Breanne Fah’s remarkable collection of manifestos, Burn It Down, chronicles 250 years of feminist “rage and dreams.” It includes more than 75 vivid treatises from around the world, each a “bleeding edge of rage and defiance” where a visionary future was born. We talked, in a series of email exchanges, about these manifestos and the enduring radical promise of feminism.
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Soraya Chemaly: Who do you think will read this book? Who do you think should read this book?
Breanne Fahs: Like all of my books, I like to think about writing and editing books that I personally want to read and that I wish existed. This is a book designed to tap into not only the cultural zeitgeist moment that we are in, particularly in terms of the painful betrayal of women happening in such a blatant way in the US, but also to recognize the transformative power of anger more broadly. So much of the academic work I read—especially outside of feminist circles—is stripped of its emotional resonance and made it to comply with “standards” that do not serve the needs of broader audiences, nor the needs of those who feel precarious or in imminent danger. In essence, this book is for those who feel enraged, fed up, overwhelmed, lonely, marginalized, betrayed, without voice, uneasy, and feral. One need not even know what a manifesto is to appreciate this particular collection. This work is about the emotional experience of transformative anger as communicated through feminist manifestoes throughout the last 150 years.
One of my favorite lines by Valerie Solanas is when she straight up says that her writing is for “whores, dykes, criminals, and homicidal maniacs.” I think there is absolutely value in making books that are for the marginalized without trying to make everyone else feel comfortable about that. I want this book to tell women that they are not alone, and more importantly, that they have never been alone in their sense of rage against patriarchy. I also think this book shows that we can feel intense solidarity with people who are raging out about issues different from our own. It is the anger itself that unites us.
And what a dream it would be, to answer your second question, if people read this book in order to better understand women’s anger, or to understand their own role in producing women’s anger. It is so difficult to talk about and within the language of anger without trying to make people feel more comfortable or at ease with it. Your work is of such immense value in how you take anger seriously without reducing its complexity.