✍🏾In Her Words: A Radical Feminist Reading of Living a Feminist Life
Guest Contribution by Jocelyn Crawley
The Peachy Perspective occasionally features guest posts from Southern radical feminists whose voices sharpen our collective fight for women’s liberation. In this In Her Words, Jocelyn Crawley turns to Sara Ahmed’s Living a Feminist Life, exploring what the text reveals about navigating—and rejecting—the daily pressures of patriarchal life.
Patriarchy, in my opinion, is the most difficult reality that an individual can grapple with in this life. And although feminism is a formidable force that consistently critiques and condemns male supremacy, misogyny is demonstrably more powerful in its necrotic work of demeaning, dehumanizing, and demoralizing women and girls. Perhaps it is for this reason that I found Sara Ahmed’s introduction to her important book Living a Feminist Life particularly poignant. At the onset of her important text, she argues that feminism is a force which involves both loud acts of rebellion and refusal as well as quiet modes of releasing realities that diminish us. The word “diminish” is particularly apposite here insomuch as feminism exists in response to the recognition of the role that patriarchy plays in making women become or feel as if they are becoming less than what they might be. And, in a male supremacist world that promotes the proliferation of life-diminishing realities such as prostitution, pornography and popular propagandistic literature which encourages women to just be bodies rather than becoming thinking minds, the diminishing of female people is the norm rather than the exception. Thus the need for texts like Ahmed’s. In this work, she discusses the purposes and praxes that women who have chosen to live a feminist life can and should become cognizant of in their professed disloyalty to the patriarchy. At one point, she contextualizes the issue of rejecting patriarchy by referring to the fact that, as a result of it, we are caught up in a “struggle for more bearable worlds” (1). Despite the unbearable nature of patriarchy, the material realm in which we live continues to be, as Ahmed notes, a “not-feminist and antifeminist world” (1), with this reality pointing towards heightened awareness of the multifarious responses that can and do surface in context of patriarchy: complicity, false consciousness, ignorance, collusion with the oppressor, etc. In light of these realities, she argues that living a feminist life means that we can ask ethical questions that lead to answers regarding how we might live more productively and positively in a world predicated on inequality and injustice.
Although the entire book is an exemplary depiction of what a feminist life marked by ongoing disloyalty to the patriarchy can look like, Chapter 1 offers the reader a particularly effective representation of feminism because it is grounded in the author’s experience. Ahmed, for example, discusses a jarring experience she endured while jogging:
There is one time I remember, very acutely, still. I was out jogging, just near my home. A man whirled passed on a bike and put his hand up the back of my shorts. He did not stop; he just carried on cycling as if nothing had happened, as if he had not done anything. I stopped, shaking. I felt so sick; invaded, confused, upset, angry. I was the only witness to this event; my body its memory (23).
Here, Ahmed’s list of verbs convey her emotive reaction to the perverse action that her body was subjected to. She recalls the experience to convey multiple key aspects of feminist living, one of which is a process she refers to as memory work. In stating that “feminist work is often memory work” (22), Ahmed notes that feminism often arises from an awareness that something does not feel right. In recalling an experience which conveys an awareness of sensorial wrongness, she simultaneously cultivates consciousness regarding what is right about living the feminist life. It involves, she says, an intensity which includes being “aroused by what you come up against” (22). This arousal, the awareness that something is wrong with the world, can involve bodies. Specifically, Ahmed states that “Feminism can begin with a body, a body in touch with a world, a body that is not at ease in a world; a body that fidgets and moves around. Things don’t seem right” (22). In the case of Ahmed’s memory of a man inappropriately touching her body, living the feminist life becomes the process of recalling the event and noticing that her bodily response conveyed that something was definitively awry about his infraction. In so doing, Ahmed writes that after being violated by the man’s hand, “I began jogging again, but it was different: I was different. I was much more nervous. Every time someone came up behind me, I was ready, tense, waiting. I felt differently in my body, which was a different way of encountering the world” (23). Here, the reader can note the intersections that Ahmed makes between feminist living, the body, and memories. Memories of sexist encounters that one experiences in her female body can function as a site through which allegiance and adherence to feminist principles burgeon or deepen, leading one to lead a feminist life in which the reality of male privilege is recognized and repudiated rather than overlooked and ignored. This process of noticing rather than ignoring, Ahmed writes, can be difficult. Specifically, she notes that “Feminist consciousness can feel like a switch that is turned on. Turning off might be necessary to survive the world that we are in, which is not a feminist world. Feminist consciousness is when the on button is the default position” (31). Here, she explains that “turning off,” or acting like one is not aware of the patriarchal harms that are unfolding all around one, could play an integral role in surviving within a patriarchal world. Yet feminism, she says, is the counterforce which operates by making awareness of patriarchy one’s normative, consistent practice and position.
As the text continues to unfold, Ahmed conveys that living the feminist life involves experiencing various forms of antagonism from individuals who have ingested and adopted the mainstream, patriarchal way of viewing and living in the world. In discussing this matter, Ahmed notes that when feminists speak, people roll their eyes. The eye rolling functions as a form of somatic communication. Ahmed states that the eye rolling communicates “collective exasperation because you are a feminist” (38). This emotive response to feminism conveys that feminist theory and practice is frustrating for individuals who want the process of “going along to get along,” sharing power with privileged men, and suppressing the reality of the ongoingness of femicides for the purpose of maintaining a false sense of peace and relative equality with men to become and remain normative. Feminists upset the normalization of women’s oppression by speaking about it, and experiencing resistant eye rolling from individuals who would rather contribute to the patriarchy’s perpetuation by remaining silent about or complicit with it is a response that those who wish to lead a feminist life can expect to receive. Ahmed conceptualizes this somatic framework with the equation “Rolling eyes=feminist pedagogy” (38). To paraphrase the equation would be to say that a sign that one is espousing feminist ways of thinking and learning about the world is that many, if not the majority, of people will respond with dismissive bodily responses that convey their sullen disregard for feminist dissidence.
In Chapter Two of the text, Ahmed discusses the feminist life in context of awareness of the palpable, tangible way that patriarchal norms make themselves evident to us. Specifically, she notes that an individual might “walk into a toy shop” and “pick up the vacuum cleaner, a toy vacuum cleaner, and feel like you are holding the future for girls in a tangible thing. You can pick up a toy gun, and also feel this: the future for boys held as a tangible thing” (43). In providing this example, Ahmed illustrates how patriarchy orients bodies in intentionally gendered ways such that our experiences in the living world involve our programmed gravitation towards specific objects which come to represent certain gendered, patriarchal patterns that we are supposed to conform to. Girls, for example, are led to envision themselves completing domestic tasks with vacuum cleaners; boys, on the other hand, are taught to engage the world in ways that involve normalizing weaponization and violence. This is how, Ahmed says, patriarchy directs us toward certain futures. Living the feminist life, then, is noticing how this patriarchal power operates as a “mode of directionality” (43) resituating and reorganizing our bodies such that we naturalize the process of moving towards and into ways of being and knowing that sustain gender norms.
As the book progresses, Ahmed becomes increasingly acute in her analyses of the interconnected, antagonistic relationship that exists between feminism and patriarchy. For example, she notes that feminism is inundated in an aura of negativity because it involves recognizing and responding to one’s feelings regarding the wrongness of patriarchy. People who have bought into patriarchy thus view feminism as a problem because it involves feminists feeling things which get in the way of normatively conforming to patriarchal patterns and the expectations that these social conformists have regarding “who we are and what life should be” (65). To those who have accepted patriarchy as a desirable, viable, or inevitable way of life, individuals who oppose it are killjoys whose ontological condition is one of “being against happiness, being against life” (65). In other words, living the feminist life involves recognizing that those who choose to adopt and reflect patriarchal values view feminism as a process which involves challenging and condemning the lives of “happiness” that people attain when they accept the privileges, inclusion, and sense of collective belonging that come with ideologically aligning themselves to male-centered ways of being and knowing. Thus feminism, to non-feminists who choose patriarchy, is a threat to the patriarchal way of life and the learned “happiness” that results from immersion in its fictions, scripted realities, ongoing demonization of women, creation of domesticity cults, etc.
As the text progresses, Ahmed delves into the complexity of diversity work as a site through which the antagonism that exists between dissident feminist thought and normative cognitive frameworks which tolerate logics of domination such as racism. To make this discourse meaningful, Ahmed explains that the praxis of diversity work is multi-faceted, involving both 1. the process of attempting to transform an institution which has historically not been invested in or reflective of principles of inclusion and 2. the work of recognizing and responding to the reality that many individuals do not conform to institutional norms (91). In discussing her experiences with diversity work, Ahmed maintains that while some individuals are appointed to help change institutions that are not diverse, this process can involve one’s growing awareness that the institution does not actually actively seek transformation. This reality has been observed by many individuals who maintain radical ideologies and praxes; they find that institutions employ them for the professed purpose of making their environments and procedures more inclusive without actually being receptive to the transformative process. Thus it is disturbingly interesting to note that being hired to do diversity work can be a part of an institution’s process of making itself appear progressive and inclusive without actually maintaining a deep interest in and commitment to these values. In other words, hiring people to do diversity work can be an institution’s process of keeping up appearances, thereby unveiling a layer of inauthenticity and collusion in oppression which those who seek to lead an authentic feminist life should be aware of. Ahmed shares a practitioner’s story to illustrate this point:
I came to [the university] three and a half years ago and the reason that they appointed someone, I think, was because of the compliance with the Race Relations Amendment Act. . . . You come into a position like this and people just don’t know what kind of direction it’s going to go in. You’re not, sort of, there’s nobody helping to support you. This job does not have support mechanisms and you know maybe you’re just there, because if you’re not there then the university can’t say that it’s dealing with legislation. (94, 95)
Here, the reader can see the role institutions play in hiring individuals under the premise of having them develop processes and procedures which will contribute to the creation of a more equitable, inclusive educational environment. Yet in so doing, these institutions fail to provide those they hire with the support systems and mechanisms necessary to make the diversity work effective. It appears that institutions organize this process in an intentionally ineffective way. In concluding this, Ahmed notes that “An appointment can be how you are not given institutional support, as if being “just there” is enough” (95). As Ahmed’s words imply, just being there is not enough; ontological presence does not necessarily translate into material change.
As Ahmed’s discourse on diversity work continues, she incorporates another reference to the role that bodily responses can play in revealing the antagonistic attitude that individuals who are committed to maintaining systems of domination have towards people who press against regimes of sexism and racism. In discussing how mainstream individuals often roll their eyes when exposed to feminist pedagogy, Ahmed draws attention to the somatic effects that antipathy to patriarchy can engender. And in her discussion of diversity work, she brings this reality to light again by noting that when individuals attempt to discuss the walls that exist when people of color try to successfully work within academia, some listeners “just blink” (147). Although the blink could convey that listeners are startled or disoriented upon becoming the recipients of new information regarding the perpetuity of racist discrimination, the blinking action does not translate into a form of awareness that is accompanied by concern or deep empathy towards or about the historically subjugated individual who is attempting to move successfully within an academic institution that is hostile to her or him. Rather, as Ahmed notes, the blinking response of individuals who are exposed to discourse regarding the walls that people of color experience when attempting to work successfully in higher education reflects their awareness that “when you bring up walls, you are challenging what lightens the load for some…” (147). In other words, challenging the persistence of inequity constitutes a threat to the way of life for privileged people who benefit from being able to maintain positions within higher ed while also attaining promotions in the field. That people of color experience challenges with either or both of these vocational realities is not a priority to individuals who benefit from these institutions privileging their whiteness.
When viewed as a composite whole, Ahmed’s Living a Feminist Life functions as a depiction of the profoundly thoughtful and rewarding existence that individuals who choose to unlink themselves from patriarchy can attain. In providing readers with a plethora of personal and professional examples conveying how both patriarchy and white supremacy work to oppress women generally and women of color specifically, she enables individuals to understand that the feminist process involves becoming aware of the power that these regimes of domination have so that these forms of perverse power can be analyzed and summarily rejected.
