Bad Girls, Divas, and Feminist Killjoys

• In Event: 63.070 - Bad Girl Theory and Practice: Qualitative Research in Post-Truth Times

Abstract

Purpose
In this presentation, I apply Sara Ahmed’s notion of the “feminist killjoy” (2010) to think through my pedagogical experiences with a group of young women of color with whom I worked in a summer program called The DIVA Institute (Developing Intellectually Vibrant Activists) (Author, 2017).

Method/Data
Using auto-ethnography (Holman Jones, et. al), I discuss two specific topics that emerged from our work together: material and symbolic violence against young women of color, and creative expression as a form of critical resistance and activism. I then quickly move to an analysis of the possibilities and limitations of characterizing these ethnographic subjects as “feminist killjoys.” In other words, I explore the tension between material and symbolic formulations of political subjectivity especially as it relates to populations whose citizenship status is always already limited and highly vulnerable.

Significance
Feminists of color have proliferated a wide range of theoretical perspectives and critical tools to understand the complicated subject positions available to young women of color in contemporary fields of education, politics and popular culture (Evans-Winters, 2011; R.N. Brown, 2014; Jiwani, et. al. ; Hernandez and Rehman, 2002) . Yet, as Girlhood Studies scholar Marion Brown (2011) notes, three figures dominate the discourses on contemporary girlhood: the mad girl; the sad girl; and the bad girl. And, of these three figures, girls of color (especially Black, Latinx and immigrant girls) are constructed as “bad girls.” In relation and response to this construction is Sara Ahmed’s notion of the “feminist killjoy” (2010; 2017). A feminist killjoy is one who, informed by the willful intellectual and social traditions of women color, articulates or embodies resistance to racist, sexist, homophobic and xenophobic ideologies and actions. Using the figure of the feminist killjoy, I argue that spaces like the DIVA Institute, can serve as a site of historicizing constructions of “bad girls” for a new generation of scholar-activists.

Author

• Lisa Weems, Miami University