This FEELed Note was written by FEELed Lab administrator Julia Jung.
For a while now our unofficial FEELed Lab motto has been: “We do what we can with what we have”. (Astrida likes to add “in the time that we have” at the end, but I prefer the two-liner).
October was an intense month of trying to do lots of things and figuring out what I have to give/ share/ work with. I am proud of myself for doing lots of things last month, but this FEELed Note is more a story of things not quite going as gloriously as planned or hoped and how that’s also okay – because November will be my month of rest & relaxation, hehe (and because it’s always okay; scholarship is usually slower and more messy than we’d like or pretend for it to be).
One of the big October things was that Nela and I attended the M.A.K.E. conference in Vancouver. We had had great plans to do a big FEELers meet-up at M.A.K.E., but times are difficult right now and only a few of us were able to make (lol) it. But we had a beautiful time re-connecting with Dawn Roe, Claire Fitch and Estraven Lupino-Smith ❤
One of the highlights was getting to see Dawn’s Hydrofeminist Action Generator (H.A.G.) print. It includes images we captured during Dawn’s workshop back at FEELers of the streams leading into Okanagan lake near Naramata. Check it out:
After getting back to Kelowna via a foggy drive on the Coquihalla I started listening to Ottessa Moshfegh’s “My Year of Rest and Relaxation” (2018). I was reminded about the book by a reading about it in an abstract for a paper at M.A.K.E. that – very in theme with this FEELed Note – I didn’t actually manage to go to. I had started reading “My Year of Rest and Relaxation” a few years ago, but apparently then wasn’t the moment for it, but LAST WEEK was. If you’ve read the book you’ll know it’s not actually quite a story about rest and relaxation; it’s hilariously dark, jaded, sad and alienating.
So, I invite you all to join me for a month of rest and relaxation in November.
I’d like to proclaim rest & relaxation as the opposite of “self-care”. Following Mountz et al.’s (2015) take on Slow Scholarship as a “A Feminist Politics of Resistance through Collective Action in the Neoliberal University”, I think the vibes of rest & relaxation can also be a form of resistance. If self-care vibes are performative and neoliberal, rest & relaxation vibes are unhinged and anarchic. Perhaps they can be a way of embracing slow scholarship.
The soundtrack for rest & relaxation might just be what I’ve been listening to on repeat during October: The album “Withdraw” by Fresh (2019). I’ve been particularly enjoying the unhingedness of the refrain of their song “Revenge”:
I am valued, I am loved
I will get revenge on everyone who’s done me wrong”
Going to M.A.K.E. I was very nervous thinking about what others would think about my contributions and especially my installation. I had such great plans for my installation and best intentions to do it for a while, but it only came together just before the conference. I’d been planning making a zine for it forever and had grand ideas for it’s aesthetic design, but it ended up being a simple text-only zine. Still, I’m really proud of it! Here’s what it looked like:
In the end, I felt similarly about my installation to what fresh‘s front person Kathryn Woods said about their album:
I second guess myself and care about what people think of me but the record is really honest and I am definitely proud of how i didn’t censor myself and i didn’t think ‘oh, how will this come across’ “- Kathryn Woods, 2019
How to – Rest & Relax:
Here are some suggestions for moving into rest & relaxation vibes co-sourced with others who are in dire need of rest & relaxation, too:
- Make a list of quotes from “My Year of Rest and Relaxation”, answer all e-mails and messages only with those quotes
- Cook a big pot of soup and eat it in bed
- Pick a sign of a former dean and waltz down the hallway (or watch the movie Eileen and never touch the book)
- look into and learn all about Hags (join the H.A.G. = Hydrofeminist Action Generator!!)
- Master the art of microsleep (places where you don’t think you can sleep but you actually can: 60-sec Zoom-meeting naps)
- Don’t rest while riding your bike
- Write unhinged poetry and share it with your friends
- Give up the urge to solve everyone else’s problems
References
Mountz, A., Bonds, A., Mansfield, B., Loyd, J., Hyndman, J., Walton-Roberts, M., … Curran, W. (2015). For Slow Scholarship: A Feminist Politics of Resistance through Collective Action in the Neoliberal University. ACME: An International Journal for Critical Geographies, 14(4), 1235–1259. https://doi.org/10.14288/acme.v14i4.1058
