My Favourite Book Review

In Living a Feminist Life, Sara Ahmed explores the multifarious forms feminism is experienced, positively and negatively. Sara Ahmed unpacks the complexities of the obstacles of always being ‘the feminist’ in the room and dedicating one's life to “asking ethical questions about how to live better in an unjust and unequal world”. To Ahmed feminism is about creating relationships, being an ally, and breaking down historical systems that have created walls against tolerance. Divided into three different sections, Becoming Feminist, Diversity Work, and Living the Consequences, Living a Feminist Life is consumed by Ahmed’s personal experiences, literary essays, and the consequences of being a feminist in a patriarchal society.

She utilizes literary theory, philosophy, linguistics, feminist and critical race theory, disability studies, and more to convincingly show that living a full feminist life is about more than self-determination, individual choices, and academic theory but must be grounded in our everyday experiences.

In the beginning, Ahmed begins Becoming a Feminist by defining feminism as a life question.

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She argues that “to live a feminist life is to make everything into something that is questionable”. Because patriarchal ideals are interwoven into every part of society, “way down, to the letter, to the bone,” it is crucial to be self-reflective and always question your ideas and experiences. Feminism is about creating movements, bringing people together, and creating conversations around questions of inequality. Ahmed effortlessly incorporates her own background to theory and becomes extremely personal throughout, saying, “I began to appreciate that theory can do more the closer it gets to the skin”.

By adding her own anecdotal experiences, Ahmed supports her theories masterfully, giving her audience an avenue to connect with her and the text. She makes the personal political.

A focal point within Living a Feminist Life is the figure, the feminist killjoy. Ahmed explains, “the feminist killjoy is understood as a wall maker. The wall maker is the one who makes things harder than they need to be; she makes things hard for herself”. The feminist killjoy is the person who disrupts the happiness in a room due to their inability to stay quiet in moments when there is prejudice, sexism, and intolerance. They halt the conversation and choose to raise awareness about a problem. While there are consequences to being the killjoy, Ahmed argues that feminists must be willing to speak in order to create real changes.

Another ideal Ahmed discusses is the “feminist snap,” or “how we collectively acquire tendencies that can allow us to break ties that are damaging as well as to invest in new possibilities”. For feminists, there is a breaking point, an instance in which we wake up from a damaging situation. The snaps allow us to explore new possibilities. A snap-in of Ahmed's personal life is her resignation from Goldsmiths college after the school failed to address sexual harassment problems on campus. The book ends with two refreshingly practical tools: a killjoy survival kit, which suggests categories of items one might collect to help sustain one’s feminism, and a killjoy manifesto, a kind of mission statement for intersectional feminism. The feminist hope of Living a Feminist Life rests on the power of assembling collectivities, affinities, shelters, and survival kits as a ‘shared feminist project’.

Ahmed’s ‘Killjoy Manifesto’ (an instant classic for feminist survival kits everywhere) concludes that ‘we must stay unhappy with this world’ if we want to change it, must honor our killjoys, our broken spirits and fragile communities if we want to stay strong. This text is unapologetically intersectional; intersectional feminism is framed not as what one should strive for, but as what is essential to the foundation of developing feminist life. Here Ahmed’s impeccable research and immersion in feminist discussion become clear, as she unpacks foundational concepts and texts, placing them in alignment with trans feminism, womanism, and other aspects of justice that have been often overlooked.

There were of course some weaknesses throughout the book. At times, Ahmed left the reading wondering and questioning some of the text. There were times where she assumes the reading will fullying understand her conclusions without much reasoning. An example is when she is discussing trigger warnings. She explains trigger warnings as the cousin to the killjoy. Ahmed says, “The moral panic over trigger warnings often evokes this figure, specifically the figure of the oversensitive student who is not attuned to the difficulty and discomfort of learning”. Using others’ sensitivity as a mechanism to keep from social critique is evident throughout a feminist life, but when Ahmed uses this argument in blanket defense of trigger warnings, she neglects to engage meaningfully with critiques of trigger warnings and thus fails to engage meaningfully with trigger warnings themselves.

In my opinion, it is undeniable that Ahmed’s book is a well-crafted work, both scholarly and lyrically, that builds upon itself and delivers concrete, adaptable conclusions; it is a gorgeous argument, sprinkled with moments of comedic relief and an open door to the community of feminist killjoys. While a controversial argument, I believe her incorporation of life experience into theory is probably my favorite part of the entire text. To understand her personality is to relate to her on a level beyond an author but as another feminist woman in the fight. Ahmed says, “From a shattering, a story can be told, one that finds in fragility the source of a connection  A break can offer another claim to being, being in question as a break in being, recognizing breaking as making a difference in the present, shaping the present”. The most powerful understanding from the book is the realization that great strength is created within a feminist person through heartbreaking experiences.