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Living a Feminist Life

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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…. The volume combines deeply personal anecdotal (and often painful) stories of feeling like an outsider, even while surrounded by her closest family members, with easily digestible feminist theory. I can still hear the sound of the voices, the car as it slowed down, the bike that rushed past, the door that opened, the sound of the footsteps, the kind of day it was, the quiet hum of a plane as I woke up. I began the first chapter of my book Strange Encounters by evoking this image: the stranger as a shadowy figure with a "grey mac shimmering at your feet" (Ahmed 2000, 19). We are creating a support system around the killjoy; we are finding ways to allow her to do what she does, to be who she is.

While Ahmed is a scholar, I found the language relatively accessible but will require a basis in feminist thought.

Feminism helps you to make sense that something is wrong; to recognize a wrong is to realize that you are not in the wrong.

And the chapter on lesbian feminism was exciting but also kind of retrod a lot of areas that don't match up always with the women of color feminism that Ahmed is in the tradition of (interesting to read that chapter alongside Audre Lorde's writings on why separatism isn't feasible, for example--which I don't think is necessary for a lesbian feminism, but is a greater feature of Ahmed's lesbian feminism than I think makes sense. Read it, use it, give it to your daughters and especially to your sons – and relish being a killjoy: if nothing else, it’s really cathartic. 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. 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.Attending to the feeling might be too demanding: it might require you to give up on what otherwise seems to give you something; relationships, dreams; an idea of who it is that you are; an idea of who it is that you can be. 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. The violence of judgments that tend to follow violence against women and girls has been documented by feminists over generations. Drawing mainly on the scholarship of feminists of color, Ahmed brings critical theory to life through practical examples and personal experience.

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