Much contemporary discourse about feminist ire describes the phenomenon as a case of what we might call rage redux. Rebecca Traister argues in Good and Mad: The Revolutionary Power of Women’s Anger (2018) that “[t]he contemporary reemergence of women’s rage as a mass impulse comes after decades of feminist deep freeze” (2). Anger, rage, ire, and fury2 seem now to be mobilized as political tools by women increasingly often, following a decades-long period Traister names “feminist cool” where “much of the spirit of mass, brash, sustained political fury that had animated the 1960s and 1970s was muffled in the 1980s and stayed that way for decades” (5). However, this understanding of feminist affect ignores the diversity of feminists and feminisms. Young white women perhaps may have turned away from the label, using ‘humanist’ or other blander, less aggressive terms. For these women, ‘Feminist’ became a slur, and the gender debates of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries were dominated by a neoliberal, postfeminist ethos.3 Women were told by white (post)feminists to “lean in” (Sandberg), choose success, and embrace consumerism as a means to achieving self-fulfillment, independence, and resilience (Gill and Scharff; McRobbie). As a result, the term ‘feminist’ became tainted, discursively linked to combative older women and to past eras, when gender inequalities were perceived as truly heinous (McRobbie; Scharff; Traister), to the extent that as late as 2013, actor Susan Sarandon seemingly uncritically had internalized the core tenets of neoliberal white postfeminism. In an interview for The Guardian, Sarandon stated: “I think of myself as a humanist because I think it’s less alienating to people who think of feminism as being a load of strident bitches…” (Day n.p.). As a public figure, celebrity, and cultural icon with a certain amount of clout, Sarandon has the power to influence public discourse as well as to echo and disseminate dominant ideals and ideas.

However, women of color often did not have the luxury of turning away from feminism, and so the “deep freeze” Traister mentions is more aptly understood as a kind of erasure of women of color feminisms. Black feminist writers and thinkers along with Indigenous feminists produced multiple works that did not accept the postfeminist, individualist ideas of Sandberg and others during the “deep freeze” period. Although arguing for coalition building between feminist groups, works such as the Combahee River Collective’s “A Black Feminist Statement” (1979) did not eschew anger and other “ugly feelings.” Rather, like Audre Lorde in “The Uses of Anger: Women Responding to Racism” (1981), they argued for their usefulness as resistance. So rather than a general lack of women’s fury, “the mass, brash” kind of fury Traister notes was deliberately silenced by more appeasing, white-centered feminist ideals. As a result, the rage that has unfurled in the last decade since Trump entered the political arena is perceived as a new phenomenon, because the efforts of women of color are not always acknowledged.

As a response to this whitewashing of feminist rage, contemporary women of color feminists reclaim a long tradition of rejecting this type of neoliberal, white, postfeminist ideology, because it often privileges the already-privileged and undermines collective action while ignoring the intersectional, structural, and systemic factors in women’s struggles (Lorde, “An Open Letter”; hooks, “Dig Deep”; Kay and Banet-Weiser). The essays, manifestos, and the political or “protest poetry” of previous generations resonate in the works by the women of color slam poets I cite here, who openly and unironically embrace the characterization “a load of strident bitches” as a feminist badge of honor.

This embrace of raucous refusal and noisy bitchiness has its roots in a deep sense of being fed up, of having reached one’s limit (Traister; Kay and Banet-Weiser). In other words, this poetic fury constitutes a kind of feminist “snap”—a moment of rupture, when something becomes too much or when it appears to become too much. In her 2017 lecture “Snap! Feminist Moments, Feminist Movements,” Sara Ahmed states,

This unnoticed pressure is highly racialized. The contemporary focus on “women’s anger” as new is ahistorical and tends to overlook the women of color—like Lorde and hooks—who did not take part in the “feminist deep freeze” that Traister discusses.

As an interpretative framework, the feminist snap makes obvious ugly feelings like embitterment, anger, disgust, frustration, and fury, all of which play a central role in producing or catalyzing spiteful reactions. Spite is a reactive and future-directed emotion that is often tied to and mobilized by other emotions, and in the case of feminist spite, I argue that fury and its cousin emotions become a means of endurance and refusal in spite of oppression and violence. Slam fury is often mobilized deliberately, tactically, and spitefully, to spit in the face of what bell hooks, across several publications, calls “imperialist white supremacist capitalist patriarchy.” This protest is spiteful, because it arises out of deep frustration and desperation, and it is in some sense futile. As Simon McCarthy-Jones notes in his 2020 book Spite: The Upside of Your Dark Side, “Spite may be the last weapon of the downtrodden” (McCarthy-Jones 61). Mobilized deliberately and optimistically, the fury of the poets is meant to upset, to offend, or to cause a rupture within the system, building on a longer tradition of feminists employing anger as a political tool (Ahmed, “Snap!”; Lee; Traister; Kay and Banet-Weiser). This may be a form of weak critique, or what McCarthy-Jones calls “weak spite,” which “rather than requiring the actor to incur a personal cost while harming another, simply requires the actor not to benefit from harming the other” (McCarthy-Jones 92). Harm in this sense does not just include physical or extreme harm but can also manifest as deliberate acts that bother or cause offense. They are weak if they incur little cost but strong if they incur a heavy toll on the spiteful.

Ceremonial rage is akin to weak spite in that it costs little; however, this does not mean that it cannot be effective or have real consequences. Recently, in books such as Soraya Chemaly’s Rage Becomes Her: The Power of Women’s Anger (2018), Brittney Cooper’s Eloquent Rage: A Black Feminist Discovers Her Superpower (2018), and Myisha Cherry’s The Case for Rage (2021), to name a few, the authors trace fury and rage as effective and affective strategies of anti-racist, feminist rebellion, creativity, and care—especially for black and other minoritized women. Often centered around the 2016 US Presidential election and its aftermath, these books point to a temporal and emotional peak in women’s fury, an epoch that white actress Amber Tamblyn calls an Era of Ignition (2019). In this way, Tamblyn echoes Chemaly, who argues that “[t]his is an era of angry women and women willing to make noise. This is not a luxury but a necessity” (Chemaly 255). Here, however, Chemaly is hinting at a longer historical trend of women’s fury by evoking Audre Lorde’s influential texts “Poetry Is not a Luxury” (1977) and “The Uses of Anger: Women Responding to Racism” (1981). In the former speech, Lorde discusses poetry as a feminized and feminist language that is vital for translating emotion into action, and in the latter speech, Lorde claims anger as a productive emotion in the face of racism. Anger can be harnessed and mobilized for revolution, because women of color have a right to be angry and to show that anger: “Anger is an appropriate reaction to racist attitudes, as is fury when the actions arising from those attitudes do not change” (Sister Outsider 129). In a much-quoted section of this speech, Lorde claims that

Thus, what Myisha Cherry calls “Lordean rage” is a righteous reaction and challenge to racist, misogynist anger and sexist spite (Cherry 5).

Although this is outside the scope of this article, misogynist violence and racist anger deserve honorable mentions as backdrop for the ugly feelings expressed through slam and spoken word poetry in return. In her moral philosophical exploration of misogyny, Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny (2018), Kate Manne notes how misogynist ugly feelings and hostility towards women often develop when misogynists feel the status quo is threatened. Although she writes of “attitudes,” it is important to note that she refers to affect when she says of the emotions related to this misogyny that “attitudes in the family of hostility have played a key role. These have included resentment, spite, ill will, and various threatening and punitive tendencies” (Manne 58). People who hate women do so with a cultural force as backing and support. As Manne points out, misogyny—and I will add racism—is systemic and “part of a (much) larger system” (71), in which women are denigrated and subjected to violence in both physical and symbolic forms; in fact, it is “continuous with a whole host of ways of enforcing gender [and racial] conformity” (71). This is a question of ideology and of interpellation. As Manne states, “When one’s effigy is one’s body, one burns right along with it” (59). Women’s identities and bodies are subjected to “hostile attitudes” that are both salient and capable of doing “irrevocable damage” (71).

Thus, as a reaction and resistance to these hostile systemic attitudes, the poetic mobilization of anger and its ilk for spiteful purposes offers a kind of appropriation of emotionalities that have traditionally been tied to “unladylike” behavior and comportment. Anger is an “outlaw emotion,” as Allison Jaggar has it (Jaggar 166), and it manifests in temporally specific ways for women. Anger, ire, rage, and fury are always already outlawed for them. As Chemaly writes:

Reading slam as one important manifestation and avenue for disseminating rage challenges the idea that anger is not the “political property of women,” and understanding this rage as part of a ceremony enables a deeper engagement with the form and a reevaluation of its importance as a cultural and literary phenomenon.

Furthermore, the type of furious feminist spite expressed in slam poetry is not merely an expression of petty resentment, or what Cherry calls “ressentiment rage” (Cherry 19–20), although resentment often figures in producing spite. Feminist spite is performative, an active and forceful refusal more akin to Nietzschean ressentiment4 against heteropatriarchal misogynist violence and oppression. Thus, ressentiment-spite often manifests as an obstinate refusal, a (willful) ‘no,’ to echo Sara Ahmed (“Not in the Mood;” “No.”). She understands this no as a speech act: “an address; delivered to a person or made against a system or given in a situation,” and she continues, as,

For feminists—especially feminists of color—no is risky because it is perceived as spiteful (see also Ahmed, Living a Feminist Life 195–96), and because it reveals established gendered and racialized boundaries; it is often “dismissed as impertinent in the sense of rudely bold or boldly rude and can be judged as an act of political vandalism” (“No.” n.p.). This feminist ‘no’ echoes throughout much contemporary slam poetry as an expression of refusal, manifesting as both poetic theme, embodied performance, and dominant tone.

In using the word of ‘tone,’ I am drawing on two different conceptions, both of which are relevant to my analyses below. Firstly, in Ugly Feelings (2005), Ngai defines the concept of ’tone’ as the “literary or cultural artifact’s feeling tone” (28), a sense created by the reader in their encounter with the aesthetics and affective literary devices of a text. Thus, tone is not the same as attitude, nor is it necessarily an intended effect of a given text, but rather the reader’s interpretation of various intra-, inter-, and extratextual elements interacting with the text as a whole. Ngai clarifies:

Importantly, this conceptualization of tone also “cannot be reduced to representations of feeling within the artwork” (Ngai 2005: 28). It is a slippery concept that is notoriously hard to pinpoint and define simply. “The concept’s power resides precisely in its amorphousness,” Ngai claims (30). In this article, I exploit this amorphousness as a strength and as a fruitful way to explore spite and fury as similarly amorphous and often expressed as “free-style” emotions (Campbell 67).

Furthermore, in performance studies tone is used to refer to ‘tone of voice’ and has to do with the ways in which performers vocalize, intone, and enunciate. Both of these uses of tone become important tools when analyzing spoken word poetries, as the feeling-tone is directly influenced by the voice-tone of the performers, and similarly, tone is central for our understanding of the force of a ‘no’ and other affective vocabularies. In this way, performers have a lot of power over their audiences, and especially in poetry slam competitions, the voice-tones are often intensely overwhelming live experiences meant to affect the audience, and to provoke the audience to participate vocally and in embodied ways. Hooting, shouting, clapping, snapping, whistling, and other bodily, nonverbal forms of responses are not just tolerated but actively encouraged, if not demanded in poetry slam (Glazner; Aptowicz; Johnson; Bennett).

Although spoken word and slam poetry are often used interchangeably, here I refer to slam poetry specifically, as a sub-type of spoken word. Poetry Slam is a competitive poetry reading event, a form of entertainment that was first invented in Chicago in the 1980s by Marc Kelly Smith, a white working-class poet, who wanted to rejuvenate American poetry and to energize the audience, by offering venues of expression outside of the stale poetry landscape (Olson; Somers-Willett; Johnson). Smith invented the rules of the competition, which in large part are still followed in most slams today (though often with minor tweaks). Poets must perform original work, cannot use props or costumes, and cannot perform poems longer than three minutes. There are penalties for going over time. In many competitions, the ceremony kicks off with a performance by a “sacrificial poet” (Somers-Willett 28), who sets an evaluative standard. This opening slammer performs and receives a score (to find a baseline from which to score the other slams) but does not participate in the competition.

In the poetry slam hosted by Marc Kelly Smith at the Green Mill Cocktail Lounge in Chicago, they still follow these original rules (Johnson). They start the show with a formulaic call-and-response act meant to outline the format (and to inform newcomers), but most importantly, to reiterate and strengthen the ceremony. As Javon Johnson states in Killing Poetry: Blackness and the Making of Slam and Spoken Word Communities (2017),

Thus, the established set of rules of a poetry slam make it a form that lends itself well to understanding it as a form of extended ceremony. Everything must be performed and carried out exactly right, and each poem fulfills nearly archetypal roles. In many of the general competitions there are seemingly fixed categories or tropes of poets, such as the Angry Lesbian/Black Woman, the Sad White Girl, and the Bipolar Cisman, to name a few. Obviously, my categorizations are somewhat flippant, but these poet-tropes serve important ceremonial functions. And just like in many ceremonial settings, humor—often in the form of sarcastic, carnivalesque satire—and games play important roles (Hoffman). The whole slam is one long game with scores, prizes, winners, and losers.

Author and linguist John McWhorter (2003) has pointed out that there seems to be a certain level of homogeneity represented in the style of slam poetry, despite the slam scene’s wish and push for diversity and heterogeneity of the slammers (see also Glazner; Aptowicz; Johnson). A lot of slam poetry performances exhibit what McWhorter somewhat dismissively terms “a formulaic rage” (63), and although he does not elaborate on what the phrase means exactly, he seemingly uses it to dismiss slam poetry as insincere or exaggerated in terms of its usage of affect. He notes that the poets often rely on gimmicks, the third of which he describes as the “most constricting, [namely] the easy reaching for recreational outrage” (63). In The Cultural Politics of Slam Poetry: Race, Identity, and the Performance of Popular Verse in America (2009), Susan B. A. Somers-Willett expands on this to argue that “[m]ost slam poets acknowledge this homogeneity in rhetorical style—the ‘formulaic rage’ of loud, self-righteous declarations—while at the same time fiercely disavowing such homogeneity in their own work” (30). This understanding of formulaic affect, however, focuses exclusively on the form that this rage often takes, and in this way constitutes a kind of tone policing.5 And one might add, somewhat glibly, what literary genre is not in some ways formulaic? Of course, it cannot be denied that many slam poets—especially slam poets of color and women—perform a form of rage that is recognizable because it gets deployed repeatedly and similarly by many different poets. It may seem like the poets only copy a successful formula as a mere gimmick, but it may also be that many women and especially women of color are truly furious (see e.g. Lorde, “the Uses of Anger”; Cooper; Chemaly). Instead, as I will elaborate on in my analysis below, the rage needs to be understood as having a specific function for the poets, as a type of ceremonial emotionality, a collective affect that does not indicate disingenuousness or mere superficial, empty posturing, but a deeper sense of communal affective belonging. It might be that the poets echo each other and that their rage is formulaic, making it seem insincere to McWhorter and Somers-Willett, but these persistent reiterations of rage should be seen as ways to reinforce, celebrate, and propagate fury for a reason.

Despite the rituals and fixed format of the competitions themselves, slam poems represent a queer form that “exhibits a certain fluidity and adaptability in writing and performance. In addition to selecting poems they feel will be best received by a given audience, slam poets adapt the language, tone, speed, and energy of a poem to different contexts, audiences, and venues” (Somers-Willett 25). Thus, the performances exist in multiple forms and temporalities simultaneously. In other words, as Somers-Willett further notes, “The slipperiness of the slam poem is that it exists both everywhere and nowhere at once: it may exist as text or in performance bounded by space and time or as utterance and image in recorded media” (26). Furthermore, this fluidity of form and temporality allows me to extend the metaphor of the ceremony to digital, online spaces, where slam poetry and spoken word flourish. My analyses below would not be possible without the existence of the digitally recorded versions available on YouTube and other social media, and by making the performances available across the globe, organizers of the slam events and the poets ensure that the energy of the ceremony is further circulated.

Slam poets are often activists, young people of color, and often belong to the LGBTQ+ community (Rivera; Xuan; Chepp), and, furthermore, the most popular ones often out-compete the straight white ablebodied and ableminded cismen that perform. Thus, the slam community in the US constitutes a kind of poetic “undercommons,” to borrow Stefano Harney and Fred Moten’s term. Their notion of the undercommons is defined in their seminal 2013 monograph as: “Maroon communities of composition teachers, mentorless graduate students, adjunct Marxist historians, out or queer management professors, state college ethnic studies departments, closed-down film programs, visa-expired Yemeni student newspaper editors, historically black college sociologists, and feminist engineers” (30). Extending this definition from its anchorage in the academy, Erin Manning in The Minor Gesture (2016) opens up the concept further: “The undercommons is not a given site, not a place predefined, not even a recognizable enclave we could return to having found it once. The undercommons is an emergent collectivity that is sited in the encounter” (8). Emergent and in flux, the undercommons thus is a space and position of refusal and opposition, made up of an unstable collectivity of precaritized and marginalized folks who are fed up and ready to snap. As Harney and Moten write: “we refuse to ask for recognition and instead we want to take apart, dismantle, tear down the structure that, right now, limits our ability to find each other, to see beyond it and to access the places that we know lie outside its walls” (6). Slam poetry as poetic undercommons offers a home for poets who are not part of the literary establishment, or what Charles Bernstein has called “official verse culture” (16). The origins of slam as an institution encourages this interpretation. Slam—following spoken word—arose as a space for the voiceless—the white working class, queer, black, and Latinx folks among others—to find a voice and to give voice to others like themselves (Aptowicz; Somers-Willett; Johnson; Bennett). Similarly, Bennett states that “[s]poken word has always been a haven for oppressed peoples; from its infancy in the 1960s to its current heyday, the most prominent figures in the modern spoken-word movement have been black and brown poets, many of whom have a strong political bent to their writing” (Introduction).

However, it is also important to point out the commercial and establishment entanglements of slam. The gradual evolution of slam has led to its current form, a popular poetic competition that spans the nation (and the globe), often making poetic superstars out of its constituent members. For instance, Porsha Olayiwola—whom Poetry Slam Inc. labels “Black, poet, dyke-goddess, hip-hop feminist, womanist, friend”—was appointed poet laureate of the city of Boston in 2020 (Poets.org). Olayiwola, known in the community as Porsha O., rose to fame with her 2014 sarcastic performance of “Angry Black Woman,” in which she playfully but furiously excoriates racist ideas about gender, racialization, and emotionality. This slam along with her other performances won her the Individual World Poetry Slam in Phoenix, Arizona (2014).

This means that there is a constant tension within the slam world between acceptance, resistance, refusal, and recognition, which further destabilizes the form and opens up a field of possibilities for renewal and fruitful innovations. “It is a kind of hokey-pokey we spoken word artists are forced to play,” Alix Olson states, “one foot in and one foot out of mainstream existence. Together, we form this essential community, a hip-hop ballet—coming together, twirling, lifting, dizzyingly determined to be en pointe” (xvii). Although a way of reclaiming space and time, the contemporary slam poetry of women of color refuses recognition and instead revels in what I call a naked will to bother—spite that works to defy, challenge, and refuse. Slammers are poetic agonists in ritual combat for not just the cash prizes that come with winning a poetry slam, but also for authenticity and social change (see also Somers-Willett).

As problematic or contested as the term may be, authenticity is highly valued in slam performances and in their attempt to transmit the sense of rawness of emotion and authenticity from the live events to online audiences, slam poetry venues often eschew high-tech productions (Bennett). Cameras are almost always stationary, and the angle is almost always fixed and eye-level with the performer. Occasionally, the camera angle is lower, which may be intentional in order to mimic an audience member’s gaze. In all three videos analyzed below, the camera angle is static, the audio is gritty, and the performances are unedited and unfiltered. These deliberate choices underscore and help accentuate the feeling of authenticity of the poetic performances, and it disseminates the feeling of community across slam poetry’s forms (live, recorded, or—rarely—written), which in turn helps extend the ceremony.

Although I focus only on a select few videos of slam performances in this article, and although generalization is problematic, these performances constitute a series of manifestations of a larger, emergent assemblage, and thus should not be seen as individual performances but parts of a movement of rage, a continuously evolving ceremony. These slam poems are instances of an “address,” to revisit Ahmed’s words on ‘no’. The poems are protracted nos, “delivered to a person or made against a system or given in a situation” (Ahmed, “No.”). The slam poetry I analyze here takes the form of so-called epideictic oratory, i.e. strongly worded, declamatory speech against a specific topic or person, expressing resentment and fury towards those people and institutions the poets view as the cause of gendered and racialized oppressions.

This epideixis is clearly demonstrated via the highly sarcastic nature of much slam poetry. For instance, the 20206 slam “White Boys,” by Gabriella Guajardo, known as Gigi Bella, declaims, or “calls out,” white male entitlement. This slam centers on white men and abusive, racist, sexist, and colonialist behaviors and micro-aggressions. Initially Bella’s voice-tone is playfully sarcastic, using the trope of the hipster-white-boy to situate her critique. “White Boy says, ‘I had to wait in line at Starbucks today, so I know about oppression,’” she announces at the top of the performance, and throughout the slam, this generic white boy trope is used to call attention to the stereotyping white boys get away with, by initially mocking and stereotyping them in turn:

Bella performs her poem in a fast-paced, breathless way, punctuating her lines and words with sardonic intonations, frustrated hand gestures matching her words, and scornful facial expressions showing her disgust and repulsion.

From this animated mockery, the poem turns to how these white boy tropes obscure a deeper, more sinister discourse rooted in misogyny, colonialist violence, and racism. Beginning with a series of casual digs at white boy tendencies, Bella mocks: “White Boy says he knows all about brown people because of all of the Spanish girls he’s dated,” and then moves into a critique of the commodification of brown women’s bodies in a stanza about “horchata” or as White Boy calls it: “Mexican titty milk.” Bella speculates about how White Boy could use this milk to set up a milk station at a local hipster “cold brew coffee shop and start turning a profit, while I bust my horchitis [her breasts] in another episode of cultural appropriation at its finest.” This seems to be a direct nod to what bell hooks calls “eating the other” (Black Looks 21–39), a form of symbolic, cultural cannibalism, which involves those with the cultural power to back them consuming Otherness as a way to spice up their own lives. As hooks argues, it is about transforming and enriching the Self via fetichizing the Other and benefitting from this exploitation.

Bella then turns from this playful mockery of cultural appropriation to violent manifestations of the practice. Initially, the white boy teases her and calls her “dirty”: “White Boy thinks my brown mouth is dirty. With every flip of my chingona tongue, with every ‘fuck you’ shouted at the orange TV pendejo” (a reference to Trump), and significantly, “when I tell him I’m tied to this land, to my native Aztlán blood and the red dirt in my teeth.” Accompanying Bella’s words are several important gestures, such as the use of an extended middle finger to enhance the ‘fuck you,’ and also several enunciatory features, such as heavy stresses on hard initial phonemes. This results in a sense that furious spite, outrage, and hurt spill out of every word when she states: “White Boy responds by texting me a picture of a cartoon Pocahontas, naked, ass out, standing next to John Smith, who’s holding a looped belt, smiling,” an image of colonialist hypersexualization of indigenous women’s bodies, ripe for the taking, there to be beaten and conquered, disguised as a joke. And the joking continues, when Bella recounts how White Boy thinks it would be sexy if she says “colonize me, Daddy” during sex.

One of the most haunting imageries Bella employs is the metaphor of skinning rabbits. Recounting that while lying on the chest of her white lover, he strokes her hair and tells her that “bunny rabbits are calmed to stillness and forced to trust just before someone slides the skin off their small bodies.” Bella simultaneously mimes calmly stroking a rabbit before turning to panicked anger. Her hand gestures speed up along with her words moving toward the culmination of the poem; that is, panic, fear, and spite are all mixed in the poem’s feeling-tone, expressed though Bella’s voice-tone—Bella’s body language and enunciation both become increasingly shaky. Gasping between the lines, short fast inhales, and a quivering voice announce the emotionality, while the words spitefully critique white cismasculine violence—both the symbolic and the physical kind.

Bella’s performance is clearly angry, and she is clearly transmitting more than anger, but it is hard to judge from the sound of the video how the audience responds or whether they resonate with her emotionality. What interests me here is, firstly, the poetic expression of these complex feelings, and secondly, the familiarity of her emotions and performance devices.

Firstly, stretching her hands out to the sides—in a posture often used on the slam scene—pushing against an imagined box or the invisible abuser, she chants, “I just wanna kick and push my way out of his palms, and I am all bunny-rabbit-heartbeat-sudden-will-to-live,” pounding a fist on her chest in time to the syllables of “bunny rabbit.” The last part of this quote (“bunny-rabbit-heartbeat-sudden-will-to-live”) is uttered quickly almost as if it is one long word, an example of what Sue Campbell calls “free-style feelings” (71). These are types of emotions expressed in terms outside of our common understandings or vocabularies, for instance, they may be expressed poetically, experimentally, or non-verbally. Bella is not just communicating fear. Not just rage. This is more like humiliation-frustration-fear-panic-rage-and-more, a feeling that in Campbell’s words can “be difficult to understand through the emotion categories with which most of us are familiar” (8). As Bella shows here, poetry can be an effective affective transmitter of such free-form emotions.

Secondly, the familiarity of the gestures and movements, as well as the tone-patterns, enunciation, and use of breath, are part of what makes McWhorter and others classify these poetries as “formulaic.” However, as the audiences often respond favorably to poetic and performance elements like these, I argue that they have been codified as part of the ceremonial procession. In other types of slams, such as the depression-themed ones, the use of breaking voices, exaggerated facial expressions or tics, and shaking bodies fulfill the same function. They are familiar signifiers of specific emotional states, and this familiarity is comforting. The poets are inviting the listeners and viewers to form bonds and attachments.

Bella tells us she is suffocating under the pressure of a kind of entitled white-boy-ism, and the final line of the poem, “White Boy says, he’s already the best that there ever was” functions not just as a sarcastic indictment of contemporary toxic white masculinity but also as a clever disparagement as well as invitation. If this is the best there ever was, white boys can only do better from here on. Even more clearly than in the rest of the poem, here Bella stresses the b in ‘best’ and the w in ‘was’ making the utterance sound snarling. The video cuts out when the audience reacts, but we get a hint that Bella turns away in a move popularly known as a mic-drop, another willful, provocative, but codified part of the performances. These bodily and affective aspects of the performances result in echoes across slams that may otherwise not be overtly or explicitly linked, though in some cases, slam performers will make use of explicit intertextuality.

One of the unifying themes of slam poems—including slams that are not related to or expressing anger—is trauma and the myriad forms it takes, such as gendered trauma, racial trauma, childhood trauma, etc. This is often coupled with emotionally challenging performances that are meant to disturb and unsettle the audience. In the recording of their 2016 performance of “Anger” at the College Unions Poetry Slam Invitational, Ariana Brown and Arati Warrier offer such an embodied performance of trauma, fury, refusal, and endurance. Warrier and Brown’s performance is delivered as a duet, their voices sometimes blending as a chorus and other times separate, complementing and repeating each other’s experiences. Their connected voices are strategically employed to convey a sense of communal experience as well as communal resistance.

Their performance vacillates in tone between embitterment, fear, anger, and refusal, beginning with an image of embattlement, bodies and lives under attack: “My own body [is] the first castle I should learn to live in,” Brown utters in a shaking voice.7 Together they expand on this metaphor of the body as a castle by speaking in unison: “*a structure built to protect against attack.*” “I’ll be fighting for every piece of myself” and “brown women know to prepare for war” Warrier continues, while their choreographed gestures (crossing their arms and pushing hands forwards, for instance), as well as vocal tones, enhance the force of their words. The metaphor of embattlement runs throughout the poem, illustrating the hyperprecarious position of “brown women” as simultaneously “a constant sacrifice” and “just not enough.”

At the midpoint of the performance, the tone, mood, and theme shift from defensiveness and terror to anger and spiteful resistance; they “*insist on existing*” and claim the right to their fury, as “*anger is all I have to know I have not died yet,*” they chant in unison. Anger thus becomes a means of empowerment but also healing: “*Anger tells me none of this is my fault,*/builds me strong with harsh corners,/scorches the shame out of me.”

Addressing an imaginary future “daughter,” they offer anger as a strategy for survival and futurity: “My daughter will inherit an unfinished rage […] She will hold all her power in the arch of her back, the snap of her neck, a fortress in her fist. She will know she’s worth every brick[…]” Although there is a tinge of dejectedness and futility in this, as Brown and Warrier imagine their daughters have to keep fighting the same fight, the intergenerational aspect should be noted. They also propose that their contemporary rage will function as a touchstone or exemplar for future generations. Imagining their bodies as castles, “a large fortified building or group of buildings,” they invite both ancestors and future generations into their ceremonial rage:

Thus, anger is not an individual emotion but a unifying affect; expressing it offers communal empowerment and survivance, not just survival but as Gerald Vizenor has it, “an active sense of presence over absence, deracination, and oblivion; survivance is the continuance of stories, not a mere reaction, however pertinent” (1), a forceful way to insist on taking up space. Together, Brown and Warrior chant: “*Brown women find each other, hold each other, press our shaking crowns together and laugh.*” Laughter is survivance and protest, and it disrupts tragic narratives of oppression (see e.g. Willett, Willet, and Sherman; Chess; Frey). As a feminist weapon, laughter offers power, and by invoking the image of cackling, a form of laughter associated with the hated figure of the witch, they invoke feminine monstrosity, but also joy. Although feminist laughter might firstly be cathartic, it can also be creatively spiteful.

Brown and Warrier’s insistence on existing, proclaiming proudly their right to be acknowledged as human and worthy of life, may seem like an obvious point. However, black and brown women’s creation of culture and participation in politics continues to be devalued. In Banet-Weiser’s Empowered: Popular Feminism and Popular Misogyny (2018), the author concludes with a section on rage and marginalization. In this section, Banet-Weiser traces how gender, race, entitlement, and affect intersect, and in a particularly illuminating example, she illustrates one of the significant reasons why black and brown women seem especially angry. Discussing the 2017 Women’s Marches as expressions of feminist anger, Banet-Weiser problematizes whose anger counts. She recounts: “When Brooklyn blogger and activist ShiShi Rose wrote to white women about the march that ‘now is the time for you to be listening more, talking less,’ some white women reportedly canceled their trips to the march…” (Banet-Weiser 180). This example is just one of the ones Banet-Weiser uses to illustrate how White Feminists took offense to what they perceived as divisive rhetoric and silencing, but which for black and brown feminists was yet another demonstration that in mainstream feminist circles, race is deprioritized and whiteness is privileged.

This leads me to the last example, Melania Luisa Marte’s “Mad” (2018). This slam is a furious performance that reacts to this kind of silencing white feminists engage in when they call on black and brown women to ignore race for now and focus on the larger issues—according to their understanding. Overtly echoing Audre Lorde’s “The Uses of Anger,” Marte confronts the “allies” of black women, those white feminists who performatively express support but fail to listen and fail to decenter their own experiences. In Lorde’s experience, recounted in “The Uses of Anger” this is a common phenomenon. Lorde explains: “I speak of direct and particular anger at an academic conference, and a white woman says, ‘Tell me how you feel but don’t say it too harshly or I cannot hear you.’ But is it my manner that keeps her from hearing, or the threat of a message that her life may change?” (125). The question is as central to Marte’s time and experiences as it was in 1981 when Lorde posed it.

Unlike the two slams mentioned above, Marte’s does not express anger towards systems of oppression rooted solely in male or masculinist, patriarchal heteronormative terms; it more significantly aims at the complicity of white feminists in upholding these structures of oppression. Tonally switching back and forth from her own furious voice to a spiteful, mocking White Girl persona as she moves along the poem’s fault lines, Marte lambasts so-called allies and fake wokeness. “White intersectional feminist speaks,” Marte snarls at the top of the performance, switching quickly to a higher pitched, discernibly softer type of tone and voice: “she sounds, like, totally triggered.” By employing this double-voicedness, Marte is able to simultaneously critique sexism and racism and to mock superficial, self-centered forms of feminism aligned with white women’s experiences alone. By making her own voice that of the fake White Girl, Marte ventriloquizes as a protest against white women speaking over and speaking for all women. Her poetic white-face is a carnivalesque reversal of racist tropes and an ironic commentary on historical, cultural representation and racialized erasure.

Responding to the privileging of white women in the Women’s Marches after the 2016 Election, Marte snarls: “Like she isn’t trying to Make America Great Again for herself too. Like we should trust her. We should trust her because she too has been oppressed. Even only for the last eight months. Like black women haven’t always been at the back of the movement keeping that shit afloat.” By referencing the Women’s Marches, Marte is furiously reiterating the sentiment expressed by a popular picture of the activist Angela Peoples that has become almost iconic. The picture of her from the March shows her holding a sign that reads “Don’t forget: White Women Voted for Trump” while casually sucking on a lollipop (Wortham 2017), a humorously apathetic or casual critique of a fundamental problem within feminist movements. Banet-Weiser notes that,

Marte makes the same point in “Mad,” shouting, “Like she ain’t 53% [inaudible] y’all’s president made it inside the White House in the first place!” However, unlike Peoples’s casual coolness, Marte turns to fiery fury.

Moving in and out of the reversed Other’s (White Girl) voice, Marte thus snaps at the invisibilization of black, brown, and indigenous women: “Like she isn’t trying to appropriate my oppression, but this time it sounds cuter and believable because it’s coming from a softer mouth. Like if I keep talking like this, all gentle and pretty, mask my strength under the cute little acoustic voice […].” She pauses for effect and then switches back to using her own unapologetically angry, and importantly, loud voice. This voice cuts through the rest of the performance, involving an increasingly quicker delivery, ending in a shrill snap: “Like she still doesn’t totally understand what the problem is. Like why are you so freakin’ mad!?” Thus, Marte ends the poem with a sharp scream; she walks off stage with a defiant glare towards the audience, inviting them—daring them—to respond and react.

As an example of the most political and perhaps less poetic types of slam poems, Marte’s slam deliberately seeks out and breaks a bond, snapping at white feminists. Marte seems to participate in this particular competition not to win it but to make a point. “Snapping at someone can also snap a bond to someone,” Ahmed states (Living a Feminist Life 193). Marte snaps as a way to refuse marginalization and invisibility within feminist/activist movements. Although Ahmed states that even “[a] word can be snap,” that is, the mere bringing up of certain words can function as snapping bonds, Marte refuses to stop at the word. “The word racism is heard as breaking something, a bond of whiteness, say, that fragile bond that somehow, we know how, has to be protected even by those who are not part of it,” Ahmed contends (“Snap!”). Marte echoes and critiques this proposition, and by deliberately defying the protection of the bond with or acquiescing to White Feminists and their attempts to “tone police” in feminist movements (see e.g. Nuru and Arendt), Marte challenges her audience. By snapping at us and defiantly walking away scowling, she invites us to react, and our reactions will probably vary. This slam poem is designed to provoke and possibly to make the audience feel uncomfortable and guilty, but as Lorde says: “Guilt is not a response to anger; it is a response to one’s own actions or lack of action. If it leads to change then it can be useful, since it is then no longer guilt but the beginning of knowledge” (“The Uses of Anger” 130).

Lorde pointed to the larger problem of black women’s anger for white feminists, and her provocation in 1981 echoes in Marte’s slam poem today: “To those women here who fear the anger of women of Color more than their own unscrutinized racist attitudes, I ask: Is the anger of women of Color more threatening than the woman-hatred that tinges all aspects of our lives?” (“The Uses of Anger” 129). Marte spiting White Feminists is an extension of Lorde’s query and a call for reflection, an invitation to consider whose anger counts.

Although mobilizing this type of fury may be done out of spite, to some degree, it might also be out of necessity. As Ahmed states, “Snapping can be necessary for being, which means for some, to be requires snapping, snapping not as a singular event, but as what you have to keep doing to keep being” (“Snap!”). Rage and spite are acts of survivance, and as Brittney Cooper states in her memoir-manifesto, Eloquent Rage: A Black Feminist Discovers Her Superpower (2018):

The fury expressed by the slam poets discussed above is performative, and their poems function as imaginary conversations with oppressors and allies. This imagined/performative fury echoes Jack Halberstam’s notion of “imagined violence,” elaborated in the article “Imagined Violence/Queer Violence: Representation, Rage, and Resistance” (1993). In this article, Halberstam troubles the distinction between the real and the imaginary by offering a view of imagined rage and violence as potentially disruptive, inviting revolt through the production of counterrealities. Towards the conclusion, he states that “[i]magined violences create a potentiality, a utopic state in which consequences are imminent rather than actual, the threat is in the anticipation, not the act” (199). Although careful not to conflate representation with reality, he states that representations of violence and rage “can harness the force of fantasy and transform it into productive fear” (195), and this fear can mobilize and disrupt. It is not actual retaliation of the downtrodden that concerns Halberstam, or the present article, but the threat of retaliation: “it threatens precisely in its potentiality” (195) and, in the case of ceremonial rage, in its fluidity, ubiquity, and force. In short, there is a creative, productive aspect to spiteful rage. As Miquel de Beistegui states in Thought under Threat: On Superstition, Spite, and Stupidity (2022), there is a “creative potential of resentment, rooted in imaginary revenge” (185, his emphasis).

Ceremonial rage is imagined but performative, not ineffective or inauthentic. As a feminist concept and speech act, the power of ceremonial rage lies in its potential function as “a conscious political strategy,” to borrow Kathleen Woodward’s words (31), which may have a real effect in the world. It rejects received notions about women and affect, as well as the ideals of contemporary popular, neoliberal (post-)feminism, a politics that focuses on individualism over the collective. Ceremonial rage centers the collective and seeks to construct communities of feminist killjoys through reiterations of shared emotions.

Although this spiteful rage may seem counterintuitive as a means toward change—it does certainly reject all forms of respectability politics—its raison d’etre is change, or even revolution. The original conception of ressentiment by Nietzsche may be too strong here, but a reformulated form of ressentiment as ‘counterdominant spite’ coined by Simon McCarthy-Jones in Spite (2020) seems apt. As he states, “Our counterdominant side doesn’t like our being behind. It encourages us to bring down others, even at a cost to ourselves. It may know it’s safest to be quiet, but it can’t help telling the loud-mouth bully to shut the fuck up. It wants to pull down the powerful rather than elevate itself” (42). This impetus to take down the powerful lies at the heart of spiteful ceremonial rage, and though spiteful anger directed at white feminists may come at the cost of alienating some white feminists, it may also spark community and allyship. Some white feminists might just find that the righteous fury of women of color serves as motivation for reflection and action. As de Beistegui argues, spite “is creative, […] it generates values and ways of thinking […] it is a perspective on the world and an evaluation of it” (10).

Ultimately, although thematically nonidentical, Bella’s “White Boys,” Brown and Warrier’s “Anger,” and Marte’s “Mad” employ similar affective strategies to critique different aspects of “imperialist white supremacist capitalist patriarchy” to again borrow bell hooks’s phrasing. The slam poems analyzed here engage not just their audiences but also indirectly each other through affective repetitions and echoes. While Bella uses sarcastic personification of the patriarchy in “White Boys,” Brown and Warrier situate their critique in the body as embattlement, and lastly, Marte extends this collective ‘no’ to include other women. Her poem indirectly targets cisheteropatriarchy by excoriating white women’s complicity in upholding its oppressive structures. Together, and in collaboration with other slams, these poetries form a ceremony of rage that expands beyond the single iterations that are the poems themselves and resonate with broader contemporary feminist concerns about women, racialization, emotionality, power, and empowerment.

Importantly, Bella, Warrier, Brown, and Marte are not unsupported in their poetic refusals. The reiteration by many other slam poets of the same type of rage and spite boosts their message and builds on the ceremony. Other similarly affective, contemporary slams such as Imani Cezanne’s “Angry Black Woman” (2015), Crystal Valentine and Aaliyah Jihad’s “To Be Black and Woman and Alive” (2015), Kai Davis’ remediated “Ain’t I a Woman” (2016), Mwende Katwiwa aka FreeQuency’s “Dear White People” (2017), Alysia Harris’s “This Woman” (2018), and Mia S. Willis’ “Joke” (2018)—not to mention the many poets and performers in the long tradition of black and brown poetic culture—make use of similar tones and affective strategies. Future research might fruitfully engage with this broader sample of the existing poetic output and a deeper analysis of audiences’ role(s) in the ceremony of rage. For instance, judges chosen amongst the audience often reward furious performances in scoring the competition but audiences also reward their favorite slams with applause and other raucous nonverbal responses, which for spatial reasons I only hinted at above. As Somers-Willet comments, the “political ‘rant’ common to many poetry slams is not denied by slam practitioners; in fact, this aspect is celebrated by many slam poets […]” (22). The collective ire, spite, and embitterment are supported by a longer history of furious feminists. Others have come before, and others will follow, will enhance and build upon this fury to keep on constructing communities of killjoys who stage ceremonies dedicated to fury.

Feminists’ and women’s literary anger is not a new phenomenon (see e.g. Grasso), and as Ahmed states, “[w]e could think of feminist history as a history of snappy women, a history of women who have leaked all over the place. What comes out of our own mouths might come out of a history; we have, as it were, other snaps behind us” (“Snap!”). The history of feminisms in the United States is in many ways the history of feminists snapping, of angry women fighting back (Living a Feminist Life; Traister; Chemaly; a.o.).

Verbal or poetic agonism is also not a new phenomenon. bell hooks points out in her 1989 book of essays, Talking Back: Thinking Feminist, Thinking Black, that black “women have not been silent” (6), that black women’s “struggle has not been to emerge from silence into speech but to change the nature and direction of our speech, to make a speech that compels listeners, one that is heard” (6). The angry trend in poetry slam is in some ways a logical evolutionary step in the genre of protest literature in the US. The embitterment, spite, and fury expressed by the larger community of what we might call the poetic undercommons may seem to be snaps, but as Ahmed has it, it only seems that way “because of what we do not notice” (Living a Feminist Life 189). The political ethos of angry women of color slam poetry is to be noticed and heard, and their collective voices echo in the broader feminist Zeitgeist, inviting a larger communal ’us’ to orchestrate those furies.