Fragile Connections

This chapter offers a meditation on the theme of fragility. It reflects on how fragility can be a thread between those things deemed too easily breakable. Beginning with some descriptions of broken pots and jugs from George Eliot novels, the chapter shows how to break something is also to shatter a possibility. It considers an affinity between broken pots and the feminist killjoy as the one who flies off the handle. The chapter thus rethinks the figure of the killjoy as a container of damage or a damaged container. The chapter explores fragile shelters, as well as fragile bodies, and offers some reflections on how fragility can provide the basis of a queer and crip ethics: where a shattering is the start of something.