Living a Feminist Life

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And then suddenly it seems (though perhaps it is not sudden) what you tried so hard not to notice is all you can hear. The film is dystopic: many of the promises of that socialist revolution are shown to have been empty; there is sexism; there is sexual harassment; there are cuts to services for women who are victims of rape; there is unemployment and poverty that disproportionately affects brown and black communities; there is disaffection; there is despair; there is depression; there is oppression. Race might seem immaterial or less material if you are white; gender might seem immaterial or less material if you are a cis man; sexuality might seem immaterial or less material if you are straight; (dis)ability might seem immaterial or less material if you are able-bodied, and so on. 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). Even before birth: we might watch on the screen to see whether it's a girl or boy, where that is decided by virtue of the absence or presence of a penis.

Furthermore, the exhaustion of constantly fighting for the right to exist in an academic setting is explored.Secondly, Ahmed explores the question of working within institutions (this is her powerful critique of the limitations of diversity) through analysis of the challenges of bringing about transformation, including of being doubted as a legitimate source of critique and action and of the barriers erected institutionally and personally to effecting those changes sought. The middle portion of the book includes interviews with people doing diversity work at universities, followed by reflections on several films. Much of it is about reactions to feminists speaking up in private or public spaces, and how words (such as "killjoy") are used against feminists and how they can be retaken. To anyone fighting for social justice or engaging in anti-discrimination work, Living a Feminist Life will become a crucial component in their survival tool-kit. This was a very thought-provoking text to listen to while I was drawing, but I am also aware than my comprehension is much higher when I read than when I listen, so hopefully I will have time to get a copy of this book in print to underline and highlight.

This section concludes with a compelling analysis of lesbian feminism as a wilful politics of action and care. If a sensation is how a body is in contact with a world, then something becomes sensational when contact becomes even more intense.Feminism: how we survive the consequences of what we come up against by offering new ways of understanding what we come up against. You are asked to be patient, as if what is wrong will not go on, as if with patience, things will only get better. 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. If feminism allows us to redirect our emotions towards different objects, our emotions can become their objects. These cookies help provide information on metrics the number of visitors, bounce rate, traffic source, etc.