Paper short abstract:

This contribution is a collaborative experiment in narrativised affectivity between a feminist activist and an activist scholar bonded in friendship and comradery in turbulent times. We will attempt to co-weave our lived experiences as we reframe notions of resilience, resistance, and burnout.

Paper long abstract:

Our contribution is a collaborative testimony of affect (and affection) blurring the lines between researcher and activist working together in turbulent times and hostile environments. Crossing each other’s territories of feminist knowledge, we explore linked experiences at the intersection of our positionalities; triggered, dismissed, gaslighted, deprived, violated, medically experimented on, mentally broken. The etymology of ‘resilience’ is spiralling back but we are constantly spiralling down, we break; we trip and fall while attempting to carry the glorious message of resilience and the conditioned optimism of our activist resistance. Constantly discomforted, we are resisting on survival mode. UC50 Form. We do not understand the language that is not supposed to make sense to us. Deconditioning. We cannot ‘keep calm and carry on’ in style, we are immigrants (with a persistent accent), as pictured on the van. Gender justice. We practice high kicks on the communal bins. Accommodation. We fall asleep in Schrödinger’s litter box and wake up on the Procrustean bed. Sanity. We fail to package our fall and translate it into academic affect formulas defining burnout. Is our mental universe expanding or stretching? When ‘it seriously hurts, amiga’, we co-weave a cry against narratives of oblivion and detachment from our embodied pain. Resistance. We roll over our negative affects stubbornly, amplify the glorious failure, and echo each other’s pain readily and efficiently like a mini size amphitheatre. Trauma. We are positively hopeful that someone can open the curtains.

Co-authored with Macarena Chaviano Sánchez