Inglaterra y Gales

How can we think the consequences of our own fragility for how we build feminist shelters? It can be painstaking to build a shelter from materials left behind; from histories that make it difficult for some to survive. And yet we need to build such shelters to enable that survival. We are building precisely because of what has already been built, those walls that have hardened over time. Indeed, returning to my discussion in chapter 6, we can retell the story told by a diversity worker about her hard work in getting a policy agreed to that doesn’t end up doing anything as another shattering story. In this story, it is she, the one telling the story, who is shattered. To be shattered in this sense means to be exhausted. The story of how a diversity worker is shattered is the story of how the wall keeps standing. In an informal conversation I had with diversity practitioners in 2013 a wall became a water cannon: “It’s like water cannons. Sometimes the success story is to stay standing in the face of everything they throw at you. It doesn’t always feel like a success. But it is a success.” When to stay standing is a measure of success, you might have less time and energy to do other things. We can end up feeling used up. And also if we shatter because of what we come up against, but what we come up against is not revealed, it might seem as if we are shattering ourselves. Rather like Molly, it might be assumed we have tripped ourselves up, that we have wrong-footed ourselves; that our willfulness is behind our downfall.

When walls are not revealed it can appear as if we are shattering ourselves.

No wonder, if we are shattered, that we need places to go. It is not however that our experience of being killjoys means that we come together, however broken, to build a shelter that is warm, a shelter that would protect us from exposure to the harshness of the weather (although the idea of a killjoy shelter is appealing). If what we are building is on grounds that are not our own, it can be hard to build anything.

My experiences of women’s studies taught me about the fragility of feminist shelters. You have to work hard just for things to stay up. And I think that really affects the kind of work you do: you have less time to do things in the building when you are constantly doing building work. When you have to fight for an existence, fighting can become an existence. Women’s studies is and will probably remain a fragile dwelling, with precarious and unstable foundations. This is because, as I noted in chapter 4, to build women’s studies is to build in an environment that needs to be transformed by women’s studies; the point is to transform the very ground on which we build. We want to shatter the foundations. It is not surprising that if we try to shatter the foundations upon which we build something, what we build is fragile.

Things falling apart: that was my experience of women’s studies. One of the first signs that we were no longer going to be supported by the institution was when we were asked to move offices, from the front of the building to the back. Being put back out of the way: out of sight; out of touch. You sensed the direction things were going. You felt the precarity more and more, the gradual withdrawal of institutional support. In chapter 2, I mentioned the easing of pressure you might experience when you are going the right way as the lifting of a hand. A hand lifting can also be experienced as the withdrawal of support.

When I felt that withdrawal, I became more and more desperate; I threw myself into the project of saving women’s studies, of ensuring that it could retain its autonomy and that we could hold on to our undergraduate degree, which was one of the last single-honors women’s studies degrees left in the United Kingdom. I think I exhausted myself as well as those around me. And in hindsight, not only having left but having left so much behind me, I realize that was the sadness thing: that I lost not only the building but my connections and relationships with my feminist cobuilders. There were lots of complicated institutional as well as personal reasons for this loss. There is no need to go into them; each of us would give a different account of them. But I have heard this story elsewhere and I have heard it often: that when a feminist project is not realized, when things shatter, as things do tend to do, then our relationships with each other often shatter too.

When we have to fight for an existence, it can shape our encounters with each other. There is no doubt we can experience each other as sharp and brittle. We come up against each other. This is why the feminist killjoy does not disappear when we are building feminist shelters. In fact, she appears very quickly. You can be a sore point within feminism. You can be a killjoy at feminist tables because of who you are, what you say, what you do; because of a history you might bring up just by entering a room. And no matter how difficult some of our experiences of being a feminist killjoy, they do not prepare you for the difficulties of being in feminist spaces and still encountering the problem of being the problem. And this is how many women of color experience feminist spaces. As I noted in chapter 3, when feminists of color talk about racism, we stop of the flow of a conversation. Indeed, perhaps we are the ones who interrupt that conversation. The word interruption comes from rupture: to break. A story of breakage is thus always a story that starts somewhere. To hear feminist of color contributions as interruptions is not only to render racism into a breaking point, but to construe feminism as a conversation that starts with white women. Feminism becomes a conversation that is not our own. Audre Lorde (1984a), bell hooks (2000), Sunera Thobani (2003), and Aileen Moreton-Robinson (2003) have all taught me to think about the figure of the angry black woman, the angry woman of color, as well as the angry indigenous woman, as another kind of feminist killjoy: a feminist killjoy who kills feminist joy. To talk about racism within feminism is to get in the way of feminist happiness. If talking about racism within feminism gets in the way of feminist happiness, we need to get in the way of feminist happiness.

As feminists, most of the time we do not inhabit feminist spaces, which is probably why encountering the same problems in feminist spaces that we encounter in the world at large is so exhausting. And depressing: the walls come up in the places we go to feel less depleted by walls.

I have often heard this refrain when I have presented my work in quite white spaces: But what about white people? Don’t they have complex feelings too? One time, quite a while back in 1999, I was presenting a paper “Embodying Strangers,” in which I referred to Audre Lorde’s description, her quite extraordinary description, of racism on a New York subway. One white woman spoke in the question time with anger about how I hadn’t considered the white woman’s feelings, as if this was some sort of neutral situation and that to account for it we have to give an account from each point of view. Racism becomes the requirement to think of racism with sympathy, racism as just another view; the racist as the one with feelings, too.

In an unbalanced world, balance is unbalanced.

I think she spoke with anger because she heard my speech as anger. Another time, much later when I gave a lecture in 2011, I drew on bell hooks’s description of how feminists of color seem to cause tension without saying anything. She gives us a scenario. I suspect she has been here many times; I have been there too, so I will share it again: “A group of white feminist activists who do not know one another may be present at a meeting to discuss feminist theory. They may feel bonded on the basis of shared womanhood, but the atmosphere will noticeably change when a woman of color enters the room. The white women will become tense, no longer relaxed, no longer celebratory” (2000, 56). It is not just that

feelings are in tension, but that the tension is located somewhere: in being felt by some bodies, it is attributed as caused by another, who comes to be felt as apart from the group, as getting in the way of its organic enjoyment and solidarity. The body of color is attributed as the cause of becoming tense, which is also the loss of a shared atmosphere (or we could say, sharing the experience of loss is how the atmosphere is shared). As a feminist of color, you do not have to say anything to cause tension.

When I drew on this quote from bell hooks, a white woman came up to me afterward expressing not so much anger but hurt at hooks’s description, and at my uncritical use of hooks’s description, for the implication that all white women make women of color the problem. There was no all used in the example, but this does not mean someone cannot hear the example as all. When that is all they can hear, they hear you as saying all. And in being heard as saying all, whatever you say, you become a problem, all over again. I have been thinking of this: if histories that hurt bring us to feminism, what do we do when our own critiques become the cause of other people’s hurt? Because hurt feelings, as both Audre Lorde (1984) and bell hooks (2000) teach us, can be a way of not hearing, a way of making something about oneself, a way of not listening to others.

One time I am speaking of racism in a seminar. A white woman comes up to me afterward and puts her arm next to mine. We are almost the same color, she says. No difference, no difference. You wouldn’t really know you were any different from me, she says. The very talk about racism becomes a fantasy that invents difference. She smiles, as if the proximity of our arms was evidence that the racism of which I was speaking was an invention, as if our arms told another story. She smiles, as if our arms are in sympathy. I say nothing. Perhaps my arm speaks by withdrawing.

The withdrawal of an arm can be enough to create tension, as if by withdrawing your arm you are refusing a gesture of love and solidarity. Reconciliation is often presented as a gesture of goodwill, a handy gesture, where the hand is outstretched; the hand of the settler or occupier, say. If the outstretched hand is not shaken, something has been broken, the promise of reconciliation; the promise that we can get on; the promise that we can move on. It is the ones who do not receive that gesture as a gesture of goodwill who would be deemed to cause the breakage.

You can break a promise without making a promise.

If you refuse the gesture of sympathy, you become mean. In my own experience of pointing out racism, it is assumed not only that you cause other people hurt, but that you intended that hurt. Those who speak of racism become mean in the sense of stingy and unkind. Speaking of racism becomes a way of breaking a social thread, a fragile thread. Robin DiAngelo has called “white fragility” the “inability to handle the stress of conversations about race and racism” (2011, n.p.). White fragility works as a defense system.¹ If a consequence can be recruited as a cause, then a cause can be recruited as a defense: as if to say, we won’t hear what we can’t handle.

I noted earlier how an assignment of willfulness can be how a chain of causality is stopped at a certain point: the child becomes the cause of the breakage if we do not ask what causes the child to fall (such as the mother’s impatience, such as the feeling of lagging behind an expectation, such as the bumpiness of corporeal difference). We learn more about causality not from hypotheticals (that old billiard ball) but from our immersion in a world with others. We learn how causality can be a social habit; how a chain of events is stopped at a certain point because it allows a subject to be identified not as causing damage but as damaged by another’s cause. White fragility is this: a way of stopping the chain of causality, such that whiteness is defended against that which would trip it up, such that whiteness becomes that which would be damaged by a fall. We are learning here about the very mechanisms that lead us to a familiar place: when you speak about racism, you become the one who causes damage.

Remember: diversity as damage limitation. Racism: damage to whiteness.

White fragility is how some words (such as racism) become identified in terms of their potential to cause a breakage. You are not supposed to utter words like this; they would break the thread of a

connection. An emphasis on the potentiality to break can stop words from being sent out, as if the point of those words is to break the ones to which it is assumed they are directed. A history of fragility is also a history of meanness. Returning to objects that break, that become unable or unwilling to carry out what they are assumed to be intended for, those very objects are often called mean. Mrs. Poyser, if you remember her, when she breaks her jug, she also says, “It’s them nasty glazed handles—they slip o’er the finger like a snail” (Eliot [1895] 1961, 220). When objects are not means to our ends, they become mean.

Again we are back in the killjoy’s territory: to be mean is to prevent the completion of a desired action; to stop what is desired (so often happiness, assumed to be desired) from becoming actualized. We have to hear how being judged as mean is to be judged as getting in the way of community: as shattering a possibility that we can be whole, that we can be as one.