The Feminist Killjoy Handbook by Sara Ahmed

Now there's a book I'm looking forward to.

A depressing mystery sums it up. I would love to see her asked these questions, in-depth. I wonder whether that will happen.

Is social forms meant to be sex in the statue analogy?

I read this as her argument is that the category ‘woman’ is a social form. But that GC hate that term, sane people is a better one people want to use the ‘reality’ of biological sex to preserve the class of woman as a biological statue ie a woman can only be a woman on the basis of biological reality.

She’s right on that point. People do want to reassert this. Somewhere in there is a tangled argument about how women’s biological sex has been weaponised against them, but I do not see gendered feelings stopping that or freeing women from having their biological sex used against them..

Rather, the primacy of gendered feelings has become another weapon against women by taking away safe/r places and enabling men to assume places that women fought to claim such as being the head of a rape relief centre or political short lists or sport podiums or woman of the year. It is a depressing mystery why ‘feminists’ like SA fail to acknowledge this?

I thought she was referring to that hipster trend of turning old doors into big trestle tables on which to put your artisanal bread and I was thinking, well, it's neither killjoy nor feminist especially but I don't like that trend either...
<blithely missing the point of her incoherent nonsense>

As well as being distasteful, the Karen insult is unfortunately timed - Victoria Smith's book Hags, about the demonisation of older women, comes out in two weeks, and the use of the term "Karen" is one of the things she writes about.

This quote caught my attention as well. It is a not so subtle attempt to use and turn the common sense reality of biological sex against women and girls who are assaulted, disadvantaged, and experience the daily impact of a living in a patriarchal society because of their biological sex.

Time and time again I think of the tragedies women suffer such as the young Pakistani woman who was murdered, her body burned and hung from a bridge because a woman was not allowed to wear jeans. It doesn’t seem that the men who killed her held any doubts as to the fact that she was a woman. Not a social form or a statue. Is this what SA means by re weaponising reality? Deeply unpleasant sort of DARVO’ish attack on women trying to protect SSS’s.

Is social forms meant to be sex in the statue analogy? Or gender? If the former, is she saying we are preserving binary sex as a social form like a statue? That doesn't make sense because sex is not a social form, it's a biological category. So does she mean gender? If so, that wouldn't make sense either because while gender is a social form, it's not one gender critical feminists wish to preserve. Or at least, not as gender stereotypes associated with one sex. Am I missing something here? I saw Ahmed is speaking at the WOW festival in London. I wonder if the audience will all be adoring fans or whether there will be any meaningful debate.

The statues comparison is just awful.

As is gaslighting people over ‘reality’ while actually reifying individual feelings, desires and so on.

it makes me think of a Bright eyes lyric:
And if you swear that there's no truth and who cares,
How come you say it like you're right?

It’s all rhetoric and clever words, isn’t it? Reality in quotation marks, reference to controversies around statues (because of course knowledge of how babies are made = honouring a man who profited from the slave trade) and anything that we think we know has been put in our heads by evil, right-wing white male middle-class politicians (because anybody who ever held any political power until about five years ago fits that description).

It’s such nonsense and an insult to anybody who actually creates new knowledge or technological innovations that demonstrably change our world. That stuff is a lot harder than cheap polemics. I don’t think the arts and humanities do themselves any favours when they produce these kinds of lame takes instead of critically engaging with the world as it actually is.

This is why I am now working on common sense: to describe how and why 'reality' is being re-weaponized. What they call 'reality' is the distortion, achieved politically, turning social forms into statues that must be preserved.

now admittedly I’m a mathsy sciencey sort of person, not much given to reading social science literature which has generally seemed to me to be just some randomer’s opinions and a questionable use of my time

but does this make any sense whatsoever?

The fact that only women have the kind of bodies that can gestate babies is a distortion of reality? Really?

but it's nonsense on all counts!

Anyone using the Karen insult has really shown themselves to be a nasty, immature piece of work who doesn’t deserve to be taken seriously.

she appears to be in that pool of people who see ‘conservative’ as a kind of generalised insult rather than one with specific meaning.

As it aligns with the initials GC, it looks like a brilliant twitter sound bite. 🙄

Certainly seems to have completely misunderstood what 'gender critical' means. She thinks radical feminists are 'gender conservatives'? Has she given any of this a moment's thought?

Yes, it’s bad timing for SA, and her posts do look a bit desperate. I always thought she wasn’t a particularly impressive thinker. There are passages in Living a Feminist Life that make it quite plain that her analysis is often based on misunderstandings and a misreading of evidence.

Wouldn’t want to be the wrong type of killjoy.

not the kind of killjoy who actually rains on the (rainbow bannered) parade by asking questions rather than just cheering along.

It's so interesting that she uses the killjoy term. I suppose us 'Karens' are also killjoys, just not the type of which she approves. I find this absolutely fascinating though, that Ahmed would use such a horribly sexist term against women whose beliefs are different from hers. Wouldn't it be preferable to meaningly engage in a debate if she disagrees? I would absolutely love to ask her about this. I wonder if anybody has - it seems as though she has reached that academic superstar status where perhaps people close to her don't ask difficult questions.

Given how long publishing takes, Ahmed probably thought she’d be launching her book into an anti-Karen utopia.

Instead she’s launching it in the wake of a rapist in pink leggings photo and pretty damning details of just what has been going on in GIDS.

So, obviously, she’ll just double down on demonising women who don’t agree with her. It’s more important to please the men who identify as feminists.

Wow. Karen has been busy? What an extraordinarily unpleasant and sexist thing to write. It drips with superiority as well. I started a thread on Ahmed a little while ago - can't remember whether I mentioned her name. But I'd seen some of her tweets on gender critical feminists and just struggle to get my head around how somebody whose work I can admire can just be so ... wrong! And now she's writing about common sense?! I mean ... again, wow. What is saying men should not be in prisons with women other than ... common sense?

'Gender critical feminists have their own books coming out on March. Yes, Karen has been busy! These books have already been and will be lovingly referenced in mainstream newspapers in the UK.'

Goodness me, the bitterness.

I’ve seen this unpleasant thread from SA, too, and I think what she means in terms of ‘dominance’ is the shift of some institutions towards a more neutral stance after the feminist fight back over the last few years. The Equalities and Human Rights Commission, for example, or government bodies that have left Stonewall.

It’s interesting that SA resentfully references various GC books that are coming out soon, by Victoria Smith and Mary Harrington. The feminist book market is no longer cornered by the likes of SA (anyone remember Alison Phipps’ book which sold well but essentially told middle class white women to ‘do better’ without much actual analysis?) and there is some serious competition now from other voices. This has an impact on SA’s bottom line which is perhaps why she resorts to ‘Karen has been busy’. Of course, because all middle-aged women are the same in their mediocrity and the work of such creatures cannot possibly have any value when compared to that of a genuine intellectual. What do they say on the internet, the grift’s over?

I'm prepared to read the book, I like to stay informed on all sides of a discussion, however tedious.

However I don't understand what the point of SA's male-centring feminism is. What exactly is she trying to achieve that's meaningful for women on the ground? It's all nice and well to muse on the phenomenology of tables and doors in the comfort of your own home, meanwhile vulnerable women are locked up with rapists.

SA's produced an unpleasant tweet thread in response to Ditum's review, calling GCs "Karen" and "gender conservatives" and claiming that GC feminists "have a position of dominance in the mainstream media in the UK (and in government, including the equality sector)."

twitter.com/SaraNAhmed/status/1627349208129732609?cxt=HHwWgoCwwfLewJUtAAAA

Which "equality sector" organisations promote GC feminism exactly? Stonewall, GIRES, mermaids, Gendered Intelligence? Fawcett Society?

She’s written some brilliant stuff. I was so sad to see she’d gone in this direction … I just cannot understand how a feminist would denigrate other feminists who simply wish to protect women’s rights. Baffling.

Ah! I've got it.

She's basically dropped something and ripped off this track.

Thanks. These seems to be reminiscent of something about ravens and writing desks.