ESTADOS UNIDOS

Fragility: the quality of being easily breakable. Fragility: when being breakable stops something from happening. Relationships can break too; we know this. Have you ever been with someone, someone whom you are trying to love, trying not to give up on, and they say something that you find unbearable?

You can hear glass shatter; that point when you realize what you had is something that cannot be reassembled. If you put the pieces back together, you would be left rather like Silas, with a memorial, a holder of memories. You would be left rather like Silas, with an empty container, a reminder of what was once but is no longer.

When my own parents broke up, a friend of the family came around to talk to my mother, who was the one who had been left. He said, “This is what happens when you marry a Muslim.” The words were uttered pointedly, cutting the atmosphere like a knife. Relationships and families breaking up: it happens.

Shit happens. But in a mixed relationship, one whose legitimacy is already insecure, a breakup acquires a certain meaning: a breakup becomes what we were heading for right from the beginning. This is what happens when: as if when leads only to this. For a white woman, an English Christian woman, to marry out, to marry a brown man, a Pakistani Muslim, leads her only to this point, this ending, a relationship that

“could only end in tears,” becoming, retrospectively, always tearful.

When things were going smoothly, this friend said nothing. When things broke, race came up. We learn making from breaking. What we might call background racism might be part of the situation in which we find ourselves; racism hovers in the background when things are working, which is how race can come up so quickly when things stop working.

A wall: reassembled at the point of shattering.

Maybe it begins with a prediction made by others: that’s going to be difficult; that’s not likely to work out.

Maybe you feel the pressure to make things work to show that they can work. For queers to make things work can be a pressure as well as a project. I noted in chapter 2 how it can be presumed that a queer life is an unhappy life, a life without those things that would or should make you happy. You can feel this presumption as a pressure to prove that a queer life can be a happy life. You know that if there is a breakup, it can fulfill an expectation that such relationships are less lasting, less secure; fragile. There is a kind of queer fatalism at stake here: that to be on a queer path is to hurtle toward a miserable fate, queer as a death sentence; queer as self-shattering. And then if things do shatter (as things do tend to do), you have fulfilled an expectation that this is where being queer led you.

From the example of mixed and queer relationships, we learn how some are assumed to be inherently broken, as if their fate is to break, as if a break is what we were heading for right from the beginning. A break becomes the realization of a quality assumed to belong to something; breaking as the unfolding of being. And this is difficult: the assumption of fragility can make something fragile. The more careful you are, the more your hands tremble. The word care derives from the Old English cearu suggesting sorrow, anxiety, grief. In chapter 1 I noted how becoming careful relates to a sense of oneself

as breakable. Perhaps to become careful, to be full of care, is to become anxious about the potential to break something else. You can become clumsier when you are trying to be careful not to break what easily breaks. If you are already known as the clumsy one, you might become even more afraid of breakage, because you know that if there is a breakage, you will be judged as the one who is behind it. The more you try, the more you seem to slip up.

Fragility can be a regulative assumption that generates the quality assumed to belong to a thing. A consequence can be recruited as a cause. It might be assumed you caused your own damage because you left the safety of a brightly lit path. Gender norms too can work like this: when femininity is registered as fragility, when that fragility is used to explain what happens to her, or what she can or cannot do, a consequence of power is recruited as the cause. She is treated with caution and care because she is fragile; because she is treated with caution and care, she is fragile. Politics is what happens in between these becauses.

And a wall can come up again. A wall can become something that feels internal, like a voice inside your own head that makes you stumble. I brought up this possibility of an internal wall in chapter 6: how when those around you don’t perceive something even though it happens right in front you (such as sexual harassment), it can lead you to doubt what you perceive; it can lead you to try to modify your own perception. That doubt is then turned inward: a wall can be an obstacle that is created because you doubt yourself. Even if this wall feels internal, it does not begin there. You might have been told: You can’t do that. You won’t be able to do that. This lack of confidence might be attached to you being a girl, or you just being the being you are; not good enough, not smart enough, or just not, not enough; or too much; it is too much for you; you are too much; that too. You might be defiant in the face of this lack of confidence. I can do that. I will be able to do that. But if those words are repeated—you can’t do that; you won’t be able to do that—they can become a wavering of your own will, a doubt; an uncertainty. Confidence too can shatter. A conviction “I can” transformed into a question: can I? When she is in question, she begins to question herself. And maybe as you begin to question yourself, you don’t put yourself behind yourself to protect yourself from the possibility of not being able to do what you had thought you could do. And then you don’t. And then you think, “I can’t.” Your effort acquires the quality of the fragility that is put into the world by an expectation. You waver, you fall. And you confirm the expectation. A confirmation can be the hardening of an idea: it becomes a thing. You encounter that thing; you become that thing. And the wall that tells you you can’t go there becomes harder, until you don’t go there, in case you can’t, and then you can’t.

If politics is what happens in between these becauses, politics is what happens to you. I will return to how fragility can become a structural question, a question not only of a life but of a lot, in chapter 9.

What happens to you: we need to handle what we come up against. But what if the handle is what breaks? Fragility: losing the handle. When the jug loses its handle, it becomes useless. We sense the terror of its fate; the fragments swept up and away. And when we say we are losing the handle, we often mean we are no longer able to grasp hold of what we need to persist. The handle provides a connection. The figure of the feminist killjoy recalls that of the broken jug: she too flies off the handle, an expression used to indicate the suddenness of anger. The origin of this expression is said to be from the speed of an axe head parting company from its handle during a downstroke. When a feminist flies off the handle, she is held responsible for her sad parting from company. I want to repeat almost word for word a sentence I used earlier in describing fragile things so we can hear a resonance. It is a slight alteration of how I described the moment when Mrs. Poyser blames the jug for breaking the jug. She not only causes her own breakage, she breaks the thread of a connection. Feminism as self-breakage: history enacted as judgment. Or feminism as a tear in the social fabric; history enacted as loss; a tear; a tear. To give a cause to breakage is to create a figure, one that can contain the damage by explaining the damage. The feminist killjoy is such a figure. To be a container of damage is to be a damaged container; a leaky container. The feminist killjoy is a leaky container. She is right there; there she is, all teary, what a mess.

When we speak, no wonder: it can feel like everything shatters.

We can become the point from which things cannot be reassembled.

It is not that we always want or will this to happen. Sometimes we might not want relationships to shatter because they matter. And this can be another crisis: when the requirements to keep a connection that matters going require giving up on something else that matters. Say my good friends are laughing at a joke.

The laughter picks everyone up; the room is brimming with it. I might start laughing too, before I even hear the joke. But when I hear the joke, and when I register what has been said, I might find that I do not find it funny at all; or even that I find it offensive. Sometimes we keep laughing out of fear of causing a breakage. We might, in other words, decide not to become a killjoy in certain moments, because the costs would be too high: we would break what we need to hold on to, a relationship that we care about, a person we love, a world we cannot let go of. Of course, sometimes being a killjoy is not up to us: it can be decided for you; you can receive the assignment without saying anything. Sometimes we stop laughing.

And how quickly: things fall apart. Perhaps then feminism is how we pick up the pieces.

When I write about feminist killjoys, I know it might sound as if I am calling for her; as if her arrival for me is always a moment of political hope. That’s not always how it feels, even if, for me at least, her failure to disappear is hopeful. Sometimes, when she appears on the horizon of our consciousness, it can be a moment of despair. You don’t always want her to appear even when you see yourself in her appearance. You might say to her: not here, not now. You might not want to hear something as problematic because you do not want to hear someone as being problematic. Even though you know the problem of how exposing a problem is posing a problem, you can still experience exposing a problem as posing a problem for yourself. You might think, you might feel: I can’t afford to be her right now. You might think, you might feel: she would cost me too much right now. When you have been a feminist killjoy, when she has been part of your embodied history, she can still appear willful to you, insisting on coming up, whenever something comes up. She can be tiring. You might experience her apparent exteriority as the alarming potentiality of interiority; of becoming her, of her becoming you. I return to how her arrival can be a crisis in my discussion of feminist snap in chapter 8. A feminist politics of fragility might be based not only on how to survive what we come up against but how to enable relationships to endure that can easily be threatened by what we come up against.

We can be shattered by the force of what we come up against, when our bodies are little objects thrown against the hard walls of history, to return to my description from chapter 6. We can damage relationships that matter. And that is one of the hardest things about coming up against walls: it can threaten some of our most fragile and precious, our best, our warmest connections. As I write this, I feel sad, so very sad. And this too is one of the risks of anger. There is so much to be against; we know this.

But how easily anger can spill, can spill at those who happen to be nearby, who are the closest to us. How easily in being against something we can risk those who are with us, who are for us, who we are with and for; we can risk them because they are before us. Our anger, when generalized against the injustice of the world, can become directed toward those who happen to be nearest, often those who are dearest. The costs of struggling against injustices can be personal: indeed they are often personal; we can lose those who matter. We can get it wrong; we can be too sharp; we can regret having said something because the consequences of saying something were regrettable. Of course sometimes not: sometimes even when the consequences of saying something are regrettable, we cannot regret saying something, because not saying something would have been even more regrettable. There is time in these sometimes.

I have always resisted the idea that feminist killjoys mature, grow by growing up, and that maturity is about becoming less volatile. Maturity is without question the wrong term for my attempt to think through timing. The idea that maturing out of being a feminist killjoy assumes or hopes that feminism itself, or at least being that kind of feminist, the wrong kind, the one who always insists on making feminist points, the one who is angry, confrontational, is just a phase you are going through.

If being a feminist killjoy is a phase, I willingly aspire to be a phase.

The idea that you mature out of being a feminist killjoy, that in growing up you unbecome her, also implies a linear development and progression: as if being unaffected or less bothered is the point you should reach; what you should aim to reach. It associates maturity with giving up, not necessarily conviction as such, but the willingness to speak from that conviction.

A feminist life is not so linear. Some of us become angrier and more volatile in time. We don’t always become feminist killjoys early on; she can catch up with you at any time. Once you are a feminist killjoy, however, I think the only option is to become more of a feminist killjoy. Becoming more of a killjoy is not about being more or less willing to speak your opposition. If anything, in having more experiences of killjoying, more of a sense of how wearing it can be, you learn from this experience of not getting through. Because you are becoming more of a feminist killjoy, you might become warier of the consequences of being oppositional; a consequence, after all, can be what we share with others. You become wary of being worn. You know the energy it involves: you know that some battles are not worth your energy, because you just keep coming up against the same thing. At the same time, or maybe at another time, you also know that you can’t always choose your battles; battles can choose you. Sometimes the things you come to know seem to feel like another wall, another way of signaling that you have few places to go. Saying something, not saying something, your mouth an open question.

From my own experience of being a feminist killjoy over time, you do come to have more of a sense of time: when someone says something, you might be less quick to react. You give yourself time.

Sometimes, now, you don’t get wound up, even when someone is winding you up. There are still some things that, if said, would get through any of my defenses. There are some things I always want to react to too quickly, as I don’t need time to react. I am not saying that taking time means that your response is better. It is just to say that sometimes, you have more room for a response. Perhaps we could call this room wiggle room.

In chapter 3, I reflected on how willfulness can be actively claimed as part of a feminist inheritance.

But thinking through our own feminist fragility, how we can become fragile through feminism because of what we do not overlook, helps us to complicate that claiming: not to negate it, just to complicate it.

There can be risks to becoming oppositional; to having a sense of oneself as always struggling against something. If you are used to having to struggle to exist, if you become used to having others oppose your existence, if you are used even to being thought of as oppositional, those experiences are directive. You can enact an expectation even in the struggle not to fulfill it. You can even become somewhat oddly invested in the continuation of what you are up against. This is not to say you really want what opposes you (although there is wanting at stake here: you want to oppose what you don’t want). It is to say that if you spend time and energy in opposing something, an opposition can become part of you. It is not to say that the investment is what keeps something going at the level of the event or situation. I have experienced myself a sense of how possibilities can be closed down if I assume in advance an oppositional stance.

You can get so used to struggling against something that you expect anything that comes up will be something to be against. It can be tiring being against whatever comes up, even if hearing a wrong ends up being right. And it is possible, of course, in expecting to hear wrongs not to hear them, because if you do hear them, they fulfill an expectation, becoming a confirmation of what you already know. We can stop hearing when we think we know. I suspect we all do this: hear with expectation, listen for confirmation, whether or not we think of ourselves as feminist killjoys or willful subjects; this is ordinary stuff.

And yet, we might in assuming our own oppositionality be protecting ourselves. We might not notice our own agreements, if they are histories that are still. This is why the figure of the killjoy is not a figure we can assume we always somehow are: even if we recognize ourselves in that figure, even when she is so compelling, even when we are energized by her. We might, in assuming we are the killjoys, not notice how others become killjoys to us, getting in the way of our own happiness, becoming obstacles to a future