker’s sense, a way of being in charge? If we are charged with willfulness, then we can accept and mobilize this charge. To accept a charge is not simply to agree with it. Acceptance can mean being willing to receive. We could distinguish between willfulness as a character diagnosis (as what is behind an action) and willfulness as the effect of a diagnosis (as what is required to complete an action). You might have to become willful to survive the very diagnosis of being willful. Sometimes you can only stand up by standing firm. Sometimes you can only hold on by becoming stubborn.
We all know the experience of “going the wrong way” in a crowd. Everyone seems to be going the opposite way than the way you are going. No one person has to push or shove for you to feel the collective momentum of the crowd as a pushing and shoving. For you to keep going you have to push harder than any of those who are going the right way. The body who is “going the wrong way” is the one that is experienced as “in the way” of the will that is acquired as momentum. For some bodies mere persistence, “to continue steadfastly,” requires great effort, an effort that might appear to others as stubbornness or obstinacy, as an insistence on going against the flow. You have to become insistent to go against the flow and you are judged to be going against the flow because you are insistent. A life paradox: you have to become what you are judged as being.
Persistence for some requires insistence. Some have to “insist” on belonging to the categories that give residence to others. Take the category of Professor. An example: we are at a departmental meeting with incoming students. We are all talking about our own courses, one after the other, each coming up to the podium. Someone is chairing, introducing each of us in turn. She says, this is Professor so-and-so. This is Professor such-and-such. On this particular occasion, I happen to be the only female professor, and the only professor of color in the room (the latter was not surprising as I am the only professor of color in the department). When it is my turn to come up, the Chair says: “This is Sara.” I am the only professor introduced without using the title professor. Diversity work can involve an experience of hesitation, of not knowing what to do in these situations. Do you point it out? Do you say anything? If you do point it out, or if you ask to be referred to by the proper name, you are having to insist on what was simply given to the others; not only that, you heard as insistent, as or even for that matter as self-promotional (as insisting on your dues). We can understand how the judgment of self-will or willfulness falls: some (let’s name this some, white men in this case) do not have to be self-willed as their own will is already accomplished by the general or institutional will. You don’t tend to notice the assistance given to those whose residence is assumed. Not only do you have to become insistent in order to receive what is automatically given to the others but your insistence confirms the improper nature of your residence.
A flow is also an effect of bodies that are going the same way. To go is also to gather. A flow can be an effect of gatherings of all kinds: gatherings of tables, for instance, as kinship objects that support human gatherings. A queer experience: you are left waiting at a table when a straight couple walks into the room and is attended to right away. This might also be a female experience: as if without a man present at the table, you do not appear. For some, you have to become insistent to be the recipient of a social action, you might have to announce your presence, wave your arm, saying: “Here I am!” For others, it is enough just to turn up because you have already been given a place at the table before you take up your place. Willfulness describes the uneven consequences of this differentiation.
Someone said to me once they thought this description reduces queer and feminist politics to self-assertion (“here I am”). But who is heard as assertive? And which acts of will are attributed as self-willed? We need to become cautious about how self-will is used as dismissal. You do not need to become self-willed if your will is accomplished by the institution.
We notice categories when we come up against them; when they do not allow us to flow through spaces. Things might appear fluid to those who are going the way things are flowing. An attribution of willfulness also involves the attribution of negative affect to those bodies that get in the way, those bodes that “go against the flow” in the way they are going. Conversations are also flows; they are saturated. We hear this saturation as atmosphere. The willful subject shares an affective horizon with the feminist killjoy as the ones who are getting in the way of the happiness of others. A colleague says to me she just has to open her mouth in meetings to witness eyes rolling as if to say “oh here she goes.” My experience of being a feminist daughter in a conventional family taught me much about rolling eyes. Say, we are seated at the dinner table. Around this table, the family gathers, having polite conversations, where only certain things can be brought up. Someone says something you consider problematic. You respond, carefully, perhaps. You might be speaking quietly; or you might be getting “wound up,” recognising with frustration that you are being wound up by someone who is winding you up. However she speaks it is the one who speaks as a feminist who is usually heard as the cause of the trouble, as disturbing the peace (another dinner ruined).
Political forms of consciousness can also be thought of as getting in the way: not only is it difficult to speak about what has receded from view, but you have to be willing to get in the way of that recession. I would certainly describe consciousness of racism as willfulness. It can be willful even to name racism: as if the talk about divisions is what is divisive. Take the figure of the angry black woman explored so well by Audre Lorde and bell hooks. The angry black woman can be described as a killjoy; she might even kill feminist joy, for example, by pointing out forms of racism within feminist politics. It is as if we talk about racism because we are angry rather than being angry about racism. Women of colour don’t even have to say anything to cause tension. Listen to the following description from bell hooks: “a group of white feminist activists who do not know one another may be present at a meeting to discuss feminist theory. They may feel bonded on the basis of shared womanhood, but the atmosphere will noticeably change when a woman of color enters the room. The white women will become tense, no longer relaxed, no longer celebratory” (2000: 56).
It is not just that feelings are “in tension,” but that the tension is located somewhere: in being felt by some bodies, it is attributed as caused by another body, who thus comes to be felt as apart from the group, as getting in the way of its organic enjoyment and solidarity. “Turning up” can be diagnosed as willfulness, if your arrival is a reminder of histories that have already been “willed away.” This familiar figure of the angry person of colour hovers in the background: as if just around the corner, waiting for you. You turn up, only to find that figure has got there before you do. She always seems to get there before you can.
We might enter queer space. And oh shit, that figure is already there! How often queers of colour are heard as killjoys: as if talking about racism is what gets in the way of queer happiness. I noted earlier how queers might have to become insistent to be recognised as seated at a table. And yet of course we do have queer tables. If we talk about racism within queer politics, or if we use words like “gay imperialism” or “homonationalism” introduced by queers of colour scholars such as Jin Haritaworn, Tamsila Tauqir and Esra Erdem (2008) and Jasbir Puar (2007), then that talk is heard as what stops us from being seated at that queer table. Ok: let’s take this judgement on: if speaking about racism stops us from being seated, then we won’t be seated. A queer feminist politics of colour might require we refuse to be a seated at any activist or scholarly table that does not permit an attention to racism.
Even attending to racism can be heard as obsession. I am speaking to one of my interviewees – a woman of color – about racism. It is off-tape, and we are talking of those little encounters, and their very big effects. It is off tape, we are just talking, recognising each other, as you do; in how we recognise racism in those everyday encounters you have with people who can’t handle it, the idea of it. She says, “They always say to me that you reduce everything to racism.” A similar judgment has been implied to me, or said to me, many times. Why are you always bringing racism up? Is that all you can see? Why do you keep going on about it! Racism becomes your paranoia. Of course, it’s a way of saying that racism doesn’t really exist in the way you say it does. It is as if we had to invent racism to explain our own feeling of exclusion; it is as if racism was our way of not being responsible for the places we do not or cannot go. It is a form of racism to say that racism does not exist. I think we know this.
We know this: but we still have to live with this. No wonder that an institutional duty can be a happiness duty: a duty not to dwell on negative experiences of racism. Racism is increasingly heard as an injury to organizations and their reputation as being diverse. No wonder that anti-racism can feel like banging your head on the brick wall. The wall keeps its place, so it is you that gets sore.
To become the sore points can mean doing things with these points. The word racism is sticky. Just saying it does things. Constantly, I am witnessing what the word racism does. I am speaking of racism in a seminar. Someone comes up to me afterwards and puts her arm next to mine. We are almost the same colour, she says. No difference, no difference. You wouldn’t really know you were any different to me, she says. The very talk about racism becomes a fantasy that invents difference. She smiles, as if the proximity of our arms was evidence that the racism of which I was speaking was an invention, as if our arms told another story. She smiles, as if our arms were in sympathy. I say nothing. Perhaps my arm speaks by withdrawing.
Racism becomes a willful word: going the wrong way, getting in the way. When racism recedes from social consciousness, it appears as if the ones who “bring it up” are bringing it into existence. To recede is to go back or withdraw. To concede is to give way, yield. People of colour are often asked to concede to the recession of racism: we are asked to “give way” by letting it “go back.” Not only that: more than that. We are often asked to embody a commitment to diversity. We are asked to smile in their brochures. We are asked to put racism behind us as if racism is behind us. The narrative often exercised is not necessarily that we “invent racism,” but that we preserve its power to govern social life by not getting over it. The moral task becomes to get over it, as if when we are over it, it is gone.
I have an alternative: I call it my willfulness maxim. Don’t get over it; if you are not over it.
References
Ahmed, Sara (2012). On Being Included: Racism and Diversity in Institutional Life. Durham: Duke University Press.
Du Bois, William [1903] (2003). The Souls of Black Folk. New York: Barnes and Nobles Classics.
Essed, Philomena (1996). Diversity: Gender, Color and Culture, trans. By Rita Gircour. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press.
Fanon, Frantz [1952] (1986). Black Skin, White Masks. Trans. C. L. Markmann. London: Pluto.
Haritaworn, Jin, Tamsila Tauqir and Esra Erdem (2008) “Gay Imperialism: The Role
of Gender and Sexuality Discourses in the ‘War on Terror,’” in Esperanza Miyake and Adi Kuntsman (eds.), Out of Place: Silences in Queerness/Raciality, York: Raw Nerve Books, pp. 9-33.
hooks, bell (2000). Feminist Theory: from Margin to Centre. London: Pluto Press.
Lorde, Audre (1982). Zami: A New Spelling of My Name. London: Sheba Feminist Publishers.
—————–(1984). Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches, Trumansburg: The Crossing
Press.
Puar, Jasbir (2007). Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times. Durham:
Duke University Press.
Puwar, Nirmal (2004). Space Invaders: Race, Gender and Bodies out of Place.
Oxford: Berg.
Walker, Alice (2005). In Search of Our Mothers Gardens. Phoenix, New Edition.
In this blog, I will post some of the spoken presentations I have given over the past few years, but which I do not expect to publish because they were shaped by and for the occasion in which they were given. The one below was from an event at Goldsmiths, Judith Butler in Conversation that took place earlier this year. The introduction to this presentation refers to the question of intellectual genealogy, which I hope to write more about in Living a Feminist Life: the importance of feminists not being slotted into a male intellectual genealogy (feminist work is often positioned as derivative even in areas of scholarship that feminists have established) but also the difficulty of refusing those slots. To refuse “to be slotted” requires a certain style or stance I am calling willfulness, but I am sure we will all have our own words for it!
Note as well that this question of sexism (yes, let’s use the word!) in intellectual genealogy should not be bracketed from other kinds of sexism: it is how sexism operates not only to imply women only exist in relation to men (or even that we are ‘about’ this relation), but that women are behind men; that we come after, that our contributions are secondary and derivative.
Contribution to Judith Butler in Conversation, Goldsmiths College, May 17 2013
Sara Ahmed
One of Vikki Bell’s suggestions to us as participants in the event of this conversation was to pick a favourite Judith Butler quote and to take off from there. I love that idea even though I am not exactly following the suggestion. So let me share as an opener two of my favourite Butler quotes: the former is part of a sentence from the essay, “Imitation and Gender Insubordination,” the latter two short sentences from Precarious Life:
“I was off to Yale to be a lesbian”
“We’re undone by each other. And if we’re not, we’re missing something.”
The first time I read the first quote was probably the only time I ever had my interest sparked in going to Yale. They should put that one in their prospectus! Or turn it into an impact statement! I appreciate how this sentence is so exact: how we can become “in another way” what we already are in taking up an invitation to speak. If we can make light of the occasion, it is because it so weighty. In writing about gender, race and sexuality as a queer woman of colour, I have become attuned to the requirements of accepting invitations in which your body is somehow implicated in where you end up. You can become for an event what you speak of in the event. And sometimes we speak of, by “speaking as.” We are of course more than this “as.” In my view it is in “speaking as” that we find this more. Audre Lorde (1984) also taught me this: to speak as is not to reduce the biographical but to inhabit its complexity. If we refuse to bracket ourselves in or from our sentences, things get messier. We might even get messier: becoming beside ourselves.
The second quote I find moving. And I find Judith Butler’s work moving in how it conveys the wear and tear of human relations, how we are with others, as well as not with others. If anything, Judith Butler’s work has encouraged me to think what follows if we do not assume “withness.” After all these sentences imply that there are techniques we might have not to be undone by others, not to witness their grief, not to take care, what I think of as hap care, not to care what happens to this person or that, here or there. We miss each other when we are not undone by each other. How true.
In preparing for our conversations today I have been reflecting on how my own work has been shaped by my encounters with Judith Butler’s work. I have been influenced by specific arguments, concepts, and words, no doubt, but I think what had the biggest impact on me was as much a certain stance or style I recognized as disobedience, as not giving one’s ear to the law, and as preparedness “to make trouble” to use a phrase from the preface of Gender Trouble. When I was doing my PhD (in critical and cultural theory), I was told I had to give my love to this or that male theorist, to follow them, not necessarily as an explicit command but through an apparently gentle but increasingly insistent questioning: are you a Derridean; no, so are you a Lacanian, no, oh, ok are you a Deleuzian, no, then what? If not, then what? Maybe my answer should have been: if not, then not! I was never willing to agree to this restriction of possibility. No wonder I ended up writing a book on willfulness! It was the work of queer feminist philosophers such as Judith Butler; it was the trouble of and in that work, that taught me how to refuse the demand to follow the official paths laid out by disciplines such as philosophy. If we can create our paths by not following, we still need others before us, those who, even if they began on the right philosophical tracks ended up being “derailed,” if I can borrow Judith Butler’s word for describing her own intellectual trajectory. I want to thank you for your derailment. In travelling on less stable grounds, queer feminist philosophy thinks with as well as on its feet. This was what reading Judith Butler’s work did for me: it put a spring in my step.
I will now discuss how I used Judith Butler’s arguments about performativity from Bodies That Matter (1993) in developing a research project on diversity (for further discussion, see my recent book, On Being Included: Racism and Diversity in Institutional Life (2012)). To save time please note I am going to be conflating what I would ordinarily be careful to distinguish: words, documents, commitments, and policies. I have always been interested in what words do, and my tendency is to follow them around. I am intrigued especially by “institutional speech acts,” how institutions use words to being a certain body into existence. Diversity is an institutional word. How often institutions are often saying it, even saying they are it! As Nirmal Puwar describes in Space Invaders “the language of diversity is today embraced as a holy mantra across different sites. We are told that diversity is good for us” (2004: 1).
My research included interviewing those appointed as diversity practitioners. A key question was simply “what is diversity doing?” Diversity workers are often communication workers: they are the ones who send words out that express institutional commitments to diversity. I began to think of such words as “non-performatives,” with the “non” signalling a relation to performativity. A performative utterance for Austin refers (at least provisionally) to a particular class of speech. An utterance is performative when it does what it says : “the issuing of the utterance is the performing of an action” (1975: 6). Conditions have to be in place to allow such words to act, or in Austin’s terms, to allow performatives to be “happy.” The action of the performative is not in the words, or if it is “in” the words, it is “in” them only in so far as the words are uttered by the right person, to the right people and in a way that takes the right form. Given this, as Judith Butler argues “performativity must be understood not as a singular or deliberate ‘act,’ but, rather, as the reiterative and citational practice by which discourse produces the effects that it names” (1993: 2, emphasis added).
This quote has become for me a tool, allowing me to develop a thesis. So: non-performatives describes the “reiterative and citational practice by which discourse” does not produce “the effects that it names.” In the world of the non-performative, to name is not to bring into effect. Non-performatives are taken up as if they are performatives (as if they have brought about the effects that they name), such that the names comes to stand in for the effects. Diversity might be repeated, becoming reiterative and citational, because it does not bring something into effect.
The language of diversity appears in official statements (from mission statements, to equality policy statements, in brochures, as taglines); and as a repertoire of images (collages of smiling faces of different colours). We might conclude that there has been an institutional will to diversity. And yet, a common expression that came up in a number of my interviews was of the institution as a wall. As one practitioner describes “so much of the time it is a banging your head on the brick wall job.” How interesting that a job description is a wall description! The feeling of doing diversity work is the feeling of coming up against something that does not move; something solid and tangible; what blocks a forward progression.
We can ask: how does will become wall? Let me take an example from the research :
When I was first here there was a policy that you had to have three people on every panel who had been trained. But then there was a decision early on when I was here, that it should be everybody, all panel members, at least internal people. They took that decision at the equality and diversity committee which several members of SMT were present at. But then the director of Human resources found out about it and decided we didn’t have the resources to support it, and it went to council with that taken out and council were told that they were happy to have just three members, only a person on council who was an external member of the diversity committee went ballistic – and I am not kidding went ballistic – and said the minutes didn’t reflect what had happened in the meeting because the minutes said the decision was different to what actually happened (and I didn’t take the minutes by the way). And so they had to take it through and reverse it. And the Council decision was that all people should be trained. And despite that I have then sat in meetings where they have just continued saying that it has to be just three people on the panel. And I said but no Council changed their view and I can give you the minutes and they just look at me as if I am saying something really stupid, this went on for ages, even though the Council minutes definitely said all panel members should be trained. And to be honest sometimes you just give up.
It seems as if there is an institutional decision. Individuals within the institution must act as if the decision has been made for it to be made. If they do not, it has not. A decision made in present about the future (under the promissory sign “we will”) can be overridden by the momentum of the past. Note that the head of personnel did not need to take the decision out of the minutes for the decision not to bring something into effect. Perhaps an institution can say “yes” when there is not enough behind that “yes” for something to be brought about. It is not then that a will becomes a wall. Rather the wall is will insofar as it embodies what an institution is not willing to bring about. The wall is an institutional “no” that does not need to become the subject of an utterance; you come up against the wall when a “yes” does not bring something about. It is the practical labour of “coming up against” the institution that allows this wall to become apparent. To those who do not come against it, the wall does not appear: the institution seems as happy as its mission statement, as willing as its equality statement.
The assumption of performativity (that something has been brought into effect) is how things can stay in place. A wall is what keeps its place. This is why I have described anti-racism as such as “non-performative“. The investment in saying as if saying is doing can extend rather than challenge racism by creating the impression that we have, to quote from one diversity practitioner, “done race.” However I am not saying that non-performatives do not have uses. Another practitioner describes: “the fact of having the document there, it’s useful in the sense that you are meeting leader obligations and it’s useful in tricky situations. You can use it to explicate the principles that the university is meant to be acting upon, so it’s not unuseful.” The potential utility of the statement is in tricky situations, those when the university is probably not acting on what it is “meant to be acting upon.” If organizations are saying what they doing, then you can show they are not doing what they are saying. Diversity workers often work in the gap between words and deeds, this gap is where things happen. Diversity work: mind the gap.
Words that are sent out come back. Judith Butler’s work has helped me think of what words do and do not do in relation to bodies. When Judith writes in Undoing Gender “every time I try to write about the body the writing ends up being about language” (2004: 198) I would respond: when I read you on language I keep thinking of bodies! Perhaps words and bodies take me on the same path: the path of the path. In Queer Phenomenology, I described the “paradox of the footprint” (2006: 16) how paths are created by being followed and followed by being created. The more a path is travelled upon, the easier it can be to travel upon that path. You can see how I came to think heterosexuality in these terms: we can be directed along a path by being supported in a direction. This is why leaving a well-trodden path can be so difficult: it can mean leaving a support system. I am tempted to describe heterosexuality in these terms: as an elaborate support system.
I would suggest that words too can become paths: they leave traces behind of where they have been; trails or tails that can be followed. Indeed some practitioners argue that this is what diversity has become: a paper trail.
Perhaps words like diversity become mobile because they are lighter; over time they become less weighed down by associations (they can be used more because they do less, moving around can become what they do, even all that they do). Other words become heavier or “stickier.” I first developed the concept of “stickiness” in my book, The Cultural Politics of Emotion (2004) building on some of Judith Butler’s arguments about language and repetition from Excitable Speech (1997): once a word has become sticky, rather like a sticky object, or say Velcro, more things stick to it. If you use those words, you might slow down or get stuck. Words can be stuck to bodies. And bodies can be weighed down by association. Even if you travel on the right path, you can be slowed down, stopped, if you have the wrong body.
Racism is a sticky word. Oh the trouble it can cause! In my current research on willfulness I am thinking of the affectivity of words in terms of their charge, a kind of electric connection. When you use the word “racism” or “race” as a person of colour it is as if you acquire a negative charge: you become negation, accusation, againstness.
An example: I respond on a facebook wall to a blog that argues for the separation of ontology from politics. The blog included the following statement: “A great white shark eating a seal is simply an event that takes place in the world. It is simply something that happens. A person shooting another person is also, at the ontological level, simply an event that takes place.” I write on a third party’s wall: “Give more detail, show how things tend to fall: a white police officer shooting a black man and your ontological event is no mere happenstance. I gave some different details (a great white shark becomes a white police officer: I wanted the person to person encounter to echo the shark to seal encounter) to show how events can be “purely ontological” only if they are hypothetical, only if we strip subjects and objects from any attributes.
What follows? Much tangled discussion! My own use of the example of race is read as an accusation against the blogger by the blogger: “You rhetorically chose the example for a particular reason to try and position me as somehow indifferent to or supportive of racism.” More responses: “we’ve become so accustomed to performing a shallow search for the most obvious or appealing or fashionable hook for explanations.” And more : “the very clear position she took in responding to xxx, namely that he was wicked for observing that shootings exist without immediately making appeals to identity politics.” And more: “xxx argued that the thing called ‘a shooting’ exists. That’s not saying little, apparently, since it’s so controversial. That was Ahmed’s reaction, actually: no, you can’t say that things exist; you have to choose my favourite political lens with which to talk about them.” And more: “people like Sarah [sic] will tend to ignore other, perhaps more telling objects and trajectories because they have already found their necessary and sufficient cause through their over-determined political lens. Nothing really learned; we expected Sarah [sic] to come to that conclusion.” One might comment here on flaming and the rather monstrous nature of any virtual conversations across blogs and walls. The use of racism as an example becomes: an accusation made against someone; a fashionable hook that stops us from searching for more complex causes; a political lens that distorts what we can see; a confirmation of what is already known. Racism becomes a foreign as well as foreigner word: what gets in the way of description; what is imposed upon what would otherwise be a neutral or even happy situation.
I want to comment here on the use of the term “identity politics.” How is it that bringing up the question of race becomes describable as identity politics? Pointing out structures (how things fall; how the world is organised around some bodies and not others) is treated as relying on identity. Perhaps we are witnessing the effacement of structure under identity not by those who are involved in what is called “identity politics” but by those who use “identity politics” to describe the scene of an involvement.
There is more going on. Another time I commented on how a conference involved only white male speakers. I should add that this conference took place at Goldsmiths and these kinds of “only white male” or “only but one” events happen regularly here, I suspect because of the kinds of bodies that tend to be organised under the rubric of “critical theory.” Someone replies that they thought I sounded “very 1980s,” and that they thought we had “got over” identity politics. Not only might we want to challenge the use of identity politics here as a form of political caricature, but we might want to think of this “over.” What does it mean to assume we have “got over” something? This claim participates in a genre of argumentation I call “overing.” In assuming we are over certain kinds of critique, they create the impression we are over what is being critiqued. Feminist and anti-racist critique are heard as old-fashioned, as based on identity categories that we are assumed to be over.
Some words are heard as dated; and those who use these words become those who lag behind. Words like “racism” and “sexism” are heard as melancholic: as if we are holding onto something assumed to have gone. With Judith Butler behind me I can think through what it means for melancholia to have become our assignment. We have to hold on as these histories are not gone.
References
Ahmed, Sara (2012). On Being Included: Racism and Diversity in Institutional Life. Durham: Duke University Press.
—————— (2006). Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others. Durham: Duke University Press.
—————— (2004). The Cultural Politics of Emotion. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Austin, John L. (1975). How to do Things with Words, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Butler, Judith (2004). Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence. London: Verso.
——————— (2004b) Undoing Gender. New York: Routledge.
——————– (1997). Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative.
—————— (1993). Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex.” New York: Routledge.
——————– (1991). “Imitation and Gender Insubordination,” in Diana Fuss (ed.) Inside/Out: Lesbian Theories, Gay Theories. London: Routledge.
——————- (1990). Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge.
Lorde, Audre (1984). Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches, Trumansburg, NY: The Crossing Press.
Puwar, Nirmal (2004). Space Invaders: Race, Gender and Bodies out of Place. Oxford: Berg.
I am updating this post: my first ever post.
This is a blog by a feminist killjoy for all feminist killjoys! I began this blog seven years ago. I wrote it alongside working on a book, Living a Feminist Life, which came out with Duke University Press in Spring 2017. This book offered my most sustained commentary on killing joy as a world making project. I had previously written about feminist killjoys in my book The Promise of Happiness (2010) as well as here.
I decided to continue with the blog even though the book was finished. In the last three years I shared work from my project on complaint (and on being complainers).
There will be more still to share because the work of the feminist killjoy is not over!
YOU might be interested in this blog if YOU:
