Living a Feminist Life

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Not to be assaulted: maybe you might try to close yourself off, to withdraw from proximity, from proximity to a potential. Fans of bell hooks and Audre Lorde will find Ahmed's frequent homages and references familiar and assuring in a work that goes far beyond Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique, capturing the intersection so critical in modern feminism.

It is as if the response to power and violence is or should be simply to adjust or modify how we feel; for instance, by transforming a social relation of exploitation into a personal feeling of empowerment. This book allows everyone to grasp, wrestle, and digest it, proving yet again that making theory accessible does not have to compromise quality.

I did not appreciate how questioning sexism is one of the most profound ways of disrupting what we take to be given and thus learning about how the given is given. To make a manifesto out of the killjoy means being willing to give to others the support you received or wish you received. I remember each of these occasions not only as an experience of being violated, but as a sensory event that was too overwhelming to process at the time.

When you sense the world out there as a danger, it is your relation to your own body that changes: you become more cautious, timid; you might withdraw in anticipation that what happened before will happen again. 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. But likeness becomes not only an explanation (he is being such boy; what a boy he is being) but an expectation. 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).Language is already imprecise, so for every connecting-the-dots moment there was another moment of wondering what to make of a tangled mess. The second part of the text is particularly significant, as it focuses on how diversity can be a more ‘palatable’ word for racism and sexism, as well as the role of diversity workers within universities. While Ahmed's writing can get a little wordy or repetitive at times, her insights more than make up for slight verbosity. Incredibly powerful as it resonates with so many personal experiences regarding feminist-killjoying. When Ahmed wrote about willfulness, that was so obvious what is happening here, being unwilling to be excluded is perceived as being willful.

For those already familiar with Ahmed's oeuvre, this is some repetition of the key themes of all her major texts here. In the film, the Women’s Army is building up as a momentum; and the story of the film is the story of this buildup.There is something to be said about individualism in organizing, but there is most definitely something to be said about the myriad shortcomings that radical political projects have suffered from past and present. Maybe you learn from that, from what that repetition does; you realize retrospectively how you came to take up less space.

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. This is by far one of the best works of feminist theory I have ever read, and that's coming from a long-term student of women's studies. These big ideas then are made real practical and given form by this grounding, hence demanding, but accessible – a rare thing in too much scholarly writing.Every person who feels isolated in the righteous and often lonely fight for equality would benefit from Ahmed’s book. There’s a lot of stepping aside we need to be doing while stepping up in support of women of color and queer women and others who experience sexist oppression through more than one lens. It might be that many pass through the figure of the killjoy and quickly out again because they find her a hard place to be; not to be surrounded by the warmth of others, the quiet murmurs that accompany an agreement.