I am thinking of how we need poetry To express ourselves Practicing feminism By bearing witness to genocide To echo the words of Sarah Ihmoud To get our no’s out. To express, to press out, to speak one’s mind. The sense evolution “perhaps via the intermediary sense of how clay under pressure takes a certain form.” When I imagine that clay, I imagine not only how we give shape to something, but how we  under pressure to take a certain form. Maybe we are supposed to be polite. A smile, a container. To express ourselves, to get it out of ourselves, ourselves out, means we have to resist that ..read more

This was the first year since the beginning of the pandemic that I was able to be in the same room with other feminists, sharing our work, our words, our struggles. It meant so much. Presenting our work virtually has allowed us to reach each other in ways that we had not been able to before. But there is still something special about being in the same room together. It was so energising, to feel that snap, snap, sizzle of an atmosphere. To hear when you laughed. When you didn’t. I am so grateful it was possible to do that. Thank you to everyone for sharing time and space. I wrote The Feminist ..read more

I was asked a question earlier this month. I cannot remember the exact wording, but it went something like “is it sometimes ok to be silent to be at peace with oneself.” If I had been asked this question at another time, or if the question had been asked using slightly different words, I might have given this answer: We do what we can, where we can, by recognising our own limits, our capacities, and that can be a way of surviving politically, by which I mean, keeping hold of our commitments. Sometimes, then, withdrawal from a conversation or silence in a situation can be how we keep doing our ..read more

Since the launch of The Feminist Killjoy Handbook in March of this year, I have been taking #FeministKilljoysOnTour to share some #KilljoySolidarity. I am looking forward to the US edition of #FeministKilljoysOnTour to coincide with the publication of the handbook by Seal Press on October 3rd. I will share details on my website in September. I am pleased to share the audio recording of an event from the earlier tour, a Conversation with Judith Butler that took place on April 28th at Cambridge University.  It was a warm, uplifting and rather overwhelming experience. I was originally i ..read more

Common sense tends to be understood in a commonsensical way at least by those who appeal to it. We typically hear of common sense as what we have lost or what we need to resolve a conflict or dispute in a mature and reasonable way (“a common-sense approach”). Or, common sense is used to indicate the status of proposition as grounded in reality (“it is common sense that sex refers to biology”). Common sense can also be used to demarcate a class of subjects: those who have common sense, who are sensible and practical as well as reasonable, who hold onto reality. Common sense can thus also be use ..read more

The Feminist Killjoy Handbook is out in the world! Bringing it out into the world has taken time – and my blog has been quiet during that time. I am glad to share its arrival here. Please do order the book from independent bookstores, many of whom have got behind the handbook: you can find a list here. If you do read the book, share a picture on twitter (using the hashtag #wearefeministkilljoys). It means so much to me to know the handbook is in your hands. We launched the book at an event in Rich Mix, London, on Thursday, March 2nd 2023. It was electrifying and emotional to be with so many p ..read more

I am often asked how my arguments about complaint activism relate to the projects of transformative and restorative justice as well as abolitionist feminism. In an answer to one such question, I spoke of my caution in using some of these terms to describe some of this work because I had heard of how they can be misused in institutional settings. But I also said that complaint activism “has much more kinship with these other projects including abolitionist projects than it might appear at first” because you are thinking about “how to have accountability, how to deprive people of institutional p ..read more

You might have a fight on your hands.* You might have to fight for room, room to be, room to do, room to do your work without being questioned or being put under surveillance.  You might have to fight to find a safe path through life, a way of progressing, of getting through, without having to give up yourself or your desires. A fight can be how we acquire wisdom: we know so much from trying to transform the worlds that do not accommodate us. But that fight can also be just damn hard; when you have to fight for an existence you can end up feeling fighting is your existence. And so, we nee ..read more

I have been listening to stories of complaint. I have been collecting complaints.  To collect can mean to go to a place and bring somebody back or to bring things together from different times or places. To bring somebody back, to bring us together, to collect complaints is to create a complaint collective. One student said toward the end of sharing her story, “another straw to the bale.” I replied, “it’s a stuffed bale.” Complaint! is stuffed full of our stories. Those who complain about abuses of power, about inequalities and injustices, have so much to say because we have so much to do ..read more

Content Warning: The following post includes a discussion of transphobia and transmisogyny. How has gender become a map of a moment? Why do so many movements present themselves as against gender? In a recent article, Judith Butler shows how the difficulty of giving an account of the anti-gender movement tells us something about how that movement works: “Anti-gender movement mobilizes a range of rhetorical strategies from across the political spectrum to maximize the fear of infiltration and destruction that comes from a diverse set of economic and social forces. It does not strive for consiste ..read more