Living a Feminist Life

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As a lesbian woman of color, Ahmed incorporates intersectionality into her analysis, examining how multiple forces of oppression intertwine to affect women of color, queer women, queer women of color, and other women at the margins in academic settings and in daily life. Maggie appears in George Eliot’s ([1860] 1965) The Mill on the Floss and has been one of my co-travelers in my journeys into the histories of unhappiness as well as willfulness. In all, then, this builds into a case that unpacks the theoretical implications and effects of practice-as-lived-experience and the practice effects of engagements with theory-in-practice. Ahmed references work she has done in previous books including the themes of willful subjects, sweaty concepts and walls.

Ahmed also explores the idea of how people label those who complain about these injustices as killjoys. Feminism is sensational in this sense; what is provocative about feminism is what makes feminism a set of arguments that is hard to deliver. This book has it all: transfeminism as the political heir of lesbian feminism, direct relevance for loved experience, a defense of killing joy, a genre-defying form, and all framed though women of color feminism. Been reading this for two months and while I only got 2/3 of the way through, I have decided I am done with it for now. But more than that, she provides us with a survival guide, some coping strategies combined with wisdom and inspiration.

When you speak as a feminist, you are often identified as being too reactive, as overreacting, as if all you are doing is sensationalizing the facts of the matter; as if in giving your account of something you are exaggerating, on purpose or even with malice. Playful yet methodical, the book tries to construct a living feminism that is neither essentialist nor universalist. Ahmed also provides her most sustained commentary on the figure of the feminist killjoy introduced in her earlier work while showing how feminists create inventive solutions-such as forming support systems-to survive the shattering experiences of facing the walls of racism and sexism.

Ahmed often includes her own experiences as a lesbian feminist of colour, which are always pertinent and interesting. As I listened to my feminist colleague espouse the daily challenges involved living true to her values and convictions as she encounters moments of thinly veiled misogyny and sexism, I found myself reaching into my briefcase and slowly sliding my well ear-marked copy of Living a Feminist Life across the table and uttering: “You need to read this book”. But still, I felt uncomfortable from time to time, wondering where is my place in feminism if my presence makes it so difficult for women of color to express their feminism. But if you want to learn about embodied feminist killjoy pedagogy, neoloberal University structures and oppressive systems of whiteness and maleness that pervade those institutions, and other big words with bigger meanings made accessible and situated in their proper socio-historical place, then yes: Sara Ahmed is one of the most important scholar-activists with us. I didn’t like the idea that she put forward of feminists (be the feminist women, men, trans, other races, disabled) constantly snapping at each other.Here’s what I appreciated: the focus on the falsity of the idea of the feminist as the cause her own suffering. He did not stop; he just carried on cycling as if nothing had happened, as if he had not done anything. Ahmed’s Killjoy is also deeply collectivist, group oriented and maintains a delicate balance between the altruism necessary for the well-being of others and egoism required for the well-being of self: in this her activist figure is profoundly different from the right wing killjoy invoked by late capitalist individualism and powerfully channelled by Trump and his populist posse (the right populism of Trump, Orban and the like is also collectivist, but in an inward looking homogenising form that lacks the altruism necessary for the well-being of the Other/ed, aiming instead to bring about the end of the Other/ed). This may be of use to someone who feels completely isolated, ostracized after they have identified themselves as being feminist.

To become girl is to learn to expect such advances, to modify your behavior in accordance; to become girl as becoming wary of being in public space; becoming wary of being at all.

We learn about the feminist cause by the bother feminism causes; by how feminism comes up in public culture as a site of disturbance. I felt like the writing was all over the place and lacked coherence between paragraphs to tie it all together. There much here that resonates having lived an activist life (even when institutionalised) and while I am sure it will resonate for women in ways that it doesn’t for me, whatever your form of transformational politics there is much to learn and act on in this valuable text that I am sure I’ll need to revisit.