This post is a lecture I gave for the Around the Kitchen Festival, organised by Kunstenfestivaldesarts, earlier this year. I have added some notes and references and lightly edited the text for clarity. You can also hear me giving the lecture here.
I was glad to have the opportunity to reflect on how tables have been my writing companions for many years. With thanks to the organisers of the festival and to the publisher of my academic books, Duke University Press who took a chance with Queer Phenomenology almost 20 years ago. Many other publishers could not understand what I was trying to do in this admittedly rather quirky book.
Tables took me on a rather queer trajectory. I am so grateful to them.
Sara Ahmed, “Setting the Table, Some Reflections on Why Tables Matter,” lecture given in Brussels, May 22, 2024.
For many of us, activism, fighting for a different world, happens where we already are, at the kitchen table, sustaining and being sustained by others. The Kitchen Table became the name for a Press dedicated to publishing work by women of color. Barbara Smith explains why they took that name, “We chose our name because the kitchen is the centre of the home, the place where women in particular work and communicate with each other” (11). Smith expands “We also wanted to convey the fact that we are a kitchen table, grassroots operation, begun and kept alive by women who cannot rely on inheritances or other benefits of class privilege to do the work we need to do” (11). The fewer benefits you inherit, the more work you have to do to keep the work alive as well as yourself. Smith described the commitment of the Kitchen Table Press thus, “Our work is both cultural and political, connected to the struggles of freedom of all of our peoples. We hope to serve as a communication network for Women of Colour in the U.S. and around the world” (12). The places where many of us gather, work, meet, and greet become vehicles for sending information out. The Kitchen Table Press published the second edition of This Bridge Called My Back. Rhiannon Scharnhorst ends her careful consideration of the role of kitchen tables in feminist art and activism by quoting from Cherríe Moraga’s afterword to the fourth edition of This Bridge: “‘There was nobody to talk to,’ my companion reminds me. We sit across the kitchen table. ‘Yes,’ I say, ‘that’s why we wrote the book’” (251).
“That’s why we wrote the book.” A book, a table. The word table come from Latin tabula ‘plank, tablet, list’, A table: a surface to write. A table: how we come to write, what we can read. We have many kitchen tables behind us. I am reminded Sheba Feminist publishers in the UK who brought us radical collections such as Charting the Journey. Another of Sheba’s publications is entitled Turning the Tables: Recipes and Reflections from Women, in which contributors “contextualise their recipes in daily life.” Editor Sue O’Sullivan describes how the idea for the book “came out of some wonderful, exhausted, tipsy talks that three of us from Sheba had while unwinding after hot, hard work at the 2nd International Feminist Book Fair in Oslo last June” (1). These activities matter-the exhaustion, the excitement, talking, eating, writing, drinking, travelling, dancing.
The expression “turn the table” can mean to change a situation, often by reversing a power dynamic. Kitchen tables have many uses, including queer uses. By queer uses, I mean how things or spaces can be used in ways that were not intended or by those for whom they were not intended. When the kitchen table becomes a publishing house, the tables at the heart of a home which, for some of us, remain difficult places, far from convivial, can be how we get our stories out. In my book on the uses of use, What’s the Use? I use this image as an example of queer use: the birds turn a post-box into a nest.
The post-box has to be taken out of use as a post-box, that communication network, otherwise the birds would be displaced by the letters, a nest destroyed before it could be created. This is admittedly a rather happy and hopeful image: mostly to queer use, to inhabited spaces not intended for us, you have to do more than just turn up.
In this lecture, I share some reflections on how and why tables became not just an object of study, but my companions in thought. I will take you from my 2006 book, Queer Phenomenology, which I often call “my little table book,” to how I came to take up the figure of the feminist killjoy, to my current project on common sense. I first began writing about tables because of how they were referenced in texts I was reading. Later, I was to learn so much more about tables from undertaking empirical research, listening to people describe their efforts to transform institutions; first for a project on racism and diversity and then for a project on complaint. I shared the material from these projects in my books On Being Included which came out in 2012 and my book Complaint! which came out in 2021. And I will share some table stories from both of these projects today. I will end the lecture by reflecting on queer tables as communication networks, looping back to this starting point.
PHILOSOPHERS AND THEIR TABLES
I want to begin with the story of how I came to write about tables as well as on them. I was interested in the question of orientation -how we become orientated in time and space, and the relation between spatial orientation and sexual orientation. We ask a question. A question leads us to texts, and sometimes, to bodies of work. I was led to phenomenology, which makes orientation a starting point. In the words of Alfred Schutz and Thomas Luckmann, “The place in which I find myself, my actual “here”, is the starting point for my orientation in space” (36).
So, I was reading the work of the philosopher Husserl, and that is when I saw it, a table, Husserl’s table. Husserl begins with the world as seen from the point of view he calls “the natural attitude.” He writes, “I can let my attention wander from the writing-table I have just seen or observed, through the unseen portions of the room behind my back to the veranda into the garden, to the children in the summer house, and so forth, too all the objects concerning which I precisely ‘know’ that they are there and yonder in my immediate co-perceived surrounding)” (101). It is not surprising that Husserl sees the writing-table first - he is after all writing about what he is seeing. As Ann Banfield described in The Phantom Table, tables and chairs “are the things nearest to hand for the sedentary philosopher” (66). There is something so evocative about Husserl’s description - my attention was caught by how his wandered, from the writing-table to the “children in the summer house,” a glimpse of what was behind the philosopher. I began to think too of the domestic labour, of who was doing the work, caring for those children in the summerhouse, so the philosopher could attend to the table.
To attend to the table is to keep it in front. Husserl goes around the table, facing it, by changing his position “We start by taking an example. Keeping this table steadily in view as I go round it, changing my position in space all the time, I have continually the consciousness of the bodily presence out there of this one and the self-same table, which in itself remains unchanged throughout” (130). You cannot see the table from all sides at once. Husserl uses this example to develop a thesis on the intentionality of consciousness: when you cannot see the table from all sides at once, you intend its missing sides (I put this rather more queerly in my book as “conjuring the behind”). For Husserl the table is most certainly real.[1] But what is real is difficult to access.
In my introduction to Queer Phenomenology, I wrote “Once I caught sight of the table in Husserl’s writing, which is revealed just for a moment, I could not help but follow tables around. When you follow tables, you can end up anywhere. So, I followed Husserl in his turn to the table, and then when he turns away, I got led astray. I found myself seated at my table, at the different tables that mattered at different points in my life. How I wanted to make these tables matter” (22). You can probably hear here how following tables was a deviation! The table was only meant to be an example. That is why tables are everywhere in philosophy, as examples. Analytical philosopher Bertrand Russell opens The Problems of Philosophy with the table, asking how we know it is real until “it becomes evident that the real table if there is one is not the same thing we immediately experience by sight or touch or hearing” (1). And so, the “familiar table” has “become a problem full of surprising possibilities” (6). But, in the final chapter of the book, the table does not appear. The disappearance of the table is not surprising. When table is there to provide an example, it points elsewhere.
So, that is where I went: elsewhere.
And wherever I have gone, I have followed the tables, or perhaps they have followed me. In my current project on common sense, I have found many more tables. Given that tables were already used as examples in philosophy, it is not unexpected they would appear in the literatures on common sense. Table are typically used here not to pose the question of how we know what we know, but as a proposition that some things just are what they are. Tables also get enlisted to demonstrate the realness of many other things including categories such as sex. Just to quote from one blog, “table-ness is not the same as chair-ness. Yes, I could sit on a table but that doesn’t make it a chair…Just like a man that dresses up and tries to look like a woman doesn’t make him a woman.” [2] Judith Butler in their important critique of the anti-gender movement comments on the reliance on common sense reasoning, “there is a pounding on the table that goes along with the insistent repetition of the claim of purely biological differences, as if pounding and repetition makes it so” (177). The table is pounded on as well as spoken of, the recipient of a gesture.
It is striking that tables and chairs, which are, mostly, human artefacts, designed, products of human labour, can be so used to demonstrate a natural distinction. If anything, tables, as materials, as well as human artifacts, give us a rather different view on the facts of the matter. In Capital Marx noted: “it is as clear as noon-day that man, by his industry, changes the forms of the material furnished by nature in such a way as to make them useful to him. The form of wood, for instance, is altered by making a table out of it for all that, the table continues to be that common every-day thing, wood” (163). The table becomes a thing, alteration as the acquisition of shape, a product of human labour; there’s a hand in the table, however material it remains. Marx also suggests “Every useful thing is a whole composed of many qualities: it can therefore be useful in many ways. The discovery of these ways and hence of the manifold uses of things is the work of history” (125).
Returning to the kitchen table, discovering its uses is also the “work of history.” The kitchen table is useful in many ways and not just because it is designed for more people to sit around. The table can be used as a metaphor for human sociality or connection - metaphoric uses of tables build upon more everyday uses; even as metaphor the material matters. In The Human Condition, Arendt writes, “To live together in the world means essentially that a world of things is between those who have it in common, as a table is located between those who sit around it.” (1958: 53). For Arendt, pluralism is about partiality, when each of us sees the table from a different aspect or side, we see more of the table, we might even, thinking of Husserl, see what is behind it.[3]
Arendt turns to consider common sense in The Life of the Mind. She observes, “In a world of appearances, filled with error and semblance, reality is guaranteed by this three-fold commonness: the five senses, utterly different from each other, have the same object in common; members of the same species have the same context in common that endows every single object with its particular meaning; and all other sense-endowed beings, though perceiving this object from utterly different perspectives, agree on its identity. Out of this threefold commonness arises the sensation of reality” (50). Arendt begins with Aquinas’s conception of common sense as a sixth sense that allows us to apprehend that each sense has the same object in common (that the table we touch is the same table we see, and so on), to common sense as a context in which that object is given meaning, to the role of other sense endowed beings. Mark Uildriks suggests other sense-endowed beings might agree the identity of an object in the following way “A bird may not understand why humans make tables, but by actually sitting on it the bird confirms the table’s reality” (22).
I am rather curious about what else we could learn from the birds if they land on the table. Is there an expectation that those who turn up at the table will confirm its reality? The birds might use the table to sit on. And, so can we: a table can be a chair if it is stable enough to take our weight or low enough to be convenient for that purpose. We can use things that are not made to be used - that stone over there can be a chair at a picnic if it is big enough or a table if is surface is flat enough. Whether or not something is made to be used, how it is used does not exhaust its potential, which is why queer uses do more than reference the material qualities of things; they open that potential. The birds could turn the post-box into a nest because the opening intended for letters can be used as a door, a queer door, a way of getting in and out of the box. The birds are not just “confirming reality,” they are teaching us something else, something rather more “sensational” about reality as such.
I will return to how the birds can be our teachers in due course. They come and go. Use involves so many comings and goings, leaving traces in places. A table as a useful thing becomes a used thing, a record as well as a recorder. Feminist philosopher Iris Marion Young writes, “The nick on the table here happened during that argument with my daughter” (159). Perhaps for feminist philosophers and poets, we don’t begin with the question of what we know about tables, but what tables know about us; that nick, that argument. A scratch on the surface, traces of past encounters
“We begin with the material.” Adrienne Rich turns this starting point into an instruction: “Begin with the material,” she says, describing her own creative process thus: “Piling piece by piece of concrete experience side by side” (213). To begin with the material is to begin with the body, and also, with what is near to hand. Rich names one collection The Fact of a Doorframe. She explains the name: poetry is “hewn from the commonest living substance” as a “doorframe is hewn from wood” (xv). The commonest thing is the stuff of poetry, perhaps also, of philosophy, brought back to earth.
The wood in the door, the wood of the table. The material is the connection. Words, too, are materials, words as wood: we use them, shape things, make things. Rich uses poetry as a vehicle not only to express feelings, such as anger that many women have been encouraged to suppress, but to reflect, to philosophize, about feeling. One of her poems is entitled ‘The Phenomenology of Anger’.32 The last stanza reads
Every act of becoming conscious
(it says here in this book)
is an unnatural act
Not being conscious of something might be how we have learnt to put up with it. Consciousness of things can thus change them. In the poem, anger does not simply come from a subject, but is felt by objects. One line is a question, “How does a pile of rags the machinist wiped his hands on / feel in its cupboard, hour by hour?” Perhaps it is those who have been treated as objects, used to keep someone’s hands clean, wiped on, wiped up, made into examples, who think to ask how objects feel. A person is not just at the table, making use of it, like an instrument, but near the table, by it or with it, a juxtaposition. “Table. Window. Lampshade. You.”
KILLJOYS AROUND THE TABLE
A family too can be juxtaposition: father, mother, sisters, table, me. In Queer Phenomenology, I wrote: “The kitchen table is light-colored wood, and is covered by a plastic cloth. Around it, we gather, every morning and evening. Each of us, has our own place. Mine is the end of the table opposite my father. My sisters are both to my left, my mother to my right. Each time, we gather in this way, as if the arrangement is securing more than our place. For me, inhabiting the family is about taking up a place already given. I slide into my seat, and take up this place. I feel out of place in this place, but those feelings are pushed to one side” (88).
In Queer Phenomenology, I focused on queerness as a feeling of being “out of place,” surrounded as I was by a horizon of heterosexuality, by objects, a fondue set on the sideboard, an unused, wedding gift turned into an ornament, photographs of happy families; by conversations, by expectations, lines I was supposed to follow. Perhaps the figure of the feminist killjoy arrived into my work when I stopped pushing those feelings aside. So, although feminist killjoys did not make an appearance in Queer Phenomenology, writing about tables “set the table” for the feminist killjoys, giving them the space they needed to appear.
The feminist killjoys are the ones who get in the way of happiness or just get in the way; perhaps she does not smile for the photograph. I first wrote about feminist killjoys in The Promise of Happiness, which was published in 2010, 4 years after Queer Phenomenology. There, they had a chapter of their own. I am not sure they were too happy about that! So, in my most recent book, The Feminist Killjoy Handbook, I gave them a book of their own. Why is their book a handbook? For me a handbook is a hand, a helping hand, an outstretched hand, also a handle, how we hold on to something. The handbook is intended as a helping hand for those fighting against inequality and injustice. Experiences of killing joy can take a lot out of us, but they can also bring moments of clarity and illumination. In the handbook I offer killjoy truths, which I also call hard-worn wisdoms, as we as killjoy equations, killjoy commitments and killjoy maxims. I also offer some killjoy survival tips. And yes, my first tip to surviving as a killjoy is to become one.
The handbook is a collection of our stories of becoming feminist killjoys, which means it references many different tables. So, let’s get back to that kitchen table with its light-colored wood and plastic cloth. There we are, seated, each in our place, having polite conversations, where only some things can be brought up. My father would say something offensive. I would try not to react. He could can tell that I was not happy with what is being said. So, he says it more; he says it again. I can feel myself getting wound up by someone who is winding me up. Eventually I snap. A snap is a moment with a history. And then, I would come out with it. I say I have a problem with what is being said. But then I become the problem.
Killjoy Truth: To Expose a Problem is to Pose a Problem
You might be told you are being divisive or difficult. That you have ruined the dinner or the atmosphere. And once you are known as a feminist, the one who exposes a problem, you don’t even have to say anything. You just have to open your mouth and eyes start rolling, as if to say, she would say that, she will say that.
Killjoy Equation: Rolling Eyes = Feminist Pedagogy.
I did say that. To become a feminist killjoy is to refuse to concede by letting a problem recede. We make a commitment, which I think of as the core killjoy commitment.
Killjoy Commitment: I am willing to cause unhappiness
I became willing to cause unhappiness because of what I learnt from causing it. Let me take you to another table, back to the academic year 1994/1995. It is my first year as a lecturer in Women’s Studies. I am in the top room of the fanciest building on campus. We are seated around a large rectangular table. The meeting is for the approval of new courses. I am there because I have a new course on Gender, Race and Colonialism being considered. Most of the courses are approved without much discussion. When my course comes up, a professor from another department begins to interrogate me, becoming angrier as he went on. And he went on. I was there, seated at the same a table as he, a young woman, a person of colour, the only brown person in the room. The word in the course description that triggered his reaction was the relatively uneventful word “implicated.” That I had used that word was a sign, he said, that I thought that colonialism was a bad thing. He then gave me a lecture on how colonialism was a good thing, colonialism as modernity, that happy story of railways, language and law that is so familiar because we have heard it before. I think of this as a killjoy encounter not because I spoke back in response to what he said when he said it, I did not, but because I could hear from his reaction that what I was doing, was speaking back, refusing to tell that story, that happy story, of imperial progression.
Not to tell that story, that happy story, is to be positioned as stealing not just happiness but history. One contribution to a book on common sense conservatism begins, “Britain is under attack. Not in a physical sense, but in a philosophical, ideological and historical sense. Our heritage is under a direct assault - the very sense of what it is to be British has been called into question, institutions have been undermined, the reputation of key figures in our country’s history have been traduced.”[4] Movements such as BLM and decolonising the curriculum he suggests, are “not motivated by positivity. Quite the reverse.” Positivity is tied to preservation. So, when students asked for philosophies from outside the West to be taught, they are represented as cancelling white philosophers, as stealing what is there or from who is there. Decolonizing the curriculum is often framed as an act of vandalism: knocking off the heads of statues, snapping at the throne of the philosopher kings.
All it takes to be heard as a killjoy is not to affirm something. There is so much we refuse to affirm. Consider Ama Ata Aidoo’s novel, Our Sister Killjoy, published in 1977, the first text to give a killjoy a voice. Sissie, our sister killjoy, is our narrator. She travels from Ghana to Germany and then to England. In Germany, Sissie wanders around a market. She is referred to as the ‘black girl’, “She was somewhat puzzled. Black girl? Black girl? So, she looked around her, really well this time” (12). When Sissie sees herself seen as a Black girl, it is then that she whiteness. She regrets it, “when she was made to notice the difference in human colouring” (13). But once she has noticed it, she can’t unnotice it.
Killjoy Equation: Noticing = The feminist killjoy’s hammer
When Sissie notices being noticed, she notices whiteness. Having worked in universities in the UK for most of my career, I got so used to whiteness that sometimes I stopped noticing it. But every now and then, it would hit me, usually because of how I was addressed. One time, I was seated around a coffee table with colleagues. A white feminist admired for her work on cultural difference was sitting opposite me. She leaned forward, as if peering at me closely. ‘Sara, I didn’t know you were Oriental.” I winced at that word, how it pointed, it’s colonial legacy.
Sometimes, a point is so sharp, it is hard not to notice a history. At other times, noticing can be labour as you have to see through a history. I spoke to a student who was being harassed by her supervisor. She explains to me why it is hard to see what was happening,
And it’s odd to think back, in this moment, this seems absolutely insane to me, but at the time it was part of the culture of the department we had. You know another professor I had met with earlier in the programme said you know that he had to keep a big wooden table between him and his female students so he would remember not to touch them and then another of our long-time male faculty is notorious for marrying student after student after student. And that was within all this rhetoric of like critical race studies, and you know, pedagogy of the oppressed, as I am recounting it to you, I just wanted to say that it is so jarring to look back on it, because it looks so very clear, from this hindsight perspective.
When what you experience “at the time” is part of the culture, you don’t identify it at the time you experience it. The harassment, which was institutionalized, expressed in the idea that senior men would need a big wooden table order to remember not to touch women students, is happening at the same time the critical work is happening, or the rhetoric of critical work is being used to describe what is happening; critical race studies; pedagogy of the oppressed. It becomes clear that critical work is about rhetoric, that there is a gap between rhetoric and reality, clarity can be jarring. That is why becoming a killjoy can sometimes be about killing your own joy, taking in what is hard and painful.
I talked to another student about what happened she she turning up at a conference.
They were making jokes, jokes that were horrific, they were doing it in a very small space in front of staff, and nobody was saying anything. And it felt like my reaction to it was out of kilter with everyone else. It felt really disconnected, the way I felt about the way they were behaving and the way everybody else was laughing. They were talking about “milking bitches.” I still can’t quite get to the bottom of where the jokes were coming from. Nobody was saying anything about it: people were just laughing along. You start to stand out in that way; you are just not playing along.
The sexist expression “milking bitches” seemed to have a history. History can be thrown out like a line you are supposed to follow. When laughter fills the room, it can feel like there is no room left. To experience such jokes as offensive is to become alienated not only from the jokes but the laughter that surrounds them, propping them up, giving them somewhere to go.
If you do not participate in something, laugh when others laugh, you stand out. Maybe some people laugh in order not to stand out. She describes what happened next
He specifically went for me, verbally at a table where everyone was eating lunch. It was a large table with numerous amounts of people around it including staff… I was having quite a personal conversation with someone and he literally leant across the table or physically came forward, he was really close, and he said “oh my god I can see you ovulating.”
Because she did not find the jokes funny, because she expressed in her reaction that she was not condoning the behaviour, that she was not happy, he comes after her. Her personal space invaded, she is reduced to body; stopped from participating in a conversation around the table. She leaves that table. By leaving that table, I am not just referring to an actual table, she left the university. She left because of what she learnt from trying to complain, how she was made the problem. She described the process, “I lost my rose-tinted glasses, the way I saw those spaces being a place of excellence. I thought they were welcoming of difference. I had worked really hard to get to that space. When you come from the kind of background I have—no one had been to university to do a degree.” If she had seen the university through rose-tinted glasses, it is because they were handed to her.
We can return to the philosophers and their table. If philosophers withdraw from something in order to inspect it, we, killjoys, trouble-makers, misfits, inspect something because we are withdrawn from it. It is not so much that we have learn about tables from conversing about them but that we learn about tables from being alienated by the conversations around them.
A woman professor described to me how she noticed a table, “I realised that all the decisions were actually being taken around the lunch-table by this small group of men who actually went off and discussed what they wanted to discuss and decided what they wanted to decide and that’s how things happened in the school.” The expression “a seat at the table” is a reference to power, who gets to be involved in the discussions that influence decisions being made. She realised that decisions were being made at the lunch-table, which meant that the tables where they were supposed to be made, we call them committees, where items are tabled, were just being used as vehicles to pass decisions through. She decides to join the table, “I started trying to have my lunch with them. I thought I am going to break into the circle and try and fight my way in. But that didn’t work. They would just get up and go.” Tables become doors, how some are shut out of the places where decisions are made. We tend to notice what shuts us out.
POLISHING THE TABLE
Killjoy encounters around tables can be building blocks: how we develop our critiques of institutions as well as the tools we need to hammer away at them.
Let me return to Sissie, our sister killjoy, who turned noticing into a hammer. In Germany, when she wanders around a market, before she sees herself be seen, before she sees whiteness, Sissie sees a sheen: “polished steel. Polished tin. Polished brass.” Sissie “saw their shine and glitter” (12). Later, Sissie listens to an eminent Doctor who said he stayed in Europe “to educate them to recognize our worth.” Sissie asks by “them” does he mean “white people” and he says “well, yes” (129). Sissie can hear the violence of that yes, because she can, we can. Some end up having to polish themselves in order to considered worth something, make themselves more palatable, appearing grateful, smiling, as shiny as the objects Sissie sees in the marketplace.
Think of diversity: we, people of colour, have to smile for their brochures, our smiles, their sheen. I recall how the Professor heard a no in my use of the word implicated. Those of us living and working in Europe whose families came from countries colonized by Europe are asked, nay required, to gloss over the violence of histories that led us to be here.
Polish, polish, smile. To polish can mean to make something smooth and shiny by friction or coating, to see to one’s appearance, and also to refine or improve. Diversity can be a polished table, a happy fable of the table, creating the impression that everyone is welcome here. One diversity practitioner described diversity as “a big shiny apple, it all looks wonderful, but the inequalities aren’t being addressed.” Diversity can be a way of appearing to do something. When people of colour become the polish, we end up feeling implicated in that appearance.
We might be asked to sit on the diversity committee. We often end up on these committees because of who we are not: not white, not man, not able-bodied, not cis, not straight. The more nots you are the more committees you end up on! We might have to smile on these committees too. A woman of color academic describes, “I was on the equality and diversity group in the university. And as soon as I started mentioning things to do with race, they changed the portfolio of who could be on the committee and I was dropped.” The word race is a killjoy word - just say it and your will be heard as negative or obstructive or destructive. When she is dropped, so too is that work, so too is that word.
It is worth asking why she was mentioning “things to do with race.” Racism, that’s why. She told me that in her department’s research meetings, senior white men professors frequently made racist comments. One person said, “I’m from London and London is just ripe for ethnic cleansing.” She described how people laughed and how the laughter filled the room. But when she complains, she is told she has a “chip on her shoulder.” Nothing happens. She leaves. When she is dropped from the diversity table for mentioning things to do with race, her colleagues are given permission to make racist comments at that same table. This is how, under the banner of diversity, you are allowed to be racist but not call something racist. To call those viewpoints racist brings the whole thing into dispute, or even just into view, the table itself.
Those who cannot be at the table thus see more of it. She told me about what happened when she contributed a paper for a special issue of a journal on decolonizing her discipline. She receives feedback from a white editor, “the response of the editor was “needs to be toned down, not enough scholarly input to back up the claims they are making.” Basically, get back in your box, and if you want to decolonize, we’ll do it on our terms.” Whiteness can be just as occupying of spaces when they are designated decolonial; you are told the same old things by the same old people, tone it down, cite right, cite white, remove yourself from your text. Even when we create our own tables to dismantle the structures, we encounter the same structures.
“Get back in your own box.” Let’s return to the post box that became a nest. There could have been another sign on that box, birds welcome!
Diversity is that sign. All those comments, tone it down, back up your claims, they function as letters in the box, piling up until there is no room left, no room to breathe, to nest, to be. If diversity is that sign, diversity obscures the hostility of an environment.
For some people, not being given enough time is how they don’t have enough room. I spoke to a lecturer who made a complaint after her university failed to adjust her work load when she returned from long term sick leave. She is neuroatypical, she needs more time to return to work, so she can do her work. Despite having evidence that the university did not follow its own policies, she does not get anywhere. She describes the experience of complaint as follows
It was like a little bird scratching away at something and it wasn’t really having any effect. It was just really small, small; small, and behind closed doors. I think people maybe feel that because of the nature of the complaint, and you are off work so they have to be polite and not talk about it and so much of their politeness is because they don’t want to say something. And maybe [it is] to do with being in an institution and the way they are built; long corridors, doors with locks on them, windows with blinds that come down, it seems to sort of imbue every part of it with a cloistered feeling, there is no air, it feels suffocating.
A complaint can acquire exteriority, becoming a thing in the world; scratching away; a little bird, all your energy going into an activity that matters so much to what you can do, who you can be, but barely seems to leave a trace; the more you try, the smaller it becomes, you become, smaller; smaller still. Scratching can give you a sense of the limits of what you can accomplish. Notice the birds have returned. Little birds “scratching away at something,” rather like the birds in the post-box, trying to create a nest in a hostile environment.
I think again of the bird that landed on Arendt’s table. Could that bird be an invitation to think differently about common sense? Hannah Arendt suggests that if common sense gives us “that sensation of reality,” the activity of thinking is about losing it, “thinking can seize upon and get hold of everything real- event, objects, its own thoughts; their realness is the only property that remains stubbornly beyond its reach” (51-3). So, when common sense is turned into a legacy project - we are back to the pounding on the table, the insistence that a table is a table or our table - what is lost is not reality as such but a sensation of it or an unthinking relation to it. People might not want to think about what they previously did not have to think about - they might not want to learn to use preferred pronouns or to pronounce different or “difficult” names.
This loss of unthinkingness is framed very quickly as an imposition on freedom. Speaking of unthinking, let me quote from the British prime-minister, Rishi Sunak. He said, “We want to confront this left-handed culture that seems to want to cancel our history, our values, our women.” The argument that women are also being cancelled expressed with that old sexist possessive (‘our women’) draws loosely from the ‘gender critical’ argument that the term gender has replaced sex. Sunak has since said “A man is a man and a woman is a woman - that’s just common sense.” When man is the answer to the question of what is a man, the answer is there is no question. Think of how little is being said here, how little we learn. If we were to say a tree is a tree or a table is a table, we would not be saying anything, or learning anything about trees or tables. To pound on the table, to declare this is “our culture” or “our history” or “our women” is to defend an unthinking relation to the world or what I am tempted to call an unthinking freedom.
Common sense is used to remove the question of what is what or who is who. Questions can be made strange, a questioner a stranger.[5] All some of us have to do to throw something into question is to arrive, to try and to take up a seat at a table or to become a chair. Heidi Mirza, a woman of colour professor, described a conversation at her inaugural lecture as professor “a white male professor leaned into me at the celebration drinks and whispered bitterly in my ear, “Well they are giving Chairs to anyone for anything these days”’ (43).When a woman of colour becomes a chair, chairs lose their status and value. The value of some things is dependent on the restriction of who can have them or be them.
You are not really a chair so you damage a chair. You might be told you are not really a professor. A not really migrates, reality turned into an arrow, made a measure: you might be told your relationships are not really relationships, that your families not really families, that you are not really from this country, that you are not really who you say you are, that you don’t really belong here, that your subject is not really a proper subject. You might be questioned, who are you, what are you, where are you from, no really. The one who throws things into question is made questionable.
Killjoy Truth: For some, to be is to be in question
Or you might be invited to have a seat at the table because you are the topic of conversation, hmmm, is it a real table, how do I know, are you real, how do you know, interrogated because of how you appear. I talked to a trans student of colour made a complaint about sexual harassment and transphobic harassment from their supervisor who kept asking them deeply intrusive questions about their gender and genitals. These questions were laced in the language of concern for the welfare of the student predicated on judgements that they would be endangered if they conducted research in their home country. When they complain, what happens? They describe “people were just trying to evaluate whether he was right to believe there would be some sort of physical danger to me because of my gender identity… as if to say he was right to be concerned.” The same questions that led you to complain are asked because you complain. These questions make the concern right or even into a right; a right to be concerned. So much harassment today is enacted as a right to be concerned: we have a right to be concerned about immigration (as citizens), we have a right to be concerned about sex-based rights (as “adult human females”) and so on.
You can see why it is important to refuse to join some tables, to enter into debates where you are the question or the topic of conversation. I think back to how, when tables are used as examples within philosophy, they disappear. When you are asked to debate your existence around a table, you are asked to witness yourself disappear. In her aptly named article, “When Tables Speak”, Talia Mae Bettcher describes a tendency among some philosophers to approach “race, gender, disability, trans issues” as “no different methodologically from investigations into the question of whether tables really exist.”
We learn in time to diagnose what I call false positives, gestures that appear to be welcoming, opening a door or a dialogue, but are not.
Diversity is one such false positive. “Birds welcome.” Minorities welcome: come in, come in! Just because they welcome you, it does not mean they expect you to turn up. “Let’s have a debate about sex and gender” is another false positive. There might be another sign on the box, birds welcome to a debate, “Are You Really Birds?” That debate enables the posting of letters in the box, statements after statements about trans people not being who they say they are, that sex is real, gender, not, that we are real, you not. Were you to write your letters to oppose their letters, they would end up in the same pile, leaving you with no room, to nest, to breathe, to be.
A conservative think tank could use that same sign, “birds welcome,” as evidence that the birds are a hegemony, a powerful lobby, pushing their way into our box. They might write letters about the birds; how wrong it is that they are given special privileges. The birds can help us to recognise something here: how some of us are called powerful without even being able to get into the damn box! The point is of course that those who understand the box as theirs, that common sense we sometimes call ownership, are still using the box, posting the letters, more and more letters, complaining about the woke and the snowflakes. Right now, in the UK as elsewhere, there are many attacks on diversity and equality by those who evoke common sense and other institutional legacies. It is not the time to abandon our critiques of what diversity is not doing. These very critiques give us the tools we need to explain what is going on.
CONCLUSION: QUEER TABLES
It is work to try and open institutions up to those who had not been accommodated by them not least because of the hostility directed towards anyone who makes that effort. So, sometimes we leave a table to continue the work. In 2017, I left my profession in protest at the failure of the university to deal with the problem of sexual harassment. I began working to support students who had submitted a collective complaint about sexual harassment in 2013. After three years, we could not even get a public acknowledgement that the enquiries had happened let alone why they had happened. It was like they had not happened which is, I rather imagine, the effect they were looking for.
I shared my reasons for resigning on my feminist killjoy blog because I could not resign in silence if I was resigning to protesting silence, addressing you as feminist killjoys as I am addressing you now. And I became a feminist killjoy all over again. The university quickly launched a public relations campaign: “We take sexual harassment very seriously and take action against those found to be acting in ways incompatible with our strong values relating to equality, diversity and inclusion.” If any of this had been even remotely true, I would not have had to resign.
I expected this reaction. What was unexpected was the reaction of some feminist colleagues. One colleague told me my action was “against the interest of many long-standing feminist colleagues who have worked to ensure a happy and stimulating environment.” We need to learn from how the disclosure of sexual harassment can be treated as compromising not just the institution’s happiness but feminist happiness. She also called my action “unprofessional.” I have been calling myself an unprofessional feminist ever since! Becoming professional is about being willing to keep the institution’s secrets, to become a filing cabinet. Becoming professional is about polishing the table, treating complaints as dust or damage, to be wiped away, dealt with in house. Polishing is tied to progression: you are being told you will go further by smiling more, by willing to keep the institution’s secrets. This is what I call a reproductive mechanism: those who go further within the institution are less likely to question their complicity in violence.
Sometimes it is those who are closest to us, with whom we share an allegiance, who tell us we are not doing it right, that we are not polished enough, polite enough. I don’t think we are going to change institutions by doing it right. And those of us who don’t do it right, who do not polish the table, or ourselves, know so much more about institutions, see how so much of the tables remains unseen. That is why, I learnt so much more about tables themselves, what they do, how they work, from listening to those who are trying to change institutions, who see that what they sometimes call reality, at other times, legacy, is a thin veneer.
Trying to change institutions, releasing information that was supposed to polished away or filed, is treated as damaging them. Those some actions are how we create another communication network. After I posted about my reasons for resigning on my blog, I began to receive messages from many different people telling me about what happened when they complained. I heard from other people who had left their posts and professions as a result of a complaint. One story coming out can lead to more stories coming out. Even when a complaint leads you to leave, you leave something behind. I think of how after I left students put words from my work, killjoy words, on the wall. Yes, they were taken down. But they cannot stop them from having been there.
The lecturer who described her complaint as a “little bird scratching away at something” also left her post and profession. She read her resignation letter out “I wrote a two-page letter and it was really important to me to put everything in there that I felt so that it was down on paper. And then I asked for a meeting with the Dean. I kind of read the letter out in a performative kind of way just to have some kind of event.” Her complaint fills the space she leaves. She wanted to do more, to put her letter on the wall: “I just thought I am not the kind of person who would put my resignation letter on the wall, but I just wonder what it is that made me feel that I am not that kind of person because inside I am that kind of person, I just couldn’t quite get it out.” Perhaps that is what our work is about; how we help each other to get it out, to get out complaints onto wall, turning that wall into a table, a surface for writing.
The more we leave behind us, the easier it is to find us. I am reminded of the pansy project by Paul Harfleet. Harfleet planted pansies in all the places he knew that homophobic violence and abuse had taken place. Pansies are flowers; the word pansy a slur. We make something by repurposing what has been used against us. We plant something, a new growth of some kind, to mark the site of violence, to tell us what happened here. Or we might think of Queering the Map, a community project for digitally mapping LGBTQIA+ experiences. Recently, queer Palestinians used this digital map to share their stories, before they disappeared under the rubble.
One story, “I just want this to be my memory here before I die.”
We cannot not be shattered by this.
We should be shattered by this.
We must be, even.
We need to receive the messages, to tell the story of what is happening here. We need to carry the words such as those given to us by Refaat Alareer, Palestinian writer, scholar and poet, murdered by Israel. His poem, “If I must die,” begins, “if I must die, you must live to tell my story.” A poem can be a gift- a poem read out, translated, given life, spoken out, by so many, world over, from grief, from rage, with love. [6]A poem as a gift. A gift as an image. Alareer gives us an image of a piece of cloth, and some strings, becoming a kite, “flying up above,” so that a child in Gaza, might see it and “think for a moment an angel is there, bringing back love.” That cloth, those strings, words strung together, becomes a story we must live to keep telling; a hand, setting the story free.
I hear Audre Lorde here. In an interview with Adrienne Rich, Audre Lorde describes how she was “sickened with fury” about the acquittal of a white policeman who had murdered a Black child that she had to stop the car to get her feelings out. What came out was a poem she called “Power.” She teaches us that we sometimes have to stop what we are doing to register the impact of violence. Lorde took so much in, the violence of the police, the violence of white supremacy. She took it in to get it out. In that poem, Lorde uses an image of what poetry is not, poetry is not letting our power “lie limp and useless as an unconnected wire.” Lorde uses words like electricity, snap, snap, sizzle. We can pick up her words because she left them for us. We can take them out; Lorde’s words, Alareer’s too, onto the streets; the snap of a slogan, a no, a stop, stopping the car, the cars, that flow of human traffic. To say no, to stop that flow, we need more of us. This is the last killjoy truth of the handbook: the more we up against, the more we need more.
The more we need more. That’s a queer table, coming out of what we need. In another poem, “A Litany for Survival,” Audre Lorde evokes “those of us,” who “love in doorways coming and going in the hours between dawns” (31) A doorway can be a safer place to meet, if you need to slide by undetected, if you have a better chance of survival by not being seen. Even a writing table, seemingly solidarity, can be a place to meet.
A writing table, a queer gathering
A doorway, a meeting place
A kitchen table, a publishing house
A post-box, a nest
Disrupting usage and creating a shelter can refer to the same action. A queer door can be not only how we get into spaces not intended for us but how we make room so we won’t be, as it were, displaced by the letters in the box or displaced too quickly. I say “displaced too quickly” as spaces created from self-assembly are precarious; who knows what letters will end up pinned to the door. And these spaces are not simply warm and happy even if they involve joy, queer joy, killjoy joy, that comes from crafting worlds and finding each other along the way. Why? Because the killjoy always arrives before we do. And so, in time, we learn not to project antagonism onto the outsider or the stranger. When we create spaces by assembling, those spaces, tables also, do not transcend what we assemble to oppose.
It was a killjoy joy to attend recently the Palestinian solidarity encampment at Oxford University, to listen to students, to hear the how of their resistance to the genocide; the collective effort to force their institution to recognise its complicity, to divest from Israel and other imperial-war machines, as they were working out how to care for each other, and for the camp, for the tents, tents as tables, tents for cooking, for welcoming, for reading, for quiet times, for wellness, for shouting, for saying no, to business as usual. To assemble, to say no, to do no, throws so much open. We throw ourselves into a project that is urgent, necessary, doing what we can, being there, in the wear and the tear, for as long as it takes. So, when I evoke queer tables, I do not think of us sitting around, having conversations about what to do. I think of us doing it. Thank you.
References
Aidoo, Ama Ata Our Sister Killjoy: Or, Reflections from a Black-Eyed Squint. Harlow: Longman, 1977.
Arendt, Hannah, The Human Condition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958.
—- “Reflections on Little Rock,” Dissent 6, no. 1, 1959.
—- The Life of the Mind. San Diego: Harcout Brace and Company, 1978.
Banfield, Ann (2000). The Phantom Table: Woolf, Fry, Russell, and the Epistemology of Modernism. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Bettcher, Talia M. “When Tables Speak: On the Existence of Trans Philosophy, https://dailynous.com/2018/05/30/tables-speak-existence-trans-philosophy-guest-talia-mae-bettcher/ (2018).
Husserl, Edmund. Ideas: General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology, trans. W.R.Boyce Gibson, London: George Allen and Unwin, 1969.
Lorde, Audre “Litany for Survival” and “Power” in The Black Unicorn. New York: Norton, 1978, pp, 31, 108.
Marx, Karl. Capital: Volume 1. Translated by Ben Fowkes. London, Penguin Classics, (1867), 1990.
Moraga, Cherríe “Afterword: On the Fourth Edition,” This Bridge Called My Back: Writings By Radical Women of Colour. State University of New York Press, 2015.
O’Sullivan, Sue. “The Cookbook with a Difference and How to Use It’, Turning the Table: Recipes and Reflections from Women. London: Sheba Feminist Press, 1987.
Rich, Adrienne “The Phenomenology of Anger” in Driving in the Wreck: 1971‒72. New York: W. W. Norton, 1973.
— “Notes Toward a Politics of Location” in Blood, Bread, and Poetry: Selected Prose 1979‒1985. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1986.
— The Fact of a Doorframe: Poems 1950‒2001. New York: Norton, 2002.
Russell, Bertrand. The Problems of Philosophy. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001.
Scharnhorst, Rhiannon. “Composing at the Kitchen Table,” Graduate Association of Food Studies, 2019, https://gradfoodstudies.org/2019/06/16/composing-at-the-kitchen-table/.
Schutz, Alfred and Thomas Luckmann. The Structure of the Lifeworld, trans. Richard M. Zaner and H.Tristram Engelhardt, London: Heinemann Educational Books, 1974.
Smith, Barbara. “A Press of Our Own: Kitchen Table Women of Color Press, “ Frontiers, 1989, 10-3, 1-13.
Uildriks, Mark. “Hannah Arendt’s Notion of Common Sense and Reality,” Masters thesis, 2019. https://theses.ubn.ru.nl/server/api/core/bitstreams/4f71c5b6-317c-4101-9106-4c214b9df059/content
Young, Iris Marion. On Female Body Experience, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005, p. 159.
Notes
[1] Some readers have assumed my association of reality with spectrality in my reading of Husserl in Queer Phenomenology, meant that I did not understand that, for Husserl, the table is real (given his task is to resist idealism, reality matters). Rather I was trying to show that the sameness of the table is spectral (the table is the “only thing” to stay the same), which was a point about our access to reality and not reality as such.
[2] The blog can be found here. There are many examples of such uses of tables. So, “gender critical” feminist Kathleen Stock encourages her readers to “set boundaries” by starting with small claims such as “tables can’t be chairs” (ignoring the “furniture police”) before explaining why we need “mutually exclusive names for the two human sexes in order to talk clearly about them”. In my project, I will offer a critique of just how common-sense assumptions about sex and sexual difference participate in shaping and making worlds (in other worlds, in materialisation). Although, I will offer a critique of “gender critical” feminism, that will not be the point or the focus of this work.
[3] In my common-sense project, I will try and show some of the limitations of Arendt’s pluralism: we miss so much about the table, when we see it from the vantage point of different sides. I may connect the limitations of Arendt’s pluralism to her position on segregation in “Reflections on Little Rock”.
[4] Bacon, G. “What is Wokeism and How Can It be Defeated” Common Sense Thinking for a Post-Liberal Age, 2021, p. 22.
[5] In the longer project I will be drawing on the sociologist Harold Garfinkel’s breaching experiments to show how certain questions are treated as hostile because of how they pull people away from a practical activity (when we do things, including describing what we are doing, we bracket the meaning of the words being used). Note also how often common-sense arguments contrast reality with feeling (so for example, sex is real, gender a feeling). I hope to show how what gets called reality is precisely a feeling, or “a sensation of reality,” to borrow Arendt’s very useful term.
[6] See Salih J. Altoma’s important discussion of this poem in relation to Alareer’s earlier resistant poetry. See also Ruwaida Amer’s discussion of kites as symbols of hope and of Palestinian (and Palestinian children’s) existence and resistance.