A Killjoy Survival Kit: Representing Feminist Identities Through Object Elicitation Interviews

This article describes a visual and participatory research study exploring the ways young adults represent their feminist identities through objects. We detail our two-phase virtual approach – combining individual object elicitation interviews with group participatory data analysis sessions. We show how the objects participants selected tended to reflect academic, bodily, expressive, and relational understandings of feminism, not unlike the items Sara Ahmed chose to include in her “killjoy survival kit.” Finally, we highlight the methodological insights we gained during our research process; namely, how participants played with or expanded traditional definitions of an object, selected items that held both explicitly and implicitly feminist meanings, and spoke to the context of participating during a pandemic, when many were limited to objects within their bedrooms and other domestic spaces.