all we need is love, vol. 2

At a gathering of feminist scholars, we muse over friendship — care, solidarity, community — as means of survival in the academy. We consider the significance of loving each other back to life as a strategy for collective rebellion within (or against) the neoliberal institutions that harm us, and simultaneously, responsibilise us with their calls for self-care.¹ We trade stories of allyship (an ongoing practice, not a status to be claimed), of holding space for each other, of bonds that extend across generations and disciplinary boundaries and educational institutions and life-worlds.

It is common knowledge, I suspect, that pursuing a doctorate can be a profoundly isolating experience. The independence that comes from having a room (a project) of one’s very own is a blessing, yet also a curse: I work alone, sometimes in proximity to but ultimately removed from others. I often find myself only loosely tethered to scholar-practitioner-activist networks, scrambling to weave myself into them. For instance — I arrive at this conference alone,

and am immediately unmoored by seas of chatter. To quell my anxieties, I insist to myself that strangers are just friends (at least, peers) that I haven’t met yet.

Of course, it’s not so easy: academia has funny rules and conventions and hierarchies. With its fucked-up incentive and reward systems, it often asks us to play fucked-up games that pit us each other. Engage in vibrant scholarly discussion — at risk of another hungry researcher laying claim to your insights, perhaps immortalising your contributions as their intellectual property! Foster new connections with fellow thinkers — whom you will have to fight to the death, as career opportunities dwindle and grant funding pools shrink! Seek mentorship and opportunities to learn and collaborate — but focus on those with the right credentials, status, institutional affiliations! And once all these competing demands have broken you,

don’t forget to complete this mental health and wellbeing module, or come along to our R U OK? Day booth for a free cupcake and a sticker, or seek out the university’s oversubscribed counselling services!

In this panel-slash-workshop on practising decolonial, feminist care, we agree: our feminist killjoy survival toolkits must draw from outside the university’s resources. As per Ahmed, we can reject neoliberal demands for self-care, whilst still investing in and equipping ourselves for self-preservation. And so, I take stock — of my books (too many, how can I possibly choose?); my tools for writing and thinking (all my notebooks, and a pen; a laptop); my fellow killjoys. I write myself permission notes, for when my energy has depleted too low (to be mediocre; to let myself do the bare minimum; to just rest).²

Self-care can also mean caring for others, because we exist not as individuals, but within communities. The conference ends on a Friday afternoon, but I don’t return to my hotel room until late into the night. Five of us — we knit ourselves together through conversation, over fish and chips; the rolling ocean as a soundtrack; a few photos shared in a new group chat.

I confess: I initially came to my research, propelled by resentment. I start a little reflexive journal on the eve of my first day in the field, nearly a year ago now. On its first page, I make it quite plain — that my thesis proposal was pieced together from moments of hurt, a sense of betrayal, a thick rage at the hypocrisies of policymakers. I carried frustration as my ethical compass, my analytical lens. And yet,

defensiveness as an approach to theory-building — well. I’ve written about the risks of angry feminist affect before. My body aches with it: whilst I joke, often, that thinking deeply about intersectionality leaves my brain throbbing, sometimes this is literal. The project of unravelling and critiquing and resisting white feminism, and state violences, is wearing me out. I live in fear that it will ravage me beyond repair.

It has always been my intention to write a thesis that honours intersectionality’s roots in Black feminist movements, and calls to account its co-options and depoliticisations and perversions. That means I have pledged to ask difficult questions, and trouble institutions that reinforce this matrix of domination we are trapped in. And whilst I have, to date, relied upon feminist rage to enable this — for my own sake, I find myself searching love politics for complementary, perhaps alternative, guiding principles,

a new epistemological framework.

If the purpose of anger is to dismantle, then love — even if that love is sometimes expressed as fury ? — must be what motivates us to build anew. Black and Indigenous and other women-of-colour feminists know this, and have long known this. Rather than strive for redress within existing systems, which cause harm by design, they urge a redirection of labour towards radical possibilities yet to be realised. For example — Tuck, Unangax̂ scholar, encourages desire-based research,

for “desire is about longing, about a present that is enriched by both the past and the future”. For Dhamoon, embrace of futurity enables us to dream, sustain, generate, and ultimately transform. For Nash, this is what love politics compels us to do: build visionary political collectivities that will bring us closer to futures that prioritise care, relationality, community.

Love is, sometimes, gossip.

Gossip, a practice stigmatised in profoundly gendered ways, is considered the modus operandi of bitches. I’m talking sly, catty, malicious — the art and science of rumour and half-truth and speculation. I’m talking anonymous online comments; notes passed between students under tables; whispers amongst friends in ostensibly private spaces. I’m talking about the exchange of facts, “facts”, that are not supposed to be openly known.

Yet, in my group chats, over drinks, in shared hotel rooms: gossip has become fundamental in my survival toolkit. A colleague quietly lets me know that they know others who have endured unfair reprimands from (okay, bullied by) that particular manager. They affirm my experience, permitting me to withdraw any benefit of the doubt. Amongst my activist friends, we swap observations and reflections about the organisations we have engaged with, and the staff within them — because some have no shame about exploiting us for our labour. And of course,

fellow women, women-of-colour, and/or junior academics warn me about lauded scholars, whose feminist commitments are declared but not always practised. We swap horror stories about incompetent lecturers; absent (if not downright antagonistic) supervisors; agents of colonial, white supremacist, patriarchal violence within our respective universities. We loosen the usual filters of civility to offer up judgments of character — hot takes and words of caution about potential employers and collaborators and opportunities.

In contexts where you hold the power, talking shit is hateful, a mechanism to reinforce oppressive hierarchies. Where you do not, where you have been hung out to dry, where you have been pushed out to the margins: spilling the tea is a protective measure. It is how we care for each other, and have each others’ backs.

Dreaming of other worlds: I have, of course, wondered if love politics is naïveté, the easy way out, an elision over cracks which require urgent attention today. Yet, as I read again through my interview transcripts, public service refusals to imagine beyond the oppressive structures we already know,

I am now realising that, without love, we are at an impasse. Without love, there can be no genuine investment in world-making, only defeatism repackaged as pragmatism. Without love for my ancestors, my scholarly and activist foremothers, my peers and allies, future generations, I will be stuck. I will not survive.

1  I am borrowing from Dr Emma Whatman here.

2  This panel was beautifully crafted and facilitated by Associate Professor Jessamy Gleeson, Dr Rosie Shorter, Dr Ebony Muller, and (again) Dr Emma Whatman.