Living a Feminist Life

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This may be of use to someone who feels completely isolated, ostracized after they have identified themselves as being feminist. Language is already imprecise, so for every connecting-the-dots moment there was another moment of wondering what to make of a tangled mess. Just within the intro I was tripped up multiple times thinking I had accidentally re-read the same sentence, but in fact Ahmed had repeated the same words twice (or more) within a sentence with a very minor adjustment that didn't add to her point. Living a Feminist Life is a work of embodied political theory that defies the conventions of feminist memoir and self-help alike. We will expose the happiness myths of neoliberalism and global capitalism: the fantasy that the system created for a privileged few is really about the happiness of many or the most.

If a sensation is how a body is in contact with a world, then something becomes sensational when contact becomes even more intense. This is why I describe privilege as a buffer zone; it is how much you have to fall back on when you lose something. Your impatience might even be deemed the cause of your failure to reach the happiness promised, as if by becoming impatient you have deprived yourself of what would have come your way, as if you have stolen your own future perfect. I wasn't a fan of the writing style, and I wasn't getting enough out of it to continue slogging through.As Alison Jaggar describes, "Only when we reflect on our initially puzzling irritability, revulsion, anger, or fear may we bring to consciousness our 'gut-level' awareness that we are in a situation of coercion, cruelty, injustice or danger" (1996, 181; see also Spelman 1989). We have to stay with the feelings that we might wish would go away; that become reminders of these things that happened that made you wary of being at all.

We might work over, mull over, these experiences; we might keep coming back to them because they do not make sense. While Ahmed is a scholar, I found the language relatively accessible but will require a basis in feminist thought.I know that's unfair, but it should not have been this hard and painful to get through a book like this. 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.

In my time at university, I have read a lot of feminist theorists, and learned a lot of really important things about how to view institutionalised sexism and how to view the world in an intersectional light.

She then concludes with a double wrap-up, consistent with the praxis orientation of the book – her Killjoy Manifesto and a Killjoy Survival Kit, as a set of ways to care for the self through ideas, people, networks, humour, permissions and dancing…. When Ahmed wrote about willfulness, that was so obvious what is happening here, being unwilling to be excluded is perceived as being willful. You can change your choices at any time by visiting Cookie preferences, as described in the Cookie notice. We learned from how willfulness is used to dismiss feminism to hear what is at stake in these dismissals.

We must still tell these stories of violence because of how quickly that violence is concealed and reproduced.While I did not agree with everything the author says, I can respect the well documented concise intensity in which she says it. It seemed like a series of academic articles stitched together--all of which needed a bit of editing. When you refer to structures, to systems, to power relations, to walls, you are assumed to be making others responsible for the situation you have failed to get yourself out of. The documentary takes this form: we are introduced to many of the characters by snapshots attached to stories gathered by a surveillance team; the voice-over introducing each character as a suspect, as if to the police; different individuals who make up the Women’s Army, who are protesting against this new regime.