Living a Feminist Life

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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. While Ahmed is a scholar, I found the language relatively accessible but will require a basis in feminist thought. 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. While thinking about what it means to live a feminist life, I have been remembering; trying to put the pieces together.

This is why I describe privilege as a buffer zone; it is how much you have to fall back on when you lose something. You might not have used that word for it; you might not have the words for it; you might not be able to put your finger on it.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. The more-accessible language, everyday scenarios and popular literature references were much appreciated, and I felt like I was getting somewhere with Ahmed’s construction of the feminist killjoy to deconstruct the status quo. We all have different biographies of violence, entangled as they are with so many aspects of ourselves: things that happen because of how we are seen; and how we are not seen. I had thought that to be philosophical or to ask questions about the nature of reality was not to do feminism: that feminism was about something particular not general, relative not universal, that feminism was about questioning and challenging sexual violence, inequality, and injustice and not the nature of reality as such. The middle portion of the book includes interviews with people doing diversity work at universities, followed by reflections on several films.

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. He did not stop; he just carried on cycling as if nothing had happened, as if he had not done anything. Even when we critique the sex-gender distinction, even when we learn from feminist critiques of this distinction (Gatens 1983; Butler 1990), we know that that distinction works as a form of sequencing: as if from sex, gender follows.Payments made using National Book Tokens are processed by National Book Tokens Ltd, and you can read their Terms and Conditions here. consciousness can be thought of as consciousness of violence and power concealed under the languages of civility, happiness, and love, rather than simply or only consciousness of gender as a site of restriction of possibility.

This discussion takes on particular power when we consider the extent to and ways in which institutions are the materialisation of Power, so those barriers may be erected by ‘no-one’, being based in the operation of institutions, or may be erected by the acts of individuals in accord with that power regime – and usually by both in concert.

And then of course, you are deemed responsible for your own ill health, for your own failure to look after yourself better. Beyond this, Living a Feminist Life is also a very useful book with which to think about the purpose and process of feminist writing, her own included. 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…. Been reading this for two months and while I only got 2/3 of the way through, I have decided I am done with it for now.