In the fall and winter of 2017, I spent the majority of my time revising my dissertation, which I then defended successfully in December of that year. Like many of my fellow graduate students, I was working on my dissertation while constantly keeping an eye on the job market. Keeping an eye on things is necessary to know what is happening in the field and to stay informed, but it also means that my attention is directed elsewhere or redirected.
In the following “pages” I want to think about empathy, including the possibilities and dangers of empathy as a motivation to feminist action.1 At least twice in the last 24 hours prior to the initial draft of this piece, somebody had said to me, “I feel you.” And I appreciated it. But: I am suspicious of this feeling.
Social media has held an important place in my development as an intersectional feminist scholar-activist. Running the Coalition of Women in German Twitter page since October 2014 has allowed me to engage a broad audience in a diverse set of issues. And yet I acknowledge that I am often preaching to the choir, with retweets and favorites coming from like-minded individuals.
In The Promise of Happiness (2010), Sara Ahmed understands happiness as the promise of “happy objects,” as well as a form of affect that “sticks,” i.e. “sustains or preserves the connection between ideas, values and objects” that are also social goods (34).