Guest Killjoys
One of the most rewarding, intellectually stimulating, challenging, and (frankly) fun things that I get to do in my life is teach.
There is nothing more meaningful to me than watching my undergraduate students make connections between themselves and the world around them.
Usually that means teaching them about theatre and performance through the lenses of feminist, queer, anti-racist, and post-colonial theories, but this semester I got an extra special treat!
I had the honor of teaching a course entitled: Gender, Sexuality, and Pop Culture for the Women & Gender Studies Department at the University of Colorado Boulder.
My students watched classic 80s Rom-Coms, read Jeremy O. Harris’ mind-blowing Slave Play, watched episodes from shows such as Modern Family, and Pose, watched old Disney and Marvel Comics movies, read Alison Bechdel’s graphic memoir Fun Home (and watched numerous videos of performances from the Broadway musical adaptation!). They applied the Bechdel test to films, read between the (blurred *wink*) lines of music videos, watched Anita Hill and Christine Blasey Ford testify to congress, and even got to see a recording of Young Jean Lee’s Untitled Feminist Show in class. They read theorists, thinkers, and trailblazers such as Betty Freidan, bell hooks (obviously), Emi Koyama, Laura Mulvey, and Jill Dolan and Sara Ahmed (also, obviously, and after whose work this blog was named).
For their last assignment of the semester they were asked to create a blog or vlog (video blog) post applying what they’ve learned this semester to a particular work of pop culture and I have to say, I was BLOWN AWAY by some of the truly exceptional work they produced.
As a dedicated and avowed Feminist Killjoy myself I found myself going back to Sara Ahmed’s “Feminist Killjoy Manifesto” from her indispensable text, Living a Feminist Life, and I kept going back to Principle 3: I am willing to support others who are willing to cause unhappiness.
In this principle, Ahmed asks her fellow killjoys to support one another and to “[b]ack her up; speak with her. Stand by her; stand with her” (260). Moreover, she calls on us to find other killjoys and reminds us that “[t]here can be joy in finding killjoys; there can be joy in killing joy. Our eyes meet when we tell each other about rolling eyes” because “[m]oments can be a movement” (268).
So, with that in mind I decided that for my next blog post as The Feminist Killjoy as Critic, I would invite some of my students to contribute their words, voices, and ideas about pop culture as they become killjoys themselves.
Without further ado… I share their work (with their affirmative consent):
