Living a Feminist Life

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Every person who feels isolated in the righteous and often lonely fight for equality would benefit from Ahmed’s book. Once feminist consciousness is turned on, evidence of injustice seems to rear its head at every turn, leaving the feminist killjoy feeling like an alien in a world full of people who seem incapable of breathing the same air she does. Living a Feminist Life demonstrates how feminist theory grows out of daily life, how taking the words of daily life, lifting them up and inspecting them from all sides brings deeper understanding of how the world is structured, how oppression is given force through expectations and demands to be happy, accommodating, kind, willing and helpful. And then of course, you are deemed responsible for your own ill health, for your own failure to look after yourself better.

Thank you, Sara Ahmed, for being a source of light and hope within this abject blackness; for extending your arm to us so that we may be uplifted, encouraged, and supported. It is set in a future time after a socialist revolution has happened (a “war of liberation”), but the future looks rather like the present, or even the past; what is to come is already behind us.She utilizes a metaphor of a wall that she encountered in diversity work that keeps the master’s residence standing.

She advocates for speaking up against injustice, for breaking bridges with toxic people, and finding like-minded feminists with similar values. To be a feminist, then, is to be a killjoy: someone willing to speak up against sexism, racism, ableism, transphobia, etc. Ahmed grew up in Australia with a white mother and a Pakistani father as one of few POC students in her elementary schools. I was really looking forward to reading this book, but after reading the introduction I am completely put off by the redundant writing style.

This is an essential toolkit for building a feminist consciousness, practicing feminism, and surviving life as a 'feminist killjoy. 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.

One of the aspects I did not anticipate being a big part of this book was the literary criticism that engaged with Eliot’s Mill on the Floss, a book that I’ve wanted to read for the past year, because I happen to be very interested in watermills. I don't like to leave books unfinished, and am truly disappointed that a book I was looking forward to was a bust - but can't read all the books in the world now can I! It is difficult to give up an idea of one’s life when one has lived one’s life according to that idea. Ahmed views willfulness as consciousness brimming at the surface: questioning and challenging social mores that prescribe happiness in a predetermined set of criteria. As girls you learn to be cautious and careful in public spaces with that caution and care directed toward those who do not belong, whose presence or proximity is illegitimate.You are in being assigned x or y also being assigned to a group; an assignment is what you receive from others that will determine how you are positioned in relation to others. Language is already imprecise, so for every connecting-the-dots moment there was another moment of wondering what to make of a tangled mess.