Feminism needs feminists to survive
Feminism is homework
Sara Ahmed’s Living a Feminist Life is a feminist guidebook, pedagogy, and autobiography of Sara Ahmed. It is powerful and disrupting. Ahmed explains what it means to be called feminist, to be thought of as a feminist, and ultimately, to be a feminist. She writes:
claiming that word as your own: being a feminist, becoming a feminist, speaking as a feminist. Living a feminist life does not mean adopting a set of ideals or norms of conduct, although it might mean asking ethical questions about how to live better in an unjust and unequal world (in a not- feminist and anti-feminist world); how to create relationships with others that are more equal; how to find ways to support those who are not supported or are less supported by social systems; how to keep coming up against histories that have become concrete, histories that have become as solid as walls.
On feminism being everywhere, she asks, “when did feminism become a word that not only spoke to you but spoke you, spoke of your existence, spoke into your existence?” I have never really thought of ‘from whom did I find feminism?’ as Ahmed states “where we find feminism matters; from whom we find feminism matters.” I particularly found how she uses “you” to address herself in her writing about her experiences on gender-based violence. She pointed out that this was deliberate to highlight how violence can alienate you from yourself.
“Feminist action [is] like ripples in water,” Ahmed succinctly puts it, “a small wave, possibly created by agitation from the weather; here, there, each movement making another possible, another ripple, outward, reaching.”
One captivating area of interest is her discussion on citation and labeling it as “feminist memory.” As feminists, it’s critical in how we generate knowledge, how we wrote, in who we cite. Ahmed sees it as “how we acknowledge debt to those who came before.” The exercise of citation (following the well-trodden citational paths) has always been viewed dispassionately, but Ahmed argues that it should be viewed as feminist bricks. She highlighted various feminist texts that were instructive in her journey, stories of “women who leave a life” Ahmed explicitly acknowledges the feminists on whose shoulders she stands, referring to bell hooks, Audre Lorde, Judith Butler, and other feminists who have made an impact on her life. She is very clear that theory is political and can shape our everyday life reminding us that “theory can do more the closer it gets to the skin.”
Her killjoy manifesto and survival toolkit provide a guide for how one can live in feminism, not just in theories, but in practice, every day. A killjoy manifesto is a kind of mission statement for intersectional feminism. The survival kit, according to Ahmed, is a “form of feminist self-care”. This is why Audre Lorde wrote in A Burst of Light” and Other Essays, “caring for myself is not self-indulgence. It is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare.”
In explaining the killjoy survival kit, she encourages us to assemble our own kit. Her feminist killjoy survival kit includes books, things, tools, creatures, and joys. A killjoy survival kit, she writes:
is about finding a handle at the very moment one seems to lose it, when things seem to fly out of hand; a way of holding on when the possibility you were reaching for seems to be slipping away. Feminist killjoys: even when things fly out of hand, even when we fly out of hand, we need a handle on things.
Generally, this book resonates with me on a very personal level, and it urges you to recount and reexamine your own experiences. It is a book that disrupts and interrupts, and you should definitely read it.
HOW IS THE WORD FEMINISM POSITIONED IN YOUR LIFE?
P.S. HERE’S A VIDEO OF ME GIVING A QUICK OVERVIEW OF THE BOOK
