Organized by the AMS Committee on Women and Gender.
Sarah Ahmed’s concept of the feminist killjoy first entered the literature in 2010, when she published – more or less simultaneously with her book The Promise of Happiness (Duke University Press) – an article called “Feminist Killjoys (And Other Willful Subjects).” To be a feminist killjoy is to question the status quo at the expense of comfort; to probe institutions and their modi operandi – be they organisations, academic networks, or intellectual frameworks – and to speak up when and where injustice, oppression, or violence occurs.
Ahmed’s article appeared in a special issue titled Polyphonic Feminisms: Acting in Concert that was published in The Scholar and Feminist Online, the journal of the Barnard College Center for Research on Women. The edition editors, Mandy Van Deven and Julie Kubala, wanted the volume to “produce an understanding of the ways a multiplicity of voices can co-exist, albeit messily, and point toward new methods of rethinking and envisioning the complexities of feminisms and movements for social change.” Over the subsequent fifteen years we have seen many new labels for feminisms arise, including postfeminism, liberal feminism, neoliberal feminism, popular feminism, intersectional feminism, and reactionary feminism. While these approaches do co-exist, they produce ever more disharmony – sometimes radically dissonant, sometimes eerily almost consonant but set to a completely different temperament. But inasmuch as they have labels, they have also become discourses that may or may not work to advance the principles of feminism. Jilly Boyce Kay recently reminded us of Nancy Fraser’s warning that “feminist discourse has become independent of the feminist movement, and has been resignified in terms that are compatible with neoliberalism, rather than grounded in the socialist politics essential for gender justice. Feminism thus finds itself ‘confronted with a strange shadowy version of itself, an uncanny double that it can neither simply embrace nor wholly disavow’” (Kay 2024).
Musicology and musicologists can use feminist discourses to analyse texts, to reinterpret the musical past, to decode the cultural world for their students and their readers, and even to reconstruct musical discourses. This polyphonic noise is rich and strange, often exhilarating, even joyful. But musicologists also live in the real world, where the gains of the feminist movement – and the “cross-border solidarity,” as Angela McRobbie calls it (McRobbie 2009), with anti-racist, anti-ableist, and pro-LGBQTIA+ activists – have been eroded, first slowly, and then alarmingly fast. In my view, we have arrived at a time when the tools and mindset of the feminist killjoy are urgently needed to address the challenges we face.
As a self-identified feminist killjoy, what can I tell you about my own experiences, successes, and failures, applying this framework as best I can as a musician and musicologist? In forty-five years of musicmaking, archive-diving, researching, and teaching I have found role models of feminist killjoys in both past and present – be they sixteenth-century nuns, girl singers in pop, women on the current early music scene, or the formidable women of the camp at Greenham Common in the 1980s. Sometimes I have had to remake the disciplinary frame if the one I began with did not fit with what I knew to be true. And I have always sought to provide voice and a critical framework for listening to my music(ologic)al aunties, friends, and students, even when they are discordant and complex.
Sometimes I have needed to act against the grain, to take a stance that may not have been in my best so-called career interests, to speak truth to power, and to recognise when to disengage from a situation that is unequal and unjust. In Ahmed’s words, “A killjoy manifesto: requires an ongoing and willful refusal to identify our hopes with inclusion within organizations predicated on violence” (Ahmed 2017). But she goes on, “We can come to embody an alternative… We need to tell each other stories of different ways you can live, different ways you can be; predicated not on how close you get to the life you were assumed or expected to have, but on the queer wanderings of a life you live.” As musicologists, we can apply and interpret the discourses of feminism, but when we act as killjoys we remember we are part of an ongoing movement, and we are not alone. As Ahmed says, “We can hold each other by not putting ourselves on hold.”
