How we find bell hooks is not unrelated to what she has to teach us. Finding feminism is not about following the conventional paths that lead to reward and recognition. Your definition of feminism is “the movement to end sexism, sexual exploitation and sexual oppression” (2000, 33). From this definition, we learn so much. Feminism is necessary because of what has not ended: sexism, sexual exploitation, and sexual oppression. And for hooks, “sexism, sexual exploitation and sexual oppression” cannot be separated from white supremacy and capitalism. That is why, you keep naming it, what you oppose. In Outlaw Culture, hooks made use of the term “white supremacist capitalist patriarchy” an impressive eighteen times! No wonder you have given me so much killjoy inspiration! You named it, nailed it, every time! I explored this reversal of power in the first chapter of The Feminist Killjoy Handbook. Consider how racism and transphobia are often articulated as if they are unpopular or even minority positions (or to be more specific many people in the public domain position themselves as being censored when their views are described as racist or transphobic). We hammer away at the world by noticing it. A hammer is a rather blunt instrument. Noticing can also be a pen or a key board, writing as fine tuning, how we rearrange the world, moving words around so things appear differently. There is wisdom here. I use the word strangerwise for this wisdom. It is an odd word for an old wisdom, the wisdom of strangers, those who in being estranged from worlds, notice them. Nazir-Ali makes use of Moore’s hand, moving from the philosopher’s certainty that “his hand existed and was his,” to his own certainty about the nature of bodies and their purposes, to social structures and institutions. The quality of certainty is thus moved from an object that appears to be near and proximate to what is more complex and distant (2). Common sense conservatism can then speak of the stability of social institutions insofar as they are extensions of “his hand,” or “my hand,” in other words, society matters as an extension of myself or even as his or my possession. This is how legacy is turned into, or treated as, reality. And, this is how reality itself is made a possession. Moore employs his hand as a defence against the sceptics. Nazir-Ali then reemploys Moore’s hand as a defence against “the woke.” Throughout the book there are multiple references to woke. It is the references to woke that are substantial.

Common sense can work both by turning a me into a we (society matters as an extension of my hand) and a we into a me (a complaint as a will to power). And so, we learn, common sense is not as common as it is presented as being (how a few make themselves many), whilst complaints are more common than they are presented as being (how many are made into a few). Polishing can mean more than smiling for their brochures; it can require using words that gloss over our experience. I think of the feminist killjoy as a shared resource for living strangerwise. Strangerwise, is an odd world for an old wisdom, the wisdom of strangers, those who in being estranged from worlds, notice them, those who in being estranged worlds, remake them.

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And so, the more you challenge “the way things go,” the more you know about common sense. As historian Sophia Rosenfeld notes, “Common sense really only comes out of the shadows and draws attention to itself at moments of perceived crisis or collapsing consensus.” Common sense points to a crisis, rather than resolving it. This is why I describe common sense as legacy project. A legacy can mean something that happened in the past or what the past leaves behind (as war leaves a legacy of suffering, for instance). Legacy can also be something transmitted by or received from our predecessors. Legacy becomes a project when what has been, or should be, received from our predecessors is understood as threatened in some way. It might be that legacy is always a project insofar as reception or transmission is never simple or straightforward or guaranteed.

Decisions to cut aid for the terminally ill, for the elderly, for dependent children, for food stamps, even school lunches, are being made by men with full stomachs who live in comfortable houses with two cars and umpteen tax shelters. None of them go hungry to bed at night. Recently, it was suggested that senior citizens be hired to work in atomic plants because they are close to the end of their lives anyway. Since the launch of The Feminist Killjoy Handbook in March of this year, I have been taking #FeministKilljoysOnTour to share some #KilljoySolidarity.If I had been asked this question at another time, or if the question had been asked using slightly different words, I might have given this answer: When human rights lawyer, Craig Mokhiber, the director of the New York Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, resigned he described what Israel is doing in Gaza as “ a textbook case of genocide.” He also said, “The European, ethno-nationalist, settler colonial project in Palestine has entered its final phase, toward the expedited destruction of the last remnants of indigenous Palestinian life in Palestine.” They removed evidence of violence. A removal is successful when evidence of the removal is also removed. I sometimes call this polishing, empire as world-polishing, empire as a polished story, told by removing the violence. 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. Another kind of book: we read them because we need them. From Our Sister Killjoy we receive so much; snap, energy, defiance, will. I think of how Michele Cliff describes how she was inflamed by reading Our Sister Killjoy. She writes, “In her pellucid rage, Aidoo’s prose breaks apart into staccato poetry—direct, short, brilliantly bitter—as if measured prose would disintegrate under her fury.” Cliff shows how Aidoo’s story of our sister killjoy, Sissie, with its “rage against colonialism,” freed her to “direct rage outward into creativity,” so that if she could write in fire, she would.

When we are judged as imposing change, what is not recognised is the imposed nature of what we are trying to change. What is understood as “the way things are” has become naturalised or habitual. A good example of this is pronouns. Some people seem to experience being asked to respect other people’s pronouns as an imposition on their freedom. Freedoms can be predicated on being unthinking: some people do not want to think about, or be conscious of, social conventions such as how we refer to other people.Whenever people keep being given a platform to say they have no platform, or whenever people speak endlessly about being silenced, you not only have a performative contradiction, you are witnessing a mechanism of power.