To be assigned a sex in this binary system is a way of being directed toward a future, as I explore in more detail in chapter 2 . Hotjar sets this cookie to know whether a user is included in the data sampling defined by the site's daily session limit. Poyser, we might become clumsy and fall because others are impatient with us, because we are too slow; falling as falling behind. Raised in a conservative Muslim family, Ahmed delicately and heartbreakingly details her strained relationship with a father who clearly loves her as a daughter, yet is disdainful of her non-compliant willfulness.

This book allows everyone to grasp, wrestle, and digest it, proving yet again that making theory accessible does not have to compromise quality. Her killjoy survival kit and killjoy manifesto at the end of the book both act as gems, with strategies for disrupting the status quo as well as taking care of your soul. Feminism helps you to make sense that something is wrong; to recognize a wrong is to realize that you are not in the wrong. Like my grandmother, Ahmed harvest her personal experiences, spins them into understandings and weaves them into theory. 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….Showing how feminist theory is generated from everyday life and the ordinary experiences of being a feminist, Sara Ahmed highlights the ties between feminist theory and living a life that sustains it by building on legacies of feminist of color scholarship and discussing the figure of the feminist killjoy. One of the heroes of the film, Adelaide Norris, a young black lesbian, has a conversation with three white women who are part of the Socialist Youth Party, who in the film (at least in the beginning) speak the language of moderation, a language that identifies their feminist hopes with the hopes of the party. A beautifully written, smartly provocative book that belongs on our shelves, in our classrooms, and in our daughters’ hands. She sees them as simply a ruse – a way of looking like something is being done, when really nothing is being done. Feminism: how we survive the consequences of what we come up against by offering new ways of understanding what we come up against.

We might work over, mull over, these experiences; we might keep coming back to them because they do not make sense. You begin to learn that being careful, not having things like that happen to you, is a way of avoiding becoming damaged. A sensation that begins at the back of your mind, an uneasy sense of something amiss, gradually comes forward, as things come up; then receding, as you try to get on with things; as you try to get on despite things.

This is a beautiful book with lots of amazing ideas that are hidden under a pretty repetitive and academic style. Her metaphor conjures memories of feminist Audre Lorde’s contention that you cannot tear down the master’s house with the master’s tools.

Or perhaps you try to deal with this violence by numbing your own sensations, by learning not to be affected or to be less affected. 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.

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. The declaration of injustice, we might note, becomes, in the story, yet another piece of evidence of the child’s willfulness. Incredibly powerful as it resonates with so many personal experiences regarding feminist-killjoying. But more than that, she provides us with a survival guide, some coping strategies combined with wisdom and inspiration. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.