Living a Feminist Life

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Her killjoy survival kit and killjoy manifesto at the end of the book both act as gems, with strategies for disrupting the status quo as well as taking care of your soul.

The history of the word woman teaches us how the categories that se- cure personhood are bound up with a history of ownership: woman is derived from a compound of wif (wife) and man (human being); woman as wife-man also suggesting woman as female servant. Hotjar sets this cookie to know whether a user is included in the data sampling defined by the site's pageview limit. While Ahmed's writing can get a little wordy or repetitive at times, her insights more than make up for slight verbosity. The history of woman is impossible to disentangle from the history of wife: the female human not only as in relation to man but as for man (woman as there for, and therefore, being for). Written in Sara Ahmed’s trademark evocative style whereby concepts, experiences, words, ideas, structures, and bodies are examined thoroughly from all possible angles, the book documents what it means to understand and lay claim to living everyday life as a feminist.Nothing better than celebrating July 4th with a book that will make our country more wonderful and just. Women might end up not even having much space in front of their own seats; that space has been taken up. If feminism allows us to redirect our emotions towards different objects, our emotions can become their objects. We might put this in another way: Maggie seems willingly to get into trouble, which is not the same thing as saying she has any choice in the matter. In chapter 1 the author runs us through what makes a feminist in her opinion, and it isn't anywhere near comprehensive enough in my own humble opinion.

These big ideas then are made real practical and given form by this grounding, hence demanding, but accessible – a rare thing in too much scholarly writing. Ahmed grew up in Australia with a white mother and a Pakistani father as one of few POC students in her elementary schools.Like my grandmother, Ahmed harvest her personal experiences, spins them into understandings and weaves them into theory.

Just this week, the local NAACP rescinded its endorsement of the Portland Women’s March on January 28th because the organizers said that talking about the issues affecting immigrant women, Muslim women, queer women, and women of color is “too political” and took to deleting the comments on the Facebook organizing page demanding inclusion. Reaction has been what one expects with white defensiveness and anger such as “it wasn’t YOUR march to begin with. Stranger danger is an effective as well as affective script: some bodies become dangerous, others endangered.

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.