Kyla Wazana Tompkins: The Recurring Trauma of Intergenerational Queer-Feminist Life

How has anger operated as a force in feminist thought and politics, from second wave feminists’ rage at the ingrained sexism they faced, to contemporary intersectional feminists who berate the biases and exclusions of their feminist forebears?  These are the questions at the heart of Kyla Wazana Tompkins’ essay, ‘Reflections of a Real-Life Feminist Killjoy: Ball-Busters and the Recurring Trauma of Intergenerational Queer-Feminist Life.’

 Commissioned for a book on the queer feminist hauntings played out in Killjoy’s Kastle, a participatory installation by Allyson Mitchell and Deidre Logue, Tompkins looks back to an earlier cultural event: the film ‘Jill Johnston: October 1975,’ that her mother, Lydia Wazana, made with Kay Armatage on the visit of the renown lesbian writer to Toronto.

While acknowledging second wave feminism’s many absences, suppressions, and prejudices, Tompkins urges us not to dismiss this history outright. Arguing that the women’s liberation movement built the foundations for feminist and queer possibilities and futures, even if many of them remain unmet, she asks, “Is it possible to hold all of those things at the same time?”

This event is organised by Gabby Moser of EMILIA-AMALIA, and follows an earlier session of E-A in Toronto focused on historical gaps, omissions, and strategies of refusal and withdrawal in feminist praxis. Tompkins will join Moser to introduce the essay and its context.

Reading

Together, in small online groups, we will read Kyla Wazana Tompkins’ ‘Reflections of a Real-Life Feminist Killjoy: Ball-Busters and the Recurring Trauma of Intergenerational Queer-Feminist Life,’ published in Inside Killjoy’s Kastle: Dykey Ghosts, Feminist Monsters, and Other Lesbian Hauntings (2019).

No advance reading is required as we will read from the essay together during the event.

 To Register: EventBrite

https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/the-recurring-trauma-of-intergenerational-queer-feminist-life-tickets-177172406437 . You will be sent a link to the essay. The Zoom link will be circulated to all registered participants one hour in advance of the event.

Kyla Wazana Tompkins

Kyla Wazana Tompkins is a writer, scholar, and former feminist grassroots organiser, currently Associate Professor at Pomona College, in the Departments of English and the Program in Gender and Women’s Studies.  She is author of the books Racial Indigestion (New York University Press, 2012) Keywords In Gender And Sexuality Studies (New York University Press, Forthcoming, 2021), and Deviant Matter: Ferment Intoxication, Rot, Jelly (New York University Press, Forthcoming). She describes her research as follows: “My work variously investigates aesthetic production, biopolitics and the history of ideas via an interdisciplinary methodology grounded in close reading practices. In all of my writing and teaching on cultural form I seek to put multiple theories of the political, including queer, feminist, Marxist, Black diasporic, and postcolonial thought, into conversation with each other, while grounding all of my projects in a thorough archival and historical practice.”

http://www.kylawazanatompkins.com/research