Killing Joy as a Queer Project

In my forthcoming The Feminist Killjoy Handbook, I suggest that the feminist killjoy is a queer figure with a queer history. When you reclaim the term feminist killjoy you end up in conversation with other people who, like you, find a potential or promise in that term, how its negativity can be redirected. In this lecture, I explore the queerness of the project of killing joy as a project of redirecting negativity. I develop some of my arguments about ‘the unhappy queer’ from The Promise of Happiness (2010) as well as ‘queer use’ from What’s the Use? On the Uses of Use (2019). In giving the feminist killjoy a queer history, I also show how and why killing joy is a world making project. 

Venue: CCA's Timken Lecture Hall (California College of the Arts Main Building 1111 Eighth Street, San Francisco, CA 94107).