There is something organic in her approach, drawing from her experiences as a woman, as a woman of color, as a queer woman of color. For those already familiar with Ahmed's oeuvre, this is some repetition of the key themes of all her major texts here. When you sense the world out there as a danger, it is your relation to your own body that changes: you become more cautious, timid; you might withdraw in anticipation that what happened before will happen again.

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. And the chapter on lesbian feminism was exciting but also kind of retrod a lot of areas that don't match up always with the women of color feminism that Ahmed is in the tradition of (interesting to read that chapter alongside Audre Lorde's writings on why separatism isn't feasible, for example--which I don't think is necessary for a lesbian feminism, but is a greater feature of Ahmed's lesbian feminism than I think makes sense.

To be a feminist, then, is to be a killjoy: someone willing to speak up against sexism, racism, ableism, transphobia, etc. Indeed, if you do not modify your behavior in accordance, if you are not careful and cautious, you can be made responsible for the violence directed toward you (look at what you were drinking, look at what you wearing, look at where you were, look look). In Living a Feminist Life Sara Ahmed shows how feminist theory is generated from everyday life and the ordinary experiences of being a feminist at home and at work. Publication dates are subject to change (although this is an extremely uncommon occurrence overall). One of the heroes of the film, Adelaide Norris, a young black lesbian, has a conversation with three white women who are part of the Socialist Youth Party, who in the film (at least in the beginning) speak the language of moderation, a language that identifies their feminist hopes with the hopes of the party.

How we are perceived as making trouble when everything is "supposedly" fine and dandy, how our pointing out sexism and/or racism is judged as a wish to direct attention to ourselves, and how eyes roll when we dare to protest injustice and oppression.This is by far one of the best works of feminist theory I have ever read, and that's coming from a long-term student of women's studies. Maybe you adopt for yourself a certain kind of fatalism: these things happen; what happens will happen; whatever will be, will be. There’s a lot of stepping aside we need to be doing while stepping up in support of women of color and queer women and others who experience sexist oppression through more than one lens. But more than that, she provides us with a survival guide, some coping strategies combined with wisdom and inspiration.

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. She has much to say that is original and valuable and this writing tic detracts from her effectiveness. Stranger danger is an effective as well as affective script: some bodies become dangerous, others endangered. Now, we all have our part to play, and I do not feel too guilty burying myself in volumes of structural analysis/systems-thinking.It took me exactly one year to read Living a Feminist Life because, I think, it's a manifesto that I wanted to consistently be present in my life. It seemed like a series of academic articles stitched together--all of which needed a bit of editing. Girling is enacted not only through being explicitly addressed as a girl, but in the style or mode of address: because you are a girl, we can do this to you. 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. Maybe I'm just out of practice reading academic stuff, but this was way more abstract than I was hoping for.