We need these resources. We need each other more than other to show up, turn up, however we can, in our queer ways, so they cannot contain it, the violence, the injustice, the sheer abject cruelty, the devastation of a place and a people, screen it out, the blinds down. We do what we can, where we can, by recognising our own limits, our capacities, and that can be a way of surviving politically, by which I mean, keeping hold of our commitments. Sometimes, then, withdrawal from a conversation or silence in a situation can be how we keep doing our work.

hooks writes of how you can be caught out by others who think they have found something out about you by finding your words. She mentions how her sisters would find her writing and end up “poking fun” at her (7). She describes leaving her writing out as like putting out “newly cleaned laundry out in the air for everyone to see” (7). Note she does not talk about dirty laundry, that expression often used for the public disclosure of secrets. This is cleaned laundry; it is hanging out there because of labour that has already been undertaken. When writing is labouring, it is what we do to get stuff out there, to get ourselves out there. There is still exposure of something, of someone, in the action of airing, making your interior world available for others to see.Does the feminist kill other people’s joy by pointing out moments of sexism? Or does she expose the bad feelings that get hidden, displaced or negated under public signs of joy? Does bad feeling enter the room when somebody expresses anger about things, or could anger be the moment when the bad feelings that circulate through objects get brought to the surface in a certain way? A complaint can be the effort to make the institution admit it, let it in. But then: you come up against the institution. So often: you end up out.

The British-Australian scholar’s latest book, The Feminist Killjoy Handbook, is an elaboration of her popular theory of killing joy. Ahmed first explored the idea in her 2010 book, The Promise of Happiness, and in Feminist Killjoys, a blog she began in 2013. The new book uses pop culture and little jargon to make the “killjoy” figure legible to feminists of all kinds. But the marches are happening all over the world because people are seeing it, which also means that people, many, many people, are making it harder for the violence not to be seen, the violence of colonial occupation. When we are told that naming extreme violence genocide is extremism, we are being told genocide is not extremism.Unseen violence is not simply violence that is not seen. Unseen violence is an action. You have to unsee something because it is seen. A complaint can be an effort to make the violence seen, to bring it out. A protest, also, can be an effort to bring the violence out, to make it public by creating a public.

The handbook is now out in the UK with Allen Unwin ( https://www.penguin.co.uk/authors/295665/sara-ahmed) and in the US with Seal Press ( https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/sara-ahmed/the-feminist-killjoy-handbook/9781541603752/?lens=seal-press). The poet can be claimed in a reply to a question of what you want to be, who you want to be. You can claim to be one before you are one. A poet can claim you, and in claiming you, a poet can be how your name and your words end up in print. The hand becomes not only what was there, or is there, but what could be lost, which is why that certain gesture is necessary, the hand as what is being handed down, from one philosopher to another, one generation to another.If it is the references to woke that have become substantial, the quality of substance is transferred to the hand, which is how the hand comes to matter more, the more it is missing. It feels fitting that Ahmed cites Toni Morrison as a feminist killjoy, as she once famously said that “the very serious function of racism,” and, I would argue, most forms of bigotry, “is distraction. It keeps you from doing your work.” Happiness, too, often serves as a distraction, encouraging people to find peace within broken systems rather than tearing them down. Less than 10 years after Obergefell, we may lose that thin promise of happiness anyway, with old victories like Roe v. Wade being overturned by the court. Polishing is tied to progression, the more you deny, the further you go. When polishing is tied to progression so much disappears, a disappearing, a clearing. We sometimes call that clearing “common sense.” By showing what has been made to disappear, we provide that common sense with its inventory.

I also call killjoy truths hard worn wisdoms: it is what we know because of what keeps coming up. Our exhaustion with something is how we know so much about it – trying experiences as a revelation of structure. A Complainer’s Handbook is intended as a companion and follow up text to The Feminist Killjoy Handbook. Rather than being a set of instructions on how to complain, it will explore how making complaints (whether expressed formally or not) can gives us a set of instructions about the world and in particular about institutions and power. To complain about abuses of power is to learn about power.