Welcome to The Feminist Killjoy as Critic!

This blog will be a place for me to collect my thoughts about the culture I encounter as a feminist, and scholar of theatre and performance studies.  It will be a place for me to problematize representations of women on the stage and screen, as well as on the page; to talk about women’s role as leaders in the arts; and the way in which our stories shape, and are shaped by the world around us.

It will be my aim to post once or twice a month about a play (when we can go see those again), book, film, or television show which in some way contributes to our understandings of women in our culture.  While I tend to write best when I’m angry, I will make the best of efforts to think of this blog as a place to contemplate, not to destroy.

Often, in academic settings, our instinct is to immediately attack the book/ article/ production/ writer in an effort to establish our own dominance and superiority (hello, imposter-syndrome), and while I’m certain there will be some moments where something I see is truly worthy of a graduate-seminar-style take-down, that is not the stated goal of this blog.

I aim rather to ask questions, prompt discussion, and maybe even engage in a little dialogue about the ways that women (and I use that term capaciously) are viewed and portrayed by the makers of culture around us.

Okay….

But what’s with the title???

In August of 2005, Jill Dolan penned the first blog post as The Feminist Spectator, built on foundations she laid in her seminal 1998 text, The Feminist Spectator as Critic. Dolan, a uniquely influential theatre and performance studies theorist and scholar, as well as an invaluable voice in both feminist and queer theory, wanted to share her many thoughts about film, books, television, and (of course) theatre.

In her initial blog post she tell her readers the following:

“The Feminist Spectator will offer occasional ruminations on theatre, performance, film, television, and other forms of cultural expression. My primary interests in these forms focus on what they tell us about gender, sexuality, race, class, and other forms of identity (in all their complex intersections and overlaps), as well as what they tell us about how to be human beings together in an increasingly complex and alienating world.”

Her blog became a place for fellow feminists to see their own concerns and joys about our shared culture reflected back to us. 

Personally, I can attest to seeing Dolan’s blog as a place to feel at home.  A place where my own discomfort about a film felt validated, not worthy of ridicule.  It was also a place to hold up works of art that represented women as powerful, thoughtful, fully-realized humans, and to feel proud of those representations.

Being a feminist can often mean being a bit lonely at the party.  It can mean being the one person in the room who everyone avoids when a certain film, television show, or performance comes up.  When EVERYONE is praising Hamilton for it’s incredible music and lyrics, the awe-inspiring performances, and the groundbreaking use color-conscious-casting who really wants to be the person bringing up the problematic representation (of lack thereof) of women?!

In these moments one becomes a Feminist Killjoy.

In Sara Ahmed’s 2010 book, The Promise of Happiness, she coins the term Feminist Killjoy to describe such a person.  One who (regardless of their gender identity) “kills joy” by calling attention to the problematic nature of the world around them, specifically from a feminist point-of-view.

Ahmed’s work has been foundational to my own understandings of everyday feminism and her Feminist Killjoy Manifesto and Survival Kit (at the conclusion of her follow-up book, Living a Feminist Life) should be mandatory reading for everyone.  For, (to quote another brilliant woman-of-color feminist, Chimamanda Ngozi Adiche,) We Should All Be Feminists.

Ahmed has led the Killjoy Life by example, leaving a prestigious post at Goldsmiths University of London after running the Centre for Feminist Research, in protest of the university’s failure to address ongoing issues of sexual assault on campus.

So… this blog, whatever it should become, is my own attempt to take what I have learned from the many feminists and feminist theorists who have come before me to celebrate great moments in our culture that hold up women, people of color, queer-folx, in all our/ their glory… and from time-to-time, to be a Feminist Killjoy.  One who can, in the words of Ahmed, “open a life, to make room for life, to make room for possibility, for chance.” 

So feminists, killjoys, friends, and more…

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