Caring Loudly: Killjoy, Care, and Protest
Killjoy and care. Two seemingly antithetical ideals that ostensibly cannot exist within the same feminist or even social framework. A killjoy is characterized as non-participation, disengagement, or critique, saying no to what’s being asked, expected, or demanded deeming it a negative connotation. Care, on the other hand, is often seen as support, connection, healing, and emotional labor, saying yes to others' needs, vulnerability, and collective survival. Within neoliberal institutions like universities, where civility and compliance are often privileged over justice, acts of resistance are frequently dismissed as antagonistic. But what if refusal itself is a form of care? What if disruption is not a rejection of community, but a demand for its transformation? Thus, the ultimate point of exploration is if the feminist killjoy can be understood as contributing to a politics of care. And more specifically, how useful is the killjoy as a figure of resistance within the contemporary university.
The feminist killjoy is a term coined by Sara Ahmed. In her Feminist Killjoy Handbook she claims, “you become a feminist killjoy when you get in the way of the happiness of others, or when you just get in the way... when you react, speak back, to those with authority...” (Ahmed, The Feminist Killjoy Handbook: The Radical Potential of Getting in the Way, 1-2) It is true when you bring up politics on a dinner table, when you point out a wrong to an authority, when you question a sexist joke, and overall when you refuse to stay silent in the face of injustice. All feminists by the very nature of challenging the status quo are killjoys. Feminists who see the inequalities and injustices and actively work in public and private against it are killjoys. Some may choose to distance themselves from the term given the negative implications even amongst feminists, but it does not change the applicability, nonetheless. Killjoys are not to be confused with lacking joy or care for others and the world. Rather, it reflects a willingness to sacrifice comfort for truth and change.
Joan Toronto, a foundational theorist of care as a political issue, looks at care as inextricably connected to politics. She defines care as “a species activity that includes everything that we do to maintain, continue, and repair our ‘world’ so that we can live in it as well as possible. That world includes our bodies, our selves, and our environment, all of which we seek to interweave in a complex, life-sustaining web” (Tronto, Revisioning the Political, 142). Care, in Tronto’s view, is not gendered and thus confined to the domestic sphere, but it is a public responsibility that must be taken up by governments and institutions. In this way, she rejects the notion that universal care is utopian. She insists that the question of care is immediately tied to policy: “To make certain that all people are adequately cared for...suggests answers about employment policies, nondiscrimination, equalizing expenditures for schools, providing adequate access to health care, and so forth” (Tronto, 145). Tronto reframes care as a matter of structural distribution as who gets care, who provides it, and under what conditions revealing that care is always entangled with power.
Building on Tronto’s insights, the Care Collective in The Care Manifesto further expands the political scope of care by highlighting the global crisis of care under neoliberalism. The manifesto argues that the protections once provided to vulnerable populations through public infrastructure have been increasingly privatized and corporatized, hollowing out the idea of care as a public good. Importantly, the Collective critiques the romanticization of “community” which is a discourse that they argue is used to shift responsibility away from the state and onto individuals. This withdrawal continues to be racialized and gendered with labor disproportionately performed by women and people of color. These failures are not accidental but are instead the result of what they call “carelessness,” a defining feature of neoliberal governance. In response, the Collective calls for mutual aid, solidarity networks, and grassroots organizing truly embody caring communities. These are real, practical solutions fighting the anti-feminist and capitalist traps of neoliberalism.
The feminist killjoy can be understood as enacting a radical politics of care precisely because she refuses to sustain harmful social norms under the guise of civility. Drawing on Joan Tronto’s definition of care as the work of “maintaining, continuing, and repairing our world” (Tronto, Revisioning the Political, 142), the killjoy’s disruption becomes a form of political attentiveness. This aligns with the Care Collective’s vision of shifting responsibility of care away from individuals and onto communities or institutions. Killjoys recognize, name, and take action upon the harms and shortcomings of institutions. Politics of care focus on interdependence which is can be understood as humans as well as the world at large are inherently connected and reliant on each other, rather than being solely self-sufficient or independent. While Ahmed doesn’t use the term “interdependency” in the same way as experts of politics of care, her killjoy is fundamentally relational. Ahmed writes,“emotions are not simply “within” or “without” but that they create the very effect of the surfaces or boundaries of bodies and worlds.” (Ahmed, “Affective Economies”, 1) This means her killjoy is shaped by and responsive to social structures, histories, and others’ pain, not cut off from them. The act of breaking social bonds is to stand up for others, especially those excluded as minorities or outside dominant norms. Happiness is not something that is distributed evenly and is instead an outcome of historical events relating to Ahmed’s idea of relationality. Ultimately, Ahmed’s relationality can align with interdependency even if hers is more phenomenological and affective than policy driven.
Despite the ways the feminist killjoy can be read as a figure of radical care, there are important tensions that complicate her inclusion within care politics. Tronto’s model, while political, still assumes a commitment to “repairing the world” in ways that suggest mutual cooperation and policy-oriented inclusion. Care Collective focuses on community efforts to build inclusive communities. Tronto’s and the Care Collective’s frameworks importantly center constructive and sustaining action. The killjoy’s defining gesture is interruption, she gets in the way. This resistance, while ethically urgent, can be read as a negative politics as it is focused more on critique than on repair. While both models seek to reach the same end goal of creating change, the methods of rupturing relationships vs nurturing them is a key difference.
The tension between the feminist killjoy and traditional care politics does not necessitate a binary choice between disruption and nurturance, but rather invites a rethinking of what care looks like under conditions of systemic injustice. Ahmed’s theory of affect locates emotion not as something private or internal, but as circulating between bodies, shaping their boundaries and capacities. As Ahmed writes, “To be willing to cause unhappiness can also be how we immerse ourselves in collective struggle, as we work with and through others who share our points of alienation.” (Ahmed, “Feminist Killjoys (And Other Willful Subjects)”). This means that the killjoy is shaped by and responds to the affective structures of institutions, histories of exclusion, and collective pain. Her refusal is not isolationist; it is responsive. In naming harm, the killjoy enacts a form of emotional labor that is as politically charged as it is affectively costly. Thus, the feminist killjoy embodies a radical care ethic that does not contradict but expands beyond traditional care politics. Tronto and the Care Collective emphasize care as infrastructure and distribution, and the killjoy expands to care as exposure, refusal, and political accountability.
Scholars Neve Gordon and Catherine Rottenberg offer a compelling framework that supports the idea of the feminist killjoy as a contributor to a politics of care. In From Human Rights to a Politics of Care, they argue that care must be reimagined not as an individualized moral sentiment, but as a collective, political project grounded in interdependence and infrastructural support. While the feminist killjoy may appear to disrupt social harmony, her refusal to uphold oppressive norms constitutes what Gordon and Rottenberg call a “collaborative utopian counter-narrative” (Gordon and Rottenberg, “From Human Rights to a Politics of Care,” 329). In this world imagined by them, it is an interdependent, radical, and opposite the narrative of an autonomous liberal subject. As they write, such activism offers “an alternative discourse and form of activism... based on a politics of care that recognizes interdependency as constitutive of all life” (Gordon and Rottenberg, “From Human Rights to a Politics of Care,” 329). The killjoy can fit within this framework offering an alternate form of activism that works to aid all life.
The reframing of killjoy feminism within the politics of care is especially urgent within neoliberal institutions like universities, where care is often reduced to personal responsibility and market-driven self-management. Wendy Brown explores how neoliberalism has altered the functioning of public goods, democracy, subjects, and knowledge, thought, and training rendering it to the purpose of individualistic contribution for capital enhancement. Neoliberalism has permeated higher education rendering broad and deep studies as passee and instead replacing teaching with vocational training. Access to education is becoming increasingly difficult and expensive doing away with the ideal of the public good and social mobility, with public education “increasingly structured to entrench, rather than redress class trajectories.” (Brown, Undoing the Demos, 184) With higher educational policies plagued by neoliberalism no longer serving as the great equalizer to promote “intelligent engagement with the world, rather than economic servitude or mere survival,” (Brown, 185) the way students and citizens interact, participate, and resist within a democracy has been fundamentally altered. This is essential because if education is increasingly becoming a form of capital to reproduce privilege and rather than promote civic engagement, then activism is punished as it goes against the purpose of the student as a worker.
Within universities, the feminist killjoy is a particularly urgent figure of resistance, especially in the face of institutional gaslighting, sanitized diversity discourse, and moral abandonment. Gordon and Rottenberg argue that a true politics of care requires “infrastructures that make caring possible” (Gordon and Rottenberg, “From Human Rights to a Politics of Care”, 338) Currently, the infrastructure within universities make it intentionally difficult to care. The killjoy activism takes form as filing a complaint in a university. This is a difficult, often times unused path that is difficult to find and proceed through. You are not supposed to challenge or undermine the university, a “superior body” in any way. Ahmed outlines a scary reality, “The more evidence you have that they are wrong, the more you are treated as being in the wrong, the harder they come down on you.” (Ahmed, Complain!, 48) Universities have the great power to silence, suffocate those who refuse the role of the “nonperformative.” If one chooses to follow the procedure for complaint within the institution, the procedure is created internally and intentionally to prevent any real complaint from going through. By refusing to participate in the institution’s facade of harmony, the killjoy serves as “manifestations of external intervention.” (Gordon and Rottenberg, 338)
In Ahemed’s methodology of using the accounts of students and others in academic spaces, she reveals the emotional toll and thought process of individuals making complaints. When a student received an uncomfortable text from a course tutor, they chose to keep it private afraid of judgement and their academic success being jeopardized. This is just one of the many stories of wrongdoings being “concealed to preserve an idea of happiness.” (Ahmed, Complain!, 107) A complaint is described to feel like a “crisis” (Ahmed, 111) Thus, before a person actually files a complaint they have to reach a point of consciousness and struggle which doesn't end once it is filed. Thus, it can be understood that complaint is not a cold or uncaring action. It can be understood as a care for yourself, others who could be affected, and care to reform your institution. Moreover, Ahmed reflects on the concept and power of complaint collectives which are groups of people who come together through the shared labor, risk, and emotional toll of making complaints within institutions. This is similar to Care Collective’s calls for communal support networks. These collectives are not just formal groupings but can emerge through shared experience, storytelling, support, and resistance. She writes, “To be an institutional killjoy, a killjoy at work, you need to work with others. Complaint activism can lead to forming new kinds of collectives.” (285) Finding others is a form of solidarity and survival that relates to the interdependence and collaborative ethics defining the politics of care.
We can see this relationship between refusal, care, and collective action unfolding in real time through recent student protests, most visibly on campuses like Columbia and Harvard, where students have taken up the mantle of institutional killjoys to demand accountability, justice, and systemic change. In these demonstrations, students have publicly challenged their institutions’ ties to military contractors, state violence, and corporate interests, refusing to preserve the university’s image of neutrality or harmony. These students function as feminist killjoys in Ahmed’s sense: they disrupt institutional comfort by demanding that the university confront its complicity in state violence. Their presence, chants, and refusal to remain silent make them targets for disciplinary action, as they "get in the way" of the smooth operations of campus life and the reputational economy of elite institutions. Yet their disruption is rooted in care. Mohsen Mahdawi, a co-founder of Columbia’s school’s Palestinian student union proclaims, “We see a serious problem; we see a humanitarian call to stand up for ending the killing of Palestinians.” (Otterman, Sharon, "Columbia Sends In the N.Y.P.D. to Arrest Protesters in Tent City") Care for Palestinian lives, care for the moral health of the institution, and care for fellow students who feel unheard or unsafe. Drawing from Tronto’s notion of care as maintaining and repairing our shared world, the protestors seek not to destroy the university, but to hold it accountable to its civic and ethical responsibilities. Their actions mirror the Care Collective’s vision of care as relational, structural, and confrontational. The institutional backlash including arrests, suspensions, and public condemnation, reflects what Wendy Brown identifies as the neoliberal transformation of education. Within this model, students are reimagined as market actors rather than political subjects. Resistance is punished because it threatens the university’s economic interests and public image, revealing the hollowing out of its democratic function. The emotional and reputational risks students face mirror those described in Ahmed’s Complaint!. To protest is to file a public complaint, to refuse institutional silence and demand redress. The protests themselves become complaint collectives, where shared vulnerability turns into solidarity, and individual discomfort becomes the foundation of collective care.
Ultimately, the disruption and refusal embodied by the feminist killjoy should be understood as an act of care. Though it may look different from foundational models like Tronto’s, it aligns with the broader aims of a politics of care. Within the neoliberal university, where students are reimagined as consumers and care is reduced to superficial wellness initiatives, the killjoy is not just useful, she is essential. As Ahmed illustrates, formal resistance through bureaucratic channels is intentionally exhausting and often fruitless, but still vital. To complain is to care enough to persist through institutional friction. And yet, complaint alone is not enough. Public protest, also a killjoy act, expands that care into the realm of visibility and urgency. In moments like the Columbia encampment, protest becomes both a form of complaint and a collective assertion of care. The killjoy thus emerges as a defining figure of protest and progress.
Works Cited:
Ahmed, Sara. "Affective Economies." Social Text, vol. 22, no. 2 (79), Summer 2004, pp. 117–139. Duke University Press. https://voidnetwork.gr/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/Affective-economies-by-Ahmed-Sara-1.pdf
Ahmed, Sara. "Feminist Killjoys (And Other Willful Subjects)." The Scholar & Feminist Online, vol. 8, no. 3, Summer 2010, Barnard Center for Research on Women, https://sfonline.barnard.edu/polyphonic/ahmed_02.htm.
Ahmed, Sara. The Feminist Killjoy Handbook: The Radical Potential of Getting in the Way. Seal Press, 2023.
Ahmed, Sara. Complaint!. Duke University Press, 2021. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.1215/9781478021961.
Brown, Wendy. Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution, ProQuest Ebook Central, 2015.
Gordon, Neve, and Catherine Rottenberg. "From Human Rights to a Politics of Care." Humanity: An International Journal of Human Rights, Humanitarianism, and Development, vol. 14, no. 3, 2023, pp. 327–346. Project MUSE, https://doi.org/10.1353/hum.2023.a924866.
Tronto, Joan C. "Care as a Political Concept." Revisioning the Political: Feminist Reconstructions of Traditional Concepts in Western Political Theory, edited by Nancy J. Hirschmann and Christine Di Stefano, Taylor and Francis, 1996, pp. 139–156. Taylor & Francis eBooks, https://doi.org/10.4324/9780429497612.
Otterman, Sharon. "Columbia Sends In the N.Y.P.D. to Arrest Protesters in Tent City." The New York Times, 6 Feb. 2024, www.nytimes.com/2024/02/06/nyregion/columbia-campus-protests-streets-police.html.
