Abstract Drawing on Sara Ahmed's concept of killjoy activism, I explore how Antje Rávik Strubel's Blaue Frau employs a killjoy poetics that refuses to brush over violence, asymmetry, injury and force. Instead, the novel intervenes in affective textures of happiness and reconciliation, and forms activist and ecological networks of resistance. I build on Ahmed's thinking, on Sarah Colvin's notion of vitalising aesthetics, on Brigitte Bargetz's engagement with affective politics, and on contemporary ecofeminist ideas to discuss how Strubel's novel as a piece of European writing dwells on microscopic remnants of trauma and resistance. Against a dominant politics of ignoring and forgetting, the novel turns its protagonist's body into a literary archive of political materialisations of power, resonating with Ann Cvetkovich's account of unnoticed traumas and bad feelings. Strubel's novel unites a network of killjoys and complainers who confront structural violence and the failures of the dominant trauma discourse in present‐day Europe with ‘klare Ansagen’. The killjoy network never stands still and continuously expands. These structures of increasing interconnectedness are similar to the beautiful intensities that can be found in nature's boundless forms. The glistening on the Baltic Sea or the vastness of mycelial networks perform aesthetic resistance to the stasis of the political sphere.
Alrik Daldrup (Thu,) studied this question.