Jackie Aina // Feminist Kill-Joy

When I read Sarah Ahmeds piece on feminist killjoy's I was instantly reminded of the famous YouTuber Jackie Aina. Jackie is a black woman who runs an incredibly popular beauty channel and during her time on YouTube she's accumulated almost 1.7 million subscribers. I've personally been watching her videos for years now and find her content to be refreshing, funny, and honestly incredibly helpful; however in hindsight you could say she's the "feminist kill joy" of YouTube.

In the past couple of years Jackie has been able to use her platform to raise awareness on the racial inequality within makeup companies. Her main point being that many beauty brand cater their products only to white or fair skin tones which leaves out a huge portion of people, both men and women, who want to purchase it. Usually, this point is brought up when she's sent PR packages from brands who have a clearly skewed shade range with possibly 10 shades of light foundations and 4 darker ones. Though she's gained a plethora of support through her fan base along with diverse companies who sponsor her, you can always find comments in her videos telling her to "calm down." Interestingly enough, her videos are never outwardly aggressive or derogatory yet they still routinely get this response from a select few who are clearly not familiar with her channel.

I can only imagine that these comments are because she's so clearly unhappy with brands or situations that are supposed to bring "happiness" to the YouTube community. In this instance, YouTube as a platform has a striking resemblance to the the table that Sarah Ahmed references in her article. She states that at this "table" the family sits around, talking and having polite conversations where only certain topics can be discussed. In the YouTube world this seems to go hand in hand with PR videos where beauty gurus get free products and are expected to promote them on their channels. The web-stars are expected to be excited about the products and convince their followers to purchase them, sometimes forgoing honesty while doing so. Jackie, however tends to break this norm and in turn, becomes the embodiment of the feminist killjoy that Ahmed discusses. In her article she states, "If you say, or do, or be anything that does not reflect the image of the happy family back to itself, the world becomes distorted. You become the cause of a distortion." It seems that with every "controversial" video that Jackie posts, she becomes more and more of a distortion to the people who don't want to listen. However, her mass following, support, progress, and hope that she's given to girls like me proves that being the "distortion" is necessary for progress.