#5 'The Killjoy' - 28/11/17


For our fifth and final session of this semester, we will be reading a section from the second chapter of Ahmed's The Promise of Happiness (2010), entitled 'Feminist Killjoys.' A PDF is accessible here.

 For further reading on the figure of the killjoy we suggest the essay 'Feminist Killjoys (And Other Willful Subjects)' which is available here. 

 The Promise of Happiness highlights how the killjoy emerges in relation to many of the figures who populate Ahmed's arguments, responding to the conditions of other affect aliens and contesting the idea of happiness itself. As Ahmed explains 'the feminist killjoy ‘spoils’ the happiness of others; she is a spoilsport because she refuses to convene, to assemble or to meet up over happiness' (65). Our reading for this week allows us to reflect upon many of our discussions and themes from semester one, raising important considerations of happy objects, willful subjects and much more. 

 The figure of the feminist killjoy appears prominently across many of Ahmed's books, essays and blog posts, emerging from these arguments as one of her most influential and prominent critical concepts to date. We will be running several sessions on killjoys in Ahmed's work across the 2017/18 academic year, but begin here with an early argument to trace the beginnings of this particular willful subject. Our conversations in semester two will also include considerations of more recent killjoys and their world-making projects, particularly as explored in Living a Feminist Life (2017). 

 All welcome!

 Details: Tuesday 28th November, 5pm-6:30pm, LHRI, Room 1.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

#7: Gender is Burning - 06/03/2019

Image
Wednesday 6 March | 5 - 6.30pm | LAHRI (29-31 Clarendon Place) | All welcome For our third session of the semester, we will be reading Butler's fourth chapter from Bodies That Matter , 'Gender is Burning: Questions of Appropriation and Subversion' (1993). In an analysis of  of the legendary queer documentary  Paris is Burning  (dir. Jennie Livingston, 1990),  Butler  contests any assumed relation between drag and subversion . She uses the documentary as a touchstone for thinking about the ways in which drag performance risks reidealising certain gender, racial, and class norms - and for considering the subversive potential of the systems of kinship underpinning drag ball culture. Touching on issues such as spectatorship and fetishisation, Butler argues for the ambivalent modalities of power embedded in the queer subcultures of drag balls.  A pdf of the chapter can be found here . Butler's chapter makes a number of important responses to negative criticisms of Pa
Read more

CFP | Quilting Points 2024: Racial Capitalism and Cultural Resistance

  Quilting Points Call for Papers     CFP | Quilting Points 202 4 :    Racial Capitalism and Cultural Resistance     01 st Ma y 2024    Call for Papers – PGR-led symposium   Deadline: 15th December     Abstracts: 250 -words    The development, organization, and expansion of capitalist society pursued essentially racial directions, so too did social ideology. As a material force, then, it could be expected that racialism would inevitably permeate the social structures that emerged from capitalism (2)   Cedric Robinson – Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition (2021)   Originally published in 1983, Cedric Robinson’s work Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition has proved critical in thinking through the relationship between race and capitalism in a global context . It has experienced a renewed wave of interest over the last decade because of the purchase that some of his concepts such as ‘racial capitalism’ and the ‘Black Radical Tradition
Read more

Robinson session 2: The Black Radical Tradition

Thursday 30 th November | 5:30 – 7:00pm | The Alumni Room (School of English) For this session, we will begin to explore Cedric Robinson’s notion of the Black Radical Tradition, which Robinson argues is that which is formed out of the rejection of racial capitalism as an “unacceptable” (p.28) value for life. Robinson spoke about writing and teaching Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition backwards, and it is in this spirit that we suggest Chapter 7 as a great introduction to this concept, condensed to a couple of pages. If you want to understand Robinson’s full reasoning and historical analysis, you can also extend this by reading  Chapter 6. Please read however much you have time for. In these chapters, Robinson focuses not on the major intellectual figures Black Marxism is usually associated with, but rather on a long tradition of anticolonial movements which produce from within their struggle different modes of being and producing knowledge. Everyone (at wha
Read more