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Living a Feminist Life. By Sara Ahmed. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017. 299 pp. $99.95 (hardcover), $26.95 (paperback).
I expect that many readers of Politics & Gender will find deeply satisfying moments of recognition in Living a Feminist Life, Sara Ahmed's personal “retracing of [her] own intellectual journey,” which is also “[her] own history of willfulness,” wherein she willed against expectations at both home and in the academy and lived to tell the story (11, 72). Begun alongside Ahmed's popular blog, Feminist Killjoys: Killing Joy as a World Making Project (https://feministkilljoys.com), and finished as Ahmed decided to resign from Goldsmiths, University of London, to protest its inaction against sexual harassment, the book draws on concepts generated in her previous books to take up the explicit question of what it means to live a feminist life and how to do so. The answer will be unsurprising to most feminist scholars—by speaking out against injustice and by strengthening and sheltering oneself in feminist worlds—but Ahmed's account is fresh and invigorating. Equal parts feminist theory, history, poetry, self-help, and call for a “feminist army of arms” (84), Living a Feminist Life commingles genres to reject the partitions of theory and practice, personal and political, and weave together an account of feminist life. It closes with a “Killjoy Survival Kit” and “Killjoy Manifesto,” both of which invoke essential feminist texts. The content and form of the book align: Ahmed has a “strict citational policy: I do not cite any white men” because “[c]itation is feminist memory. Citation is how we acknowledge our debt” (15).
Ahmed has...