Feminist Media Studies
ISSN: 1468-0777 (Print) 1471-5902 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rfms20
Feminist anger and feminist respair
Jilly Boyce Kay & Sarah Banet-Weiser
To cite this article: Jilly Boyce Kay & Sarah Banet-Weiser (2019): Feminist anger and feminist
respair, Feminist Media Studies, DOI: 10.1080/14680777.2019.1609231
To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/14680777.2019.1609231
Published online: 17 May 2019.
Submit your article to this journal
View Crossmark data
Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at
https://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=rfms20
FEMINIST MEDIA STUDIES
https://doi.org/10.1080/14680777.2019.1609231
COMMENTARY AND CRITICISM
Feminist anger and feminist respair
Jilly Boyce Kaya and Sarah Banet-Weiserb
a
School of Media, Communication and Sociology, University of Leicester, Leicester, UK; bDepartment of
Media and Communications, The London School of Economics and Political Science, London, UK
Introduction: the age of anger
How bad things have become. Or perhaps it is more accurate to say: how bad things
have always been, but it is only now that some people with particular kinds of class and
race privilege are beginning to grasp just how awful things are: how very deeply racism
and misogyny are entrenched in our culture; how devastating neoliberalism has been to
social bonds and human lives; how impending ecological disaster is increasingly not
a possibility but a sure-fire certainty. We seem to be in a moment of intense despair,
hopelessness and powerlessness; politics and public institutions as we know them are
unravelling—and not in a good way. We are living in what Pankaj Mishra (2017) calls the
“age of anger,” in which modernity has singularly failed to live up to its promises of
democracy, equality and freedom, and has thus given rise to the spread of a deep
ressentiment that manifests as the normalisation of nationalisms, racisms, and
misogynies.
Anger, we might say, has filled the space where the hope of modernity used to be—a
hope that turned out to be profoundly (and humiliatingly) misplaced. As Mishra shows,
this anger is resentful, festering, and deeply reactive. It is most often misdirected—at
women, LGBTQ people, migrants, refugees, and people of colour. It provides no creative
vision or hope for humanity, but nonetheless it thrives and grows: in its impotency, the
rage is destructive. The popular misogyny that Sarah Banet-Weiser 2018 identifies seems
to have deep affective and political affinities with the festering moods of this anger. In
this context of intensifying and extensifying hate, whose terrifying power seems ineluct-
able and uncontainable, it is perhaps no wonder how, for those of us who research and
think and live as feminists, a sense of deep despair seems to prevail.
And yet, at the same time, we are witnessing an extraordinary new visibility of
women’s anger—we might even say feminist anger—in public discourse and popular
culture; most strikingly, in the wake of the #MeToo movement (Rebecca Traister 2018).
Whereas popular feminism has hitherto been characterised by a clear repudiation of
anger (Rosalind Gill 2016; Sarah Banet-Weiser 2018), might we be in the midst of a new
shift, in which anger now might itself be becoming popular? As signalled in the
introduction to this Commentary and Criticism section, we might ask: has rage become
all the rage? Mainstream media culture seems to be newly awash with the public voicing
of women’s rage and trauma, in a way that seems and feels unprecedented (Jilly Boyce
Kay forthcoming). What might we make of this new visibility of women’s anger in media
© 2019 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
2 COMMENTARY
culture? As Sarah Banet-Weiser (2018) shows, to prosper in an economy of visibility has
only very limited value for feminism, because this is precisely where it tends to remain—
at the level of visibility. While white masculine anger becomes institutionalised, empow-
ered and weaponised, might this female rage—like popular feminism—fail to move
beyond the realm of visibility?
Mishra does not account for women’s rage in the “age of anger;” rather, he conflates this
with masculine ressentiment. Indeed, there seems to be a wider tendency for the media to
neglect women’s anger in discussions of contemporary politics and populist anger (consider
the journalistic clammering to understand the concerns and resentments of white men who
voted for Trump, but the almost total lack of mainstream media interest in why so many
black women voted for Clinton; or the ways in which the figure of the “left behind” voter in
the Brexit referendum is so frequently imagined as a white working-class man). Women’s
rage cannot be understood in precisely the same way that Mishra understands anger—that
is, as the ugly but inevitable product of modernity’s failures to deliver on its promises of
autonomy and equality—because women were simply never made those same promises. If
the anger that Mishra identifies as characteristic of our contemporary political culture is
based on the humiliation and resentment of (white) men—and as something corrosive,
sabotaging, and malignant—then how might we conceive of and cultivate an anger that is
legitimate, creative, animating and, most of all feminist? Of course, this is not to suggest that
all anger that is experienced, embodied and expressed by all women is in opposition to the
ressentiment identified by Mishra, or that it is inevitably virtuous or progressive—we need
only think of Anne Coulter, or Marine Le Pen, or the fact that so many white women voted
for Trump, to understand that regressive, hateful rage on the one hand, and productive
anger on the other, do not align uncomplicatedly with gender binaries. The task, then, is to
identify more precisely which angers we might wish to nurture and develop.
Public anger and affective injustice
In most western philosophical traditions, anger is seen as morally problematic and
politically counterproductive, as Amia Srinivasan 2016 argues. Because it traps its agents
in an inward-looking, retributive and sometimes narcissistic frame—blocking the possibi-
lity of a more just future that is based on civic love and generosity—it is most often
construed as fundamentally antithetical to political justice (Martha C. Nussbaum 2016). On
the other hand, there is a compelling tradition from Black feminist thought which under-
stands anger as a productive resource, most famously as expressed by Audre Lorde:
Every woman has a well-stocked arsenal of anger potentially useful against those oppres-
sions, personal and institutional, which brought that anger into being. Focused with preci-
sion it can become a powerful source of energy serving progress and change. And when
I speak of change, I do not mean a simple switch of positions or a temporary lessening of
tensions, nor the ability to smile or feel good. I am speaking of a basic and radical alteration
in all those assumptions underlining our lives (Audre Lorde 1997 [1981], 280)
Brittney Cooper (2018) has also written recently on the eloquence of black feminist rage—she
draws heavily on Lorde, while also acknowledging that anger is not always “focussed with
precision.” She suggests that anger can be “messy,” particularly for black girls and women who
FEMINIST MEDIA STUDIES 3
do not have the same kinds of access to the “process” and reflection necessary for focussed
anger.
Amia Srinivasan (2018) has written an excellent and nuanced defence of anger,
against Martha Nussbaum’s Aristotelian notion of anger as counterproductive.
Srinivasan, following Lorde, notes how anger, as well as being a source of energy, can
also be clarifying; it is “a means by which women can come to better see their
oppression” (2018, 126). Nonetheless, she notes that even when anger is apt—when it
is a fully justified and appropriate response to injustice—getting angry is a risky endea-
vour for those who are “already stereotyped as rageful, violent, or shrill” (136). Of course,
those whose anger is most likely to disqualify them from the racist, sexist terms of the
“civilised” public sphere are women—and most especially Black women. Such victims of
injustice, Srinivasan argues, are too often forced to choose between publicly expressing
their justified rage, and modulating or suppressing it in order to satisfy the norms of the
public sphere. Srinivasan terms this unequal access to public rage and the painful
normative conflicts that it generates “affective injustice”.
We only need to think of some recent displays of anger to see gendered affective injustice
at work in media and political culture. The #MeToo movement was in many ways about
female anger: anger at widespread and normalized sexual harassment in all industries; anger
at so few harassers being held accountable for their violent actions; anger at not being
believed for so long; anger at having to relive trauma again and again, often on social
media, in order to be finally heard. Yet, during the year in which #MeToo stories circulated
on media platforms, other stories competed for dominance and visibility: stories of male
anger, of men claiming the mantle of victimhood, lashing out at women (and feminists in
particular) as the perpetrators of their injuries. Because this assumed injury to men—often
white men in positions of power—was so unusual to them, given their privileged lives, this
male anger was often framed by the mainstream media as somehow more authentic than
female anger. Indeed, this is a clear example of affective injustice, where angry women have
been historically cast as hysterical and irrational, and men’s anger has been seen as an
appropriately masculine response. We need only to reflect on the US Supreme Court (then)
nominee Brett Kavanaugh’s Senate Hearings, where he was accused of sexually assaulting
Christine Blasey Ford in high school, to understand some of the dynamics of affective injustice.
During the hearings, it seemed so painfully clear that Blasey Ford understood extremely
well the affective terms upon which she would be understood as “credible” and “legitimate.”
She presented her case powerfully and quietly, testifying to the long-lasting trauma of
sexual assault and humiliation (“indelible in the hippocampus is the laughter”). Because
women are so often not believed, especially if they are angry, Blasey Ford appeared to work
very hard to ensure that her communicative mode was free of any angry inflection.
Kavanaugh, on the other hand, took the opportunity to display a full range of emotions,
from rage to petulant whining. He was disrespectful of his questioners, he was self-absorbed,
he was irrational. Yet his anger, at least according to some, came from an authentic place: how
dare someone accuse him of this horrible act, and as Republican Senator Lindsay Graham
shouted, “destroy this guy’s life”? Kate Manne (2018) has written astutely of the ways that the
support shown for Kavanaugh was a classic case of “himpathy”: that is, “the inappropriate and
disproportionate sympathy powerful men often enjoy in cases of sexual assault, intimate
partner violence, homicide and other misogynistic behavior” (see also Kate Manne 2018a). We
might say that himpathy plays a powerful role in affective injustice; it permits and legitimises
4 COMMENTARY
the public outrage of male perpetrators, but disallows the justified anger of victims and
survivors.
For those of us who were riveted to the television during the Anita Hill/Clarence
Thomas hearings almost 30 years earlier, which were also about a claim of sexual
harassment, we couldn’t help but notice the deeply troubling similarities. Anita Hill
was calm and rational in her accusations, like Blasey Ford. Yet Hill had to fight against
racist histories which positioned Black women’s anger as even more hysterical, irrational,
and untrustworthy. Thomas, on the other hand, in his anger, called on some of those
same racist histories to position himself as the victim. Hill, as a Black woman, had no
available narrative for the telling, as Kimberlé Crenshaw (1992) has so powerfully argued.
This affective injustice has a deep history. When Thomas was confirmed as a US
Supreme Court justice, it was a moment when sexual harassment was hardly in the
national imagination in the US—at least not as something for which men should be
held accountable. But Kavanaugh was confirmed in the context of the #MeToo
movement; a movement which has at least offered widespread public awareness
that sexual harassment is a structural problem. What should we make of this? The
sense of overwhelming despair that so many of us felt following Kavanaugh’s con-
firmation was surely connected to the realisation that the anger of #MeToo had not
been enough; that what had felt like the unprecedented power of women’s rage
could not, in the end, batter down the doors of white male entitlement; that
misogyny, after all those deeply painful and traumatic disclosures—after everything
—had still won. Even if women did everything “right,” and had played by the
affective rules, as Blasey Ford had done, we would still lose, because the rules of
the game are fundamentally rigged against us. Expressing anger had not worked;
modulating anger had not worked; affective injustice, it seems, has us trapped in
a double-bind and it is difficult to see how we might ever get out of it. When anger is
mobilised for feminist ends and still appears incapable of cracking the edifice of
patriarchal and misogynistic power, it leaves a way for deep despair to set in.
From despair to respair
Hope and despair are most often understood as one another’s opposite; indeed,
dictionary definitions position them as antonyms, as in the Oxford Dictionary which
has despair as: “The complete loss or absence of hope.” It is worth here considering that
hope and despair might not be as mutually exclusive as is commonly supposed. Terry
Eagleton (2015) distinguishes between hope on the one hand, and optimism on the
other; to have an optimistic disposition is actually deeply conservative—it assumes that
things will get better without the need for any genuine investment or hard work. Hope,
by contrast, requires a confrontation with the bitterest truths—a recognition of just how
bad things are. In this sense, then, it is not so antithetical to despair. So, while optimism
functions as a block to transformative change, “bleakness, by contrast, can be a radical
posture. Only if you view your situation as critical do you recognise the need to trans-
form it” (Eagleton 2015, chapter 1). Despair can—seemingly paradoxically—be produc-
tive of hope.
Lorde and Srinivasan have pointed us towards the importance of anger’s role in
clarifying the nature and cause of injustice. Might despair, like anger, have a similar
FEMINIST MEDIA STUDIES 5
clarificatory role? If we are living in a moment when the depth, reach and power of
misogyny have become horrifyingly clear, then despair need not point towards
a political defeatism, but rather to a politically necessary illumination. After all, if we
are truly to struggle against patriarchy and neoliberal capitalism, it is of primary
importance that we confront the scale of that which we are faced with. Sara Ahmed
argues that “revolutionary forms of political consciousness involve heightening our
awareness of what there is to be unhappy about” (2010, 592). Despair need not be
a withdrawal from or a giving up on the political, then, but a kind of illuminating,
galvanising bleakness.
There is a 15th century word that has long fallen out of use but which we think is
highly apt for the current moment, and which captures this complex relationship
between hope and despair: respair means fresh hope; a recovery from despair. It speaks
to the inextricability of hope and despair: it is not only that one might follow after the
other, but also that they often simultaneously co-exist, are entangled and mutually
dependent. The presence of despair does not equate to the absence of hope: and
indeed, perhaps the presence of the former is a precondition for the meaningful
existence of the latter. It is precisely the bland, empty optimism and the denial of
anger and pain that render neoliberal and popular feminisms so devoid of any mean-
ingful political power. It is only by embracing anger and despair—and recognising them
as legitimate aspects of our politics—that we can hope for genuine, transformative
change.
In this sense, respair is in opposition to what Lauren Berlant (2011) has astutely called
“cruel optimism.” For women, Berlant argues, investing in a utopic normativity (including
investing in the state) is decidedly against women’s best interests, it is a “love affair with
conventionality” (Lauren Berlant 2008, 2). Investing in a politics of anger that insists that
women must be quiet and “rational” in order to be credible is cruel optimism. While
understandable, refusing to express rage at systemic injustice because of the way
women’s rage is widely understood and interpreted will work only to retrench patriar-
chal relations, not disrupt them. When, in a himpathetic culture, victimhood is appro-
priated not by those who have historically suffered but by those in positions of
patriarchal power, such as with Kavanaugh, this maintains a hegemonic gender order.
When rage is disallowed from those who suffer and offered as a platform for the
privileged, it establishes a symbolic redistribution of gender asymmetry. At the same
time, a feminist politics of anger also needs to account for the double-bind of affective
injustice; a recognition that the public expression of rage comes with its own treacher-
ous potential for backlash. Rage is full of feminist possibility, but also of risk—and these
risks of rage are not evenly shared by all women.
Respair points to the inextricability of hope and despair that is entailed in any
feminist endeavour. Misogyny, racism, homophobia, transphobia, abuse, humiliation,
and exploitation are deeply endemic and everyday facts of life; these deep harms
cause trauma, pain and despair. Hope is of course necessary to help repair these
harms, but respair allows us to cultivate a hope that lets us keep sight of the fact that
we are vulnerable, and damaged, and that we have been hurt in ways that perhaps we
might never get better from. The despair of respair, after all, is what has given us the
bleak illumination we need to allow for any meaningful political work to take place.
Things are worse than we thought; the task is so much greater than we knew—this can
6 COMMENTARY
be mobilising rather than immobilising, if we try to rethink despair as something to be
worked with rather than against. Respair is a hope that comes out of brokenness, but
which does not mandate optimism or insist on happiness as an antidote or cure. Respair
always has room for “affect aliens” (Sara Ahmed 2011) who are otherwise made to feel
estranged from emotional regimes of optimism and happiness.
The despair of respair is therefore not a withdrawal or an exit from the political. It is,
to use Donna Haraway’s (2016) term, about “staying with the trouble.” As Sarah Sharma
2017 has shown, we increasingly now see a growing desire for exit, for quitting, for
saying “screw this,” and for escape. The penchant for exit, she suggests, falls along
patriarchal and masculinist lines—she terms this the “sEXIT”—and argues that such
a desire is not compatible with a feminist politics, which must always centre contingency
and care.
Respair is a hope that recognises the need for care, for mutual support, for the never-
ending need for collectivity. This differentiates it from an individual rage; respair insists
on what Silvia Federici 2018 calls a “collective subject.” We might think of respair as the
feminist rejoinder to the sEXIT; respair is about staying with the trouble, sticking with the
mess, and committing to the hard work of repair collectively, not individually. Respair
recognises the intrinsic vulnerability and interdependency of humans; it recognises that
we need to carry each other, in order to not shoulder the harms of affective injustice
alone. Respair might also help us to keep hoping even when all the odds seem stacked
against us—because it is only by seeing those odds and just how big they are that we
will have any chance of beating them.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
References
Ahmed, Sara. 2010. “Killing Joy: Feminism and the History of Happiness.” Signs 35 (3): 571–594.
doi:10.1086/648513.
Ahmed, Sara. 2011. The Promise of Happiness. Durham: Duke University Press.
Banet-Weiser, Sarah. 2018. Empowered: Popular Feminism and Popular Misogyny. Durham: Duke
University Press.
Berlant, Lauren. 2008. The Female Complaint: The Unfinished Business of Sentimentality in American
Culture. Durham: Duke University Press.
Berlant, Lauren. 2011. Cruel Optimism. Durham: Duke University Press.
Cooper, Brittney. 2018. Eloquent Rage: A Black Feminist Discovers Her Superpower. New York: St
Martins Press.
Crenshaw, Kimberlé. 1992. Whose Story Is It, Anyway? Feminist and Antiracist appropriations of
Anita Hill. In Race-ing Justice, En-Gendering Power: Essays on Anita Hill, Clarence Thomas, and the
Construction of Social Reality, edited by Toni Morrison, 402–440. New York: Pantheon Books.
Eagleton, Terry. 2015. Hope without Optimism. London: Yale University Press.
Federici, Silvia. 2018. Re-enchanting the World: Feminism and the Politics of the Commons. Toronto:
Between the Lines.
Gill, Rosalind. 2016. “Post-postfeminism?: New Feminist Visibilities in Postfeminist Times.” Feminist
Media Studies 16 (4): 610–630.
FEMINIST MEDIA STUDIES 7
Haraway, Donna. 2016. Staying with The Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. London: Duke
University Press.
Kay, Jilly Boyce forthcoming. “Celebritised Anger: Theorising Women’s Rage, Voice and Affective
Injustice through Hannah Gadsby’s Nanette.” In Gender and Australian Celebrity Culture, edited
by Anthea Taylor and Joanna McIntyre. New York: Routledge.
Lorde, Audre. 1997 [1981]. “The Uses of Anger.” Women’s Studies Quarterly 25 (1/2): 278–285.
Manne, Kate. 2018. “Brett Kavanaugh and America’s “Himpathy” Reckoning.” New York Times.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/26/opinion/brett-kavanaugh-hearing-himpathy.html
Manne, Kate. 2018a. Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Mishra, Pankaj. 2017. The Age of Anger: A History of the Present. London: Penguin.
Nussbaum, Martha C. 2016. Anger and Forgiveness: Resentment, Generosity, and Justice. Oxford:
Oxford University Press.
Sharma, Sarah. 2017. “Exit and the Extensions of Man.” Transmediale: Art and Digiculture. https://
transmediale.de/content/exit-and-the-extensions-of-man
Srinivasan, Amia. 2016. “Would Politics Be Better off without Anger?” The Nation. https://www.
thenation.com/article/a-righteous-fury/
Srinivasan, Amia. 2018. “The Aptness of Anger.” The Journal of Political Philosophy 26 (2): 123–144.
doi:10.1111/jopp.2018.26.issue-2.
Traister, Rebecca. 2018. Good and Mad: The Revolutionary Power of Women’s Anger. London: Simon
& Schuster.
