Living a Feminist Life

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Her writing on lesbian feminism in particular shows the possibilities for when women withdraw attention from men and male culture, a break that allows energy to be reclaimed for women’s orientations toward supporting one another. That orientation is not described as an idealization, though. Her work in women’s studies departments has given her all too much experience with the harm of white feminism, and she is also concerned by the violence of anti-trans feminist discourse. Still, section 3 and what follows—A Killjoy Survival Kit, and a Killjoy Manifesto—are largely devoted to the possibilities of a Killjoy movement that provides social structures for the most precarious. Self-care is not a neoliberal idea in this text because the context is one of community. Survival is seen as a shared feminist project and one in which “we have to find a way of sharing the costs of this work” (236). And we survive through caring for the embodiment of ourselves and others; through recognizing that shattering can be an opening for creating alternative worlds; and through centering our energy in women’s kinship. As both a writing teacher and a feminist scholar myself, I celebrate in this text not only a feminist research methodology, but also a temporality, an affective resonance, and a writing process to emulate and teach. It’s a writing process that nourishes embodied feminist labor, and draws our attention to the kinds of knowledges feminists are already living. Importantly, it’s also a book that honors ways of knowing of earlier generations of women of color writers. I believe one possible next step is thinking together more about why and how institutional life alienates us from these kinds of writing practices, which are also our kinship practices. Happiness: what we end up doing to avoid the consequences of being sad. Happiness is a way of being directed toward those things that would or should make you happy” (49).

This book is about a wriggling out, a speaking out. And it teaches me to write, to think, like this — word twists word, and body to thought. Because for Ahmed, words make worlds and her book — the first after she left academia in feminist revolt — is full of bluesy world-play." In regards to other students I know, whose cases were not prosecuted, in taking the decision to not prosecute, the university’s proctors privileged the legal-based knowledge system over other forms of knowledge. In effect, this rendered evidence of these other co-complainants’ pain insufficient: not having sufficient evidence means that in the view of the university, no violation had occurred. 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.in a similar way, the rule in the university disciplinary code smoothes over my [the student’s] grievance. In the university’s knowledge system, that I (the student) wants to make the violation re-appear, weighs less than a rule which states that access to a particular process of seeking justice dissolves my right to do so. The claim that “the matter is settled” means that there is no recorded injury. Such a claim is consistently contradicted/countered by my body.

I will draw these facets of antimaternality from my engagement with LFL through its solace, its extrapolated theoretical support, and its offer of a slogan I have found particularly powerful. 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 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 In addition to our explicitly academic interest, it will be helpful for us to say just a little about why we come to Ahmed’s work, given our disciplinary location in Christian theology. We met while pursuing our master of divinity degrees at Union Theological Seminary in the city of New York. Although we were drawn to each other, we’d find ourselves struggling interpersonally and intellectually despite ostensibly sharing the same concerns. To feel like we had to struggle to be together even though our stances continually isolated us together was difficult. What ultimately helped us become intelligible, legible to each other was realizing we shared experiences as theological killjoys. We were killjoys who killed others’ theological joy, as well as each other’s; not that we had those words initially. In retrospect, by using Sara Ahmed’s work we can articulate that common experience of disrupting communal pretensions of justice, progressive identity, and innocence, while also helping us to understand and appreciate the friction that sometimes manifested between us. Ahmed’s work gives a common language to facilitate the homework we did to ground and elaborate our friendship. Even if our theological location makes a connection to Ahmed’s work appear like a stretch, our academic and personal commitments make it palpably proximate. We each experience the world as (theological) killjoys and are personally invested in contributing to the discussion of just what it is to be a killjoy.A liberationist Christian evangelist reveals the violence of imperial projects as antithetical to the good news (gospel) of the Christian faith. The good news brought by the Christian evangelist is bad news for some. Under colonial theological logics, this some is racist, inverting the gospel into bad news for all those strange people who cannot be saved (i.e., those who cannot properly perform happiness and thus disrupt the happiness of others). Alternatively, we draw on liberationist Christian understandings of salvation, which cannot be quietly co-opted to justify a neoliberal agenda because the focus is not the salvation of the individual, of the sinner, of the one who oppresses those deemed other. Salvation is to be found in the survival, reparation, and possible flourishing of those who have—as Ahmed points out—been historically targeted to receive dramatically disproportionate burdens of precarity and vulnerability, as defined by racial capitalism (238). Ahmed gifts us words that we may have difficulty finding for ourselves.... [R]eading her book provides a tentative vision for a feminist ethics for radical politics that is applicable far beyond what is traditionally considered the domain of feminism." — Mahvish Ahmad, The New Inquiry 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.