Sublime

Feminists are then judged as being unable to help themselves, as if to be a feminist is to function on automatic pilot.

My project looks instead to current quotidian disasters in order to ask what, if anything, survives this insistent Black exclusion, this ontological negation, and how do literature, performance, and visual culture observe and mediate this un/survival.

When we think of feminist theory as homework, the university too becomes something we work on as well as at. We use our particulars to challenge the universal.

In living a feminist life, we learn about judgments. We learn from how they fall. Words surround us, thick with meaning and intensity. We hear these words. We learn from what we are called. It is a feminist calling.

The feminist killjoy begins as a sensationalist figure. It is as if the point of making her point is to cause trouble, to get in the way of the happiness of others, because of her own unhappiness.

Cultural critic Lauren Berlant puts it eloquently: “There is nothing more alienating than having your pleasures disputed by someone with a theory.”

once you try to think about a feeling, how quickly it can recede.

the past can be what is sealed. When the seal has been broken; pain floods in.

Because of killjoys, the story goes, we are not allowed to keep our traditions, to do what we had previously enjoyed doing in a relaxed and uncontroversial manner.