Living a Feminist Life

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It may make sense, then, that we read Living a Feminist Life not so much as a description of a feminism as an account of why self-identifying feminists are killjoys in the everyday course of living a feminist life. Ahmed states plainly that “it is not simply that we first become feminists and later become killjoys. Rather, to become feminist is to kill other people’s joy; to get in the way of other people’s investments” (65). Happiness is a project, which is mobilized, directed, and sustained under intense social pressure both to be happy and to desire to be made happy by the “right” things (49). Women’s work in this project includes the affective labor of “making others happy by appearing happy” (58). From girlhood, a cultural promise is held out to girls that they will become happy through this prioritization and performance (58). Because the happiness of all depends on this labor, women easily become identified as the source of others’ unhappiness if they notice, much less actively contest, the inequality of this unjust world (62). The affective labor of making others’ happiness the condition of one’s own happiness can pressure women, for example, to cheerfully embrace institutions that disproportionately restrict their own life possibilities, as well as those of other women; particularly women who are queer and/or nonwhite.

Building on legacies of feminist of color scholarship in particular, Ahmed offers a poetic and personal meditation on how feminists become estranged from worlds they critique - often by naming and calling attention to problems - and how feminists learn about worlds from their efforts to transform them. 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 that “when we come up against walls, how easily things shatter. To be shattered can be to experience the costs of our own fragility, to break, a breaking point” (161). [/NL] When I first found the hope Ahmed’s writing held out for me, it was a season of life as a graduate student where I was being taught how to split my mind from my body, my theory from my senses. I was learning in history seminar “ your own experience is not a text” as one of my professors informed me, questioning my reading practices in class, as gargoyles looked down on me in the Hall of Graduate Studies. I was being disciplined into acceptable ways to identify and encounter an archive, as well as how to speak in an authoritative manner. I needed this new socialization if I wanted to go on in academia, but I was being cut off from a great deal of my own ways of knowing and analyzing. Sara Ahmed’s latest work, Living a Feminist Life, dismantles the false divide between academic theory and the embodied world in which our concepts come alive. It is the kind of book we need more and more of by feminist scholars. It is an intervention not only in academic feminism, but also an invitation to rethink (and, indeed, re-feel and re-sense) the writing and reading practices we are relying upon to translate the sensuality of life into the conceptual structures of language. This translation process is a particular feminist labor, and all three of the book’s sections—Becoming a Feminist, Diversity Work, and Living the Consequences—make visible and palpable the processes within that labor.

The author

A killjoy biography is not linear. I have been reminded of this in listening to people talk about making complaints in my current research. Some have narrated how they started out not complaining because they felt too precarious, but began to complain more and more over time. Others have talked about how they started out complaining because they felt optimistic, but began to complain less and less over time. A complainer—the one deemed a complainer—is another kind of killjoy. She turns up, because something comes up; she has to decide whether to complain about something. Someone who is deemed a complainer does not always complain because she is unsure what will follow; someone who has been a killjoy is not always a killjoy. Sometimes, we cannot be a killjoy in the present, and we imagine what would happen if she was there. Sometimes, we cannot not be the killjoy in the present, and we imagine what would happen if she wasn’t there. Sometimes the killjoy appears as an alarming exteriority. Sometimes she is alarming because she is not exterior.

Feminism is already a form of being out of joint. Feminisms work to disrupt the norms that enable subjugation. Ahmed describes a question familiar to many who occupy a visual register outside the norm: “Where are you from?” (Ahmed 2017, 116). This is a demand to give an account of yourself, which must comply with the intended subtext of foreignness, if not, it will be met in turn with the clarification: “No, I mean originally” (116). These bodies are out of joint with belonging. Many books and studies support the fact that women academics pay a penalty for marriage (compared with their male or unmarried female colleagues) and pay another penalty for having children (compared with male colleagues with children). See, e.g., “Female Academics Pay a Heavy Baby Penalty,” Slate, June 17, 2013, http://home/163979.cloudwaysapps.com/esbfrbwtsm/public_html.slate.com/articles/double_x/doublex/2013/06/female_academics_pay_a_heavy_baby_penalty.html. ↩ Ahmed describes the impetus to become a feminist as an accumulation, in which the experiences of sexist subjugation function as a “gathering like things in a bag, but the bag is your body” (23). So through the experiences of my own life and those closest to me, I understand the influence of the personal in feminist theories. The hard thing for me is writing feminism through my personal life.

Ahmed’s work is eloquent, inspiring, and tremendously useful. I wish to turn now from academic summary to something more like an extension of her argument, in an attempt to talk about yet one more body type to which the academy remains unreceptive. Beautifully written and persuasively argued, Living a Feminist Life is not just an instant classic, but an essential read for inter­sectional feminists." — Ann A. Hamilton, Bitch 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

Ahmed discusses flow in terms of bodies all moving in the same direction, building momentum and pressure to continue in that direction. To the extent that “those behind question those in front, [those behind] are assumed to put themselves in front, to care only about themselves” (208); to wit Ahmed shares how not shaving her legs in her youth affected those around her. When simply living one’s life without accepting the demands of others’ happiness makes one a cause of unhappiness, active attempts to dismantle the underpinnings of an unjust world will certainly be seen as intensely selfish and willful. Loneliness and isolation often follow as a consequence of willfully living a feminist life. Thus, Ahmed argues that feminist killjoys must band together to share the challenges and joys of living a feminist killjoy life every day (82–84): killjoys cannot and should not be forced to go it alone. My pregnant and maternal body experienced this judgment in myriad ways. It is true that the physical facts of pregnancy and new motherhood create a body that is seen as not autonomous, as dependent, as asking for special accommodation, and as distracted from its true professional obligations. But really it is the history of the academy, a history of childless scholars pursuing ethereal and mind-directed research that smoothes the worn-down paths of patriarchal and patriarchal-like assumptions into something akin to the automatic authority of nature. To be a scholar is to be unencumbered, to be free of all but one’s thoughts and one’s pen (or is that a phallus?). To do feminist and anti-racist labor within institutions is to keep pointing out the material and affective structures that too many are invested in not recognizing (158). The wall feminists hit has a history, but it is also actively being reproduced, such as by silencing women who come forward naming sexual assault and harassment in academia. When Ahmed eventually left her post at Goldsmiths over this wall—when she reached her feminist snap, this breaking of bonds, and announced this moment on social media, it was a political act that sent reverberations across academia and in the communities in which I study. The snap mattered to us. We younger feminists were watching, looking up. For Sara Ahmed showed us that it’s possible to walk away from conditions that are diminishing us, too. I almost tried it once as a graduate student. I met with my professor, José Esteban Muñoz, asking for advice about how to write theory from the personal. Ultimately, he said I didn’t have to do it. So, I took this conversation as license: José said I didn’t have to make the personal my theoretical starting point, at least in writing. Given the pressures of compulsive happiness, to be/come feminist entails developing the ability to notice patterns and to hold onto experiences of being wronged (27–28). When you become wrong for noticing some things are wrong, you may no longer want to live in the world as it is (62). To change this world, feminists “might have to become willful to hold on when you are asked to let go; to let it go” (235). However this holding on requires a capacity to withstand what it feels like to be made wrong, to be made to feel like one’s arrival deflates others and immediately puts them on edge. To hold on can mean to be worn down, exhausted to the point of self-doubt and surrender.

Donna Haraway, The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People and Significant Others (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 3. ↩ That said this is one of the poorest examples of a narrator showing utter indifference to the content of a text.Whilst not quite as bad as those computer style monotone readings, there are endless errors. Mis-reading 'feminist' over and over as 'feminine' is ridiculous, utterly changing the message of the book (what IS a feminine protest?) but slightly funny I suppose once you realise. By far the worst is the constant mispronunciation of the author's name. In narrating a book concerned with words, women, racism, you think you might bother to get the author's name right. However it seems 'Ahmed' is far too complicated to pronounce so our fearless narrator plumps - repeatedly- for 'Akmed'. It is true that Ahmed rallies us once again under the banner of “women.” Note, however, that hers is a category reinvented to reference “all those who travel under the sign women” (p. 14). Transwomen are now not only included but in some sense exemplary, for “it is transfeminism today that most recalls the militant spirit of lesbian feminism in part because of the insistence that crafting a life is political work” (p. 227). Needless to say, Ahmed also understands identity in emphatically intersectional terms. If the book’s middle section on “Diversity Work” seems to veer from sexism to racism, “I am not,” Ahmed reminds us, “a lesbian one moment and a person of color the next and a feminist at another. I am all of these at every moment” (p. 230). Feminists have, of course, been theorizing identity as complex and contextual for several decades now, but it helps to have someone with Ahmed’s political and theoretical cred insist so passionately that issues of sexuality, race, class, and immigrant status can be usefully assembled under the sign of “women.” The postinaugural Women’s March on Washington—giving voice to a panoply of demands for social justice—was a similarly vivid demonstration of feminism’s ability (too often unrealized in the past) not only to mobilize huge numbers but also to sponsor a genuinely diverse resistance movement. The admixture of sex, power, young people and feminism that characterised the story of Ahmed’s principled stance proved irresistible to the British press. “Sex cover-up row: Feminism professor quits university post over claims drunk staff groped students”, bellowed The Sun, and the Daily Mail, never a publication to bypass an opportunity to foment moral panic (or, it appears, to eliminate syntactical ambiguity), reported on how “students had become pregnant by academics, and staff had groped and ‘forced themselves’ on students while drunk”. In this language of seeking a better world, we find a point of intersection between Ahmed’s work and ours; one that connects to Ahmed’s marking of the entanglement of racism (as white supremacy) and religion. She approaches this entanglement by observing that often when feminists of color speak of violence directed against women, that violence becomes racialized, racist. The mechanism for that entanglement is the figure of the outsider or the stranger. Violence is attributed to the other, and within a racist culture, that other is defined racially. The figure of the stranger does both cultural and theological work. Some violence becomes invisiblized as cultural and other violence remains exceptional: “the some of this distinction is racism” (72).