Living a Feminist Life

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At another feminist conference. 2 I ask another friend what she thinks about this book. She thinks and she laughs, and then she smiles and tells me that she feels a bit cross. (Only a bit, for the most part she feels affirmation/breaking). Why would Ahmed put us all through all of her other work, solidly shaped by paranoid writing and a genealogy of uncles, and then write this book? Why not this one first? The university can be the place that benefits the childless, if the child is understood as weight, or as part of a life that is “not work” as Hamner shows; a child as how you are left with less time to do the work that is counted as work. We might also say that the university supports those for whom having a child does not come at the expense of doing the work that is counted as work; the academic who can work because his time has been freed from doing all kinds of care work, pastoral care, housework, administrative work, as well as caring for children. I have described such academics as “white men,” with “white men” being understood as an institution; those who are freed from labour to think, who come to embody the figure of the father who is disseminating his ideas; his ideas as becoming seminal. I think it would be timely to consider how academic paternity works: fathering as a social form; fathering as the origination of ideas, even birthing an idea, fathering as about who can reproduce what is inherited; how he becomes him. I am thinking of how women who have children and women who do not have children might have to do the work that enables his becoming often at the expense of their own work. So many times as a woman academic without children I have been asked to teach classes at certain times or have been called in to cover for someone because it is assumed I can: that I am free from responsibilities. It can feel like without having a certain kind of life you have no life: that you are more available to the institution; that you can and should be more productive if you are not reproductive. Sara Ahmed talks about fragility in the seventh chapter of the book. Fragility is a thing that threads, or connects us. Fragile connection is the thread “between those things deemed breakable” (164). Relationships are also breakable. She was born in Salford and emigrated with her family to Australia when she was five. “My experiences of moving and also of being mixed heritage have shaped me in so many ways: not being from where you live (and being seen as a stranger because of how you look) means you see things quite differently. Much of my political consciousness, and wilful ways, come from my early experiences of whiteness as a brown child. Whiteness is a wall.” As both a writing teacher and a feminist scholar myself, I celebrate in this text not only a feminist research methodology, but also a temporality, an affective resonance, and a writing process to emulate and teach. It’s a writing process that nourishes embodied feminist labor, and draws our attention to the kinds of knowledges feminists are already living. Importantly, it’s also a book that honors ways of knowing of earlier generations of women of color writers. I believe one possible next step is thinking together more about why and how institutional life alienates us from these kinds of writing practices, which are also our kinship practices.

But it would still be the classroom where I learned new tongues to describe the things I had always sensed were wrong. Like books, and poems, it was also teachers who were my companions. These were teachers that affirmed my sense that there was something wrong with the classroom; these were teachers that also filled me with a sense of the classroom as an object/objective of defamiliarisation.

Living a Feminist Life encourages its reader to refuse to go along with institutional and interpersonal injustices. In centering disruption and contestation – be it publically speaking out or rolling one’s eyes – Ahmed’s feminism is a refreshing counter narrative to institutional drives for 'equality' without conflict." — Marie Thompson, Contemporary Women's Writing Gabriel, Deborah, and Shirley Tate, eds. Inside the Ivory Tower: Narratives of Women of Colour Surviving and Thriving in British Academia. Trentham, 2017. Ahmed understands that we feminists might “decide not to become a killjoy in certain moments, because the costs would be too high” (Ahmed 2017, 171). In these scenarios, embracing the willful arm as our own out of jointness with the world means more than political resistance. These are the moments that sometimes create a history of living with sexism, racism, transphobia, homophobia, and other forms of subjugation. Ahmed argues that these moments become “a history of how we shrug things off. To get on, you get along” (36). Is “getting along to get on” sometimes a protective measure to shrink from the call to be a feminist killjoy? Happiness: what we end up doing to avoid the consequences of being sad. Happiness is a way of being directed toward those things that would or should make you happy” (49). Especially compelling is Ahmed’s insistence that living as a feminist is not a sudden, euphoric escape from patriarchy and other structures of domination. Instead, it’s a lifelong project of chipping away at regimes that continue to exert considerable force. To practice feminism is therefore to encounter both frustration and widespread disapproval. It means, Ahmed warns, being seen as selfish, mean, and chronically dissatisfied—the bringer of discord to family dinners and professional meetings alike. For those of us willing to pay the price, Living a Feminist Life assures us we’re in good company." — Susan Fraiman, Critical Inquiry

Living a Feminist Life offers something halfway between the immediacy and punch of the blog and the multi-layered considerations of a scholarly essay; the result is one of the most politically engaged, complex and personal books on gender politics we have seen in a while." — Bidisha, TLS Ahmed’s book, then, is not only an invaluable contribution to feminist scholarship—it is a lifeline for all her readers to persevere in the face of injustice. For the scholar familiar with her corpus, Ahmed references rich theoretical concepts nuanced in her prior publications. 3 For general audiences, she articulates the racist and sexist experiences so many of us suffer, and she offers practical tools for how to resist succumbing to them. It is a survival book for the budding feminist and the seasoned scholar. I hesitated too in writing the book as personally as I did because of this problem: that being personal is what I am expected to be. This is my hope: in fulfilling an expectation we can challenge an expectation. If we fall on one side of the line, we can cross that line.Sara Ahmed’s Living a Feminist Life gives the old feminist mantra of “the personal is political” a new boost of relatability. In her very unique poetic language, she engages with everyday experiences, objects, encounters, feelings, and embodiments.... [I]n reading Living a Feminist Life, readers will find a companion, a vital guide to their killjoy survival kit." — Golchehr Hamidi-Manesh, Kohl Disjunctive experiences—out of joint with gender, out of joint with white privilege, out of joint of the subordinated place demanded of you—are all integral to thinking about what it means to live a feminist life. I suggest that living a feminist life can also be about being out of joint with oneself. Living Disjunctively When more and more personal stuff came out as I was writing the book (I wrote this book without my usual kind of plan: I was letting what came out come out) I felt a deep ambivalence: really, Sara, really do you want that out there?! So this sense of being “out of joint” or “out of time”—of not coinciding with oneself or even with one’s text—is something I can relate to. If I explore how the “personal is theoretical” I do so with a sense of how the personal brings with it uneasiness and discomfort, a sense of not quite fitting or residing somewhere, of not doing something properly. It is a rather queer feeling. So when I am saying that white men is an institution, I am referring not only to what has already been instituted or built but the mechanisms that ensure the persistence of that structure. A building is shaped by a series of regulative norms. White men refers also to conduct; it is not simply who is there, who is here, who is given a place at the table, but how bodies are occupied once they have arrived. 7 Emma Rees is professor of literature and gender studies at the University of Chester, where she is director of the Institute of Gender Studies.