A Useful Manifesto

I remember when I first wrote “A Killjoy Manifesto,” one of the two conclusions of my 2017 book, Living a Feminist Life. I had not intended to end the book with a manifesto: the book originally concluded with “lesbian feminism.” I rather suspect it was writing the book whilst fighting against the normalising of sexual harassment at my former institution that led to this change of shape.

The book needed to be snappier especially in its ending, to be more direct not just about the need for action but the nature of action.

Snap to it, Sara!

I wrote the manifesto very quickly; and it came out in the exact shape it has.

I feel like if feminist killjoys had a genre, manifesto would be it. But they don’t: have a genre, that is.

Writing takes a different shape when it comes from urgency.

It is never too urgent to write, but when the situation is urgent, time can slip through your fingers. Time can be what we don’t have.

You let the words out. Your body too. Roam free. If the urgency of the times we are in, the need to say no to business as usual, because Israel is conducting a genocide in Gaza now, does not stop us from writing, urgency travels into the writing.

And into you.

I always remember Stuart Hall describing Cultural Studies as “deadly serious.” He had been reflecting on the AIDS crisis. Hall notes that it might seem that Cultural Studies is rather pointless when people are dying now. Rather than dismissing the feeling that what we are doing is just “ephemeral,” Hall suggests we let ourselves be hit by it. We need to know how “little it registers, how little we've been able to change anything or get anybody to do anything. If you don't feel that as one tension in the work that you are doing, theory has let you off the hook.”

We are not off the hook.

We need to keep sharpening our tools because nothing we can say or do will be enough in the face of so much. An action will not be enough but nor is it nothing.

It is during the times Cultural Studies seems useless, that we need it the most.

Later, I wrote another manifesto.

I called it “A Useful Manifesto,” which is the title of this post. If ...