Living a Feminist Life

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We learn about the feminist cause by the bother feminism causes; by how feminism comes up in public culture as a site of disturbance. She ends the book with two practical survival guides to endure the onslaught of injustices feminists of conscience are sure to encounter as they navigate through patriarchal society. 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.

While I did not agree with everything the author says, I can respect the well documented concise intensity in which she says it. My only slightly negative comment would be the repetition of the author - not just in the book but in a following sentence. This is why I describe privilege as a buffer zone; it is how much you have to fall back on when you lose something. Showing how feminist theory is generated from everyday life and the ordinary experiences of being a feminist, Sara Ahmed highlights the ties between feminist theory and living a life that sustains it by building on legacies of feminist of color scholarship and discussing the figure of the feminist killjoy. You are asked to be patient, as if what is wrong will not go on, as if with patience, things will only get better.Ahmed argues that feminism requires discomfort, and instead of running away from that discomfort, we should sit with it, examine it, and see where it can take us. Ahmed explores the constant under-estimation of female professors, and the institutionalised sexism that still exists in academia today. It took me exactly one year to read Living a Feminist Life because, I think, it's a manifesto that I wanted to consistently be present in my life. The case for being a killjoy is built around three stages: becoming, exploring the hostile environment that produces a feminist outlook and disposition; the challenge of going against the flow and the wilfulness necessary to develop an outlook and sense of self that rejects and resists the demands and expectations of that environment. Sara Ahmed grounds her assertions with the premise that "happiness" often means conforming to problematic, patriarchal societal norms.

If the stranger could be anyone, the stranger was someone I recognized; somebody I could look out for. I believe that just as I can’t swim in a pool without getting wet, I cannot grow up white in America without getting a little bit racist–and I accept my job is to limit the damage and work to counter racism as much as I can. Host Hannah McGregor did a wonderful interview the author, Sara Ahmed, in the final episode of season 3. Feminism can begin with a body, a body in touch with a world, a body that is not at ease in a world; a body that fidgets and moves around.

We will expose the happiness myths of neoliberalism and global capitalism: the fantasy that the system created for a privileged few is really about the happiness of many or the most.

Class too can be understood in these terms: class might seem to be immaterial or less material if you benefit from class privilege, those networks and buffer zones; those ways a body is already somehow attuned to a bourgeois set of requirements. This review is just a gushing love letter of thanks to her incredible work and has little to do with the content of her text.I live in south London, not far from where Sara used to lecture, so her work has always felt close, with an ability to touch and grasp—a quality academic feminist discourse often lacks. Iris Marion Young (1990) in "Throwing like a Girl" asks how girls come to be "like girls" through how they come to inhabit their bodies. Living a Feminist Life makes visible the continuous work of feminism, whether it takes place on the streets, in the home, or in the office. Maybe there are compromises; maybe there is a diversification of styles of feminine accomplishment; maybe heterosexuality can now be done in more ways than one; but the investments remain rather precise.

With its title evoking both the ‘improving’ literature of the nineteenth century and the ‘self-help’ industry of the current era, the distance between those genre and Sara Ahmed’s impressive and important Living a Feminist Life is belied by its big hitting academic publisher….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). There is a distinct hope and optimism for the future of diversity work – but still a demand for better.