Living a Feminist Life

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How the reports and measurements and self-congratulatory events can become the very tool of oppression by managers that do not at all understand the issues of diversity in the workplace. Analytic gems like 'sweaty concepts' and 'feminist killjoy' are peppered throughout, causing the reader to pause and reflect—stopping us in our tracks, making the act of reading a 'sensational' one, thus enacting theory in the flesh. I did not appreciate how questioning sexism is one of the most profound ways of disrupting what we take to be given and thus learning about how the given is given. This book allows everyone to grasp, wrestle, and digest it, proving yet again that making theory accessible does not have to compromise quality.

I remember each of these occasions not only as an experience of being violated, but as a sensory event that was too overwhelming to process at the time. You can change your choices at any time by visiting Cookie preferences, as described in the Cookie notice.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. I]n reading Living a Feminist Life, readers will find a companion, a vital guide to their killjoy survival kit.

You begin to recognize how violence is directed: that being recognized as a girl means being subjected to this pressure, this relentless assault on the senses; a body that comes to fear the touch of a world. But more than that, she provides us with a survival guide, some coping strategies combined with wisdom and inspiration. Like my grandmother, Ahmed harvest her personal experiences, spins them into understandings and weaves them into theory. Drawing mainly on the scholarship of feminists of color, Ahmed brings critical theory to life through practical examples and personal experience.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. Ahmed grew up in Australia with a white mother and a Pakistani father as one of few POC students in her elementary schools.

I appreciated Ahmed’s transforming everyday words that we don’t think about, words like willful, arm, wall, and snap and making us think more deeply and see them as something profound, something activist and powerful. As girls you learn to be cautious and careful in public spaces with that caution and care directed toward those who do not belong, whose presence or proximity is illegitimate. 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. 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.No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher. 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. The Grimm’s fairytale of The Willful Child is also repeated throughout – a silent symbol of feminists who will not be stopped. Now, we all have our part to play, and I do not feel too guilty burying myself in volumes of structural analysis/systems-thinking.