feminist boredom was big this weekend

shoulders:

can one of y’all psyched on the ‘feminist boredom’ tip explain to me how it doesn’t fall back into a dull rewriting of prioritizing those processes central to the creation and maintenance of the subjectivity ‘women’?

this is not an answer to your question, but preliminary context while i do the dishes in a dress and heels, which feels appropriate. 

so: i first got the term “feminist boredom” from patrice petro in her essays “after shock, between boredom and history” and “historical ennui, feminist boredom.” petro talks about the way that boredom is poised between banality and change. and lars svendsen, who wrote a philosophy of boredom, talks about how boredom always contains a critical element.

i’ve meant it different ways at different times: as a descriptor of the situation, in thinking about strategies or prompts, as an affect, as a semi-joke. (relevant is valerie solanas’s famous first line of SCUM: “life in this society being, at best, an utter bore and no aspect of society being at all relevant to women”….then she advocates killing all the men and overthrowing capitalism.) one of the things i like about the term is its flexibility and that i could use it in purposely ambiguous, or even ambivalent, ways.