The Feminist Killjoy Handbook Quotes

“Iris Marion Young discusses how some girls learn to “throw like girls”; they learn not to get themselves behind an action, exhibiting what she calls “inhibited intentionality.” She describes how girls often “lack confidence in their capacity to do what needs to be done.” She notes, “We decide beforehand—usually mistakenly—that the task is beyond us and thus give it less than our full effort.”Decisions we make about our capacities are not always our own. We receive messages all the time that tell us who can do what (and who cannot). If you are told you can’t do it, that girls can’t do it, you might doubt whether you can do it; you might not put all of yourself into it. And then when you don’t manage it, you don’t pull it off, the judgment that you are not capable is confirmed. Gender norms sometimes work through a reversal of sequence: we assume we do it because we can, or don’t because we can’t, but often we can do it because we do it, or we can’t because we don’t. Over time, girls learn to inhabit their bodies with less confidence, assuming what they cannot do as a restriction of a horizon of possibility.”
― Sara Ahmed, The Feminist Killjoy Handbook: The Radical Potential of Getting in the Way

“Dismantling as a project might seem, on the surface, negative and destructive. But if, as we learned from the feminist killjoy as poet, possibility is built out of the system, we need to destroy what is built to make some lives possible, to make it possible for some people to get what they need.”
― Sara Ahmed, The Feminist Killjoy Handbook: The Radical Potential of Getting in the Way

“To sustain a commitment to the feminist killjoy, which is one way of thinking about killjoy activism, we need to hold that mirror up, to see what it reflects back to us, including what it reflects about ourselves: what we do, where we do it. We need to prepare to be undone by what we might see or what we might hear or what we might have to do.”
― Sara Ahmed, The Feminist Killjoy Handbook: The Radical Potential of Getting in the Way

“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.”
― Sara Ahmed, Killjoy Manifest