Living a Feminist Life

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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 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. Living out of joint as feminists sometimes means shifting your politics because of your context. As an undergraduate, I recall being a new student, a feminist student in the midst of an anti-identitarian college climate. A recent graduate told me, “If I could do it all over again, I would be a militant second-wave feminist.” As a then self-professed postmodern feminist, I found her statement constrictive and caught up in a world I was more interested in critiquing than embracing. As the experiences of sexism and sexual harassment accumulated in a place where I thought they would be absent, I understood what she meant. These were situations in which, as Ahmed writes, “Feminist and anti-racist critique are heard as old-fashioned” (155). Being tied to the past is a charge meant to dismiss, not historically locate. Many of the men with whom I spent time knew gender theory and used constructivism as a lever to shift the locus of sexist blame away from them and their actions and onto my “limited notions of gender.” So when theory is what you believe but in living out that theory you are met with cooptation and twisted practice, you may need to be out of joint with yourself. Over time, my theoretical leanings have reassembled, and while I did not convert into a militant second-wave feminist, I see these tactics as part of what works. I am not alone in this tactical shift. In living a feminist life, “recent feminist strategies have revived key aspects of second-wave feminism”; Ahmed indicates “we are in the time of revival because of what is not over” (30).

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. This is still a book with its gaze very firmly fixed on the academy. It doesn’t “bring feminist theory home” in quite the way Ahmed hopes. It will not have the broad appeal of hooks’ own Feminism Is for Everybody, or of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s We Should All Be Feminists (2014). But it was always bumpy. It was never uncomplicated. My most personal book before Living a Feminist Life was Queer Phenomenology, which was also possibly my most philosophical book, though queerly so. In that book, the personal first entered the writing because I caught sight of a philosopher’s table, and was led from his table (which appeared only to recede, I wanted to stop that recession) to my own family tables, the scene where the killjoy first popped up. Once the killjoy appeared in my writing, she became a connecting thread between domestic space and academic space. She allowed me to move between conference tables and family tables; to connect the experience of bringing up racism and sexism in the academy with bringing up racism and sexism at home; theory as home work. But The Promise of Happiness and Willful Subjects whilst full of killjoys (and tables) were decidedly less personal books; mostly my examples came from texts. Sometimes, we need not to appear. 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. 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.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).

I want to suggest that this arm—the arm of the willful (feminist) child—is out of joint. Out of Joint with Expectation 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 Living a Feminist Life is perhaps the most accessible and important of Ahmed’s works to date. . . . [A] quite dazzlingly lively, angry and urgent call to arms. . . In short, everybody should read Ahmed’s book precisely because not everybody will." — Emma Rees, Times Higher Education For anyone looking to understand contemporary feminist theory, this book is for you. Drawing mainly on the scholarship of feminists of color, Ahmed brings critical theory to life through practical examples and personal experience. This is an essential toolkit for building a feminist consciousness, practicing feminism, and surviving life as a 'feminist killjoy.' bell hooks couldn’t put it down." — WATERAs her introduction frames of the text’s movements and methods (note: one of the most beautiful introductions to a book I’ve ever read!): “In retracing some of the steps of a journey, I am not making the same journey. I have found new things along the way because I have stayed closer to the everyday” (11). Staying closer to the everyday offers a distinct feminist temporality: instead of rushing on, retrace. Instead of consumption of more ideas, experience deeper recognition of what has been present in your body. Instead of revealing only the clean product of the intellectual question, show how the question was lived—for the sensational, embodied, and affective moments are a feminist archive.

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. ↩ But snap has a history. I was exhausted from the struggle to get the college to take the problem of sexual harassment more seriously. So really the lead-up to the decision was slow. Once I made the decision, it was such a relief. It is one of the best decisions I have made. I have much work to do, and I miss very much being part of the Centre for Feminist Research (which was a real feminist shelter for many and will remain so) but I need to do my feminist work somewhere else. And it was also energising to witness how making public the reasons for my resignation had an impact on others fighting similar battles in their respective institutions. We need to keep naming the problem even if it means becoming a problem.” This is the first time I have written a book alongside a blog,” Ahmed writes early on. And the narrative style of Living a Feminist Life is variable, perhaps because of this parallel. It is, at times, a quite dazzlingly lively, angry and urgent call to arms. But in some sections the material is more laboured. The “companion texts” that Ahmed uses, “feminist classics” including Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway and Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, and films such as Marleen Gorris’ A Question of Silence, are intended to “spark a moment of revelation in the midst of an overwhelming proximity”. Instead, they interrupt the flow of the book’s otherwise engaging project of the feminist making her “own experience into a resource, my experiences as a brown woman, lesbian, daughter”. In other words, the book’s core project of showing how the personal is political – of how an individual’s crises and traumas can be reconfigured as springboards into resistance and renewal – loses momentum. Living a Feminist Life is a work of embodied political theory that defies the conventions of feminist memoir and self-help alike. . . . 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. Playful yet methodical, the book tries to construct a living feminism that is neither essentialist nor universalist." — Melissa Gira Grant, Bookforum I love the idea of a feminist classroom as a companion. I think of all the classrooms I have been in and how they left traces in the book. And hearing about your students speak of their grievances and complaints, how they were smoothed out or ironed out by a procedure, how an experience of assault is something that cannot be smoothed out from our memories, how the trauma and pain can spill out, hearing of this, reminded me of the experiences I had writing the book of supporting students through a series of enquiries into sexual harassment and sexual misconduct. These were difficult experiences, and it was difficult to write about them, but I felt compelled to write about them and from them. I wrote what I did, how I did, because I heard how the students were not being heard, because I was hearing the silence, how silence can be a wall.

References

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. Ahmed’s writing style has always been quirky, and this quirkiness is ramped up in Living a Feminist Life. Those years of academic apprenticeship have equipped her to write in a variety of styles, from the confessional to the anecdotal to the deadly serious (her discussion here of the murder in 2012 of Trayvon Martin is superb), and also to the very funny (“In my killjoy survival kit I would have a bag of fresh chilies; I tend to add chilies to most things. I am not saying chilies are little feminists.”).

Ahmed offers, should we read her claims in relation to theological thought, a powerful critique of theologies that break down into a (colonial) dynamic of self and other. Such theologies invariably cast the figure of the other as the stranger, the unknown, the one to be feared, the one whose religion is demonic rather than divine, the one who must be made same or destroyed. The outsider is the one who is not one of us, however that boundary around an “us” is drawn; for example, in terms of soteriology (who is (not) saved/savable/salvageable), or theological anthropology (who is (not) human), or even creation (whether human persons are the exclusive object of salvation). Ahmed’s arguments also suggest a more explicit accusation, which we share: that some Christian theologies rationalize ongoing white supremacy—though they rarely use this term—as a matter of relative cultural fitness.

Presenting my research to a room filled with white men who might today or tomorrow hold my future in their hands, how should I have responded to the suggestion that perhaps it is me who is being “sexist against men?” I did not respond as my feminist killjoy self would have liked. I instead chose to measure my response to keep on working, keep on making it. Because, it felt like maybe my dreams, my livelihood, my family might be on the line. Ahmed writes that “leaving a well-trodden path can be so difficult” (46) but that “we can leave a life” (47). In the moments where I shrink, I know I chose not to leave a life, not because I couldn’t, but because I didn’t want to. When does getting along reach its breaking point? When is being out of joint with oneself unbearable?