Living a feminist life

Sarah Ahmed’s Living a Feminist Life is much more than a farewell to her institutional academic life in the wake of her highly publicized resignation from Goldsmiths, the University of London, in protest of the university’s handling of sexual harassment. Her latest work retains a fierce grip on the spirit of feminist critical theory, while avowing that it is possible and even powerful to ‘leave a life’ that is not feminist. It is customary to begin studying feminism by defining it as a ‘life question’. For educators, such discussions flow into rewarding ‘clicks’ of transformative political consciousness when students re-examine their own experiences in the light of feminist theory. Ahmed, writing explicitly for students, begins by considering what it means ‘to make everything into something that is questionable’ (p. 2), recounting her own ‘clicking’ moments: ‘I began to realize what I already knew: that patriarchal reasoning goes all the way down, to the letter, to the bone’ (p. 4). In laying out a foundational self-reflexivity, constantly connecting her background in philosophy (the letter) with her life (bone) as a brown lesbian feminist of mixed heritage, Ahmed shows us how to re-politicize the personal: ‘I began to appreciate that theory can do more the closer it gets to the skin’ (p. 10). In urging feminists, ‘do not become the master’s tool!’ (p. 160), Ahmed invokes Audre Lorde’s well-known concept of the master’s house: ‘I had to find ways not to reproduce its grammar in what I said, in what I wrote, in what I did, in who I was’ (p. 4). Her own refusal to be a master’s tool crops up in, for example, Ahmed’s policy of citing feminists of colour rather than white men, because citations ‘are the materials through which, from which, we create our dwellings’ (p. 16). Feminism’s fault lines (such as excluding trans women) show us the cracks in dogmatic certainty: Ahmed argues that a ‘feminist tendency ... does not give us a stable ground’ (p. 7). Stability mires feminisms in injustice. Instead we must learn to reject what Alexis Shotwell (2016) describes as a politics of ‘purity’, and instead embrace the idea that feminism’s houses may be reconstructed and deconstructed on shifting terrain.