We Can Be Shattered by What We Come Up Against and Then We Can Come Up Against It Again Ahmed
"Feminism is a sensible reaction to the injustices of the world," writes Sara Ahmed, cocky-described feminist killjoy. In Living a Feminist Life , her latest work, Ahmed considers how her own agreement of feminism has developed as a way of "making sense of what doesn't make sense." At a time when public scholarship seems to be a thing of the by, she offers a model for what its mod incarnation might wait like. The volume, while grounded in theory, is also her most personal to engagement, filled with stories from Ahmed's everyday, her experience of being "a feminist at work." "Theory can practice more than the closer it gets to the skin," she reminds her readers, demonstrating that adept theory, useful theory, is generated from and should be relevant to ordinary life.
For Ahmed, a scholar of feminist theory and a queer woman of color, the personal is institutional; ane yr agone, she resigned from her position at Goldsmiths, University of London, where she had been the inaugural director of the Centre for Feminist Inquiry. Her leaving was in protestation of what she felt was the university's failure to accost the problem of sexual harassment on campus. Sharing the details of the decision on her blog, feministkilljoys.com—" Y'all accept had hundreds of meetings, with students, with academics, with administrators. Y'all have written blogs virtually the problem of sexual harassment and the silence that surrounds information technology. And nonetheless at that place is silence"— served to move her work farther into the lived world.
It was through her blog posts that the thought forLiving a Feminist Life was born; the blog's name,"feminist killjoys," refers dorsum to a cultural trope that Ahmed examined in her 2010 book, The Promise of Happiness
ReadingLiving a Feminist Life felt like having aspects of my ain experience explained to me—interactions with male colleagues, the dynamics of being brown and queer in academic spaces—while also being instructed in how to resist and interrupt those structures at work in the future. The book ends with 2 refreshingly practical tools: a killjoy survival kit, which suggests categories of items 1 might collect to aid sustain one'due south feminism, and a killjoy manifesto, a kind of mission statement for intersectional feminism. These pages are eminently shareable; I have already copied and passed them to friends, colleagues, and students, and I suspect I am not the only one.
Corresponding via email, Ahmed was gracious and generous in engaging my sprawling questions. We discussed the sometimes bumpy process of condign a feminist, the persistent myth of feminism as a white imperial souvenir, the continued relevance of the term "queer," and Ahmed'southward new project on the "uses of use."
— Nishta J. Mehra for Guernica
Guernica: You write that "feminism is homework," which made me think immediately nearly my students. Last twelvemonth, a group of young women at the loftier school where I teach founded a Feminist Club, carving out space for themselves to larn, vent, and take action. They grapple with what information technology ways to be a practicing feminist, to cultivate what you refer to as "feminist tendencies." One discipline that ofttimes arises is the question of consumption—should they still listen to music that motivates them to run faster at soccer practice if they object to the lyrics? Can they still love films from their babyhood once they observe the problematic gender tropes that run through them?
Sara Ahmed: I describe the process of becoming a feminist as a bumpy process; yous bump into a world as you begin to realize that it does non accommodate yous. You become conscious over fourth dimension of how things are not what they seem; how stories that you are told for your own enjoyment narrow down what is possible, particularly, but non only, for girls.
Once yous are a feminist, in one case you come to identify that give-and-take as your own, it is as though y'all are "switched on," such that beingness "on" is your default position, and all that yous see, all that y'all consume, that you practice, becomes something to exist challenged, questioned, resisted. It can be heady—to become attuned to how things have taken a shape in the way that a story is a shape, how things are non necessary or inevitable, how they are open up to existence challenged, how nosotros tin can create alternative stories. But information technology tin can be tiring, always being "on," and in that location is no doubt that sometimes we wish we could just switch off and sentinel a movie! In a way you could use permission notes—I put some in my killjoy survival kit. Y'all can give yourself permission to plow off when being on is too hard. This does not always work, mind you. Sometimes, you might exist tired, and you but want to spotter a feel-good film, when the killjoy comes up once again, which is to say, y'all become her. You tin find yourself questioning and critiquing things over again.
Since sexism and racism are in the world, nosotros need to engage with the earth—know it, sympathise information technology—if we are to transform information technology. Nosotros cannot withdraw from sexism and racism. And nosotros can be engaged and even enjoy what we challenge.
Sometimes being a feminist killjoy can feel similar y'all are getting in the way of your own happiness; and if happiness ways not noticing the injustices around us, and so be it. Just that's non the only way of telling a feminist story, because apprehending the world from a feminist point of view is apprehending more, not less. Living a feminist life helps to create a more complete picture because nosotros effort not to plough abroad from what compromises our happiness. Of course sometimes it tin exist tiring beingness unhappy near and then many things! But I find joy in the fullness of living a feminist life, though not simply, and not ever.
Guernica: InLiving a Feminist Life, y'all refer often to your "killjoy survival kit," which includes texts that have bureau in your life and propel you forward. Are in that location texts or works of art that you've discarded along the way because they didn't fit into the survival kit?
Sara Ahmed: I do think survival kits are what we assemble as we go along. We work out what helps pick united states of america up, what gives us energy to get on. I certainly call back the books in my kit from the impact they had on me. Then by virtue of the nature of my ain feminist memory, what makes it into the kit is what has left the strongest impression. As a teacher I have shared [those] texts. I taught Audre Lorde'due south Sister Outsider every year I was an academic, every twelvemonth for xx-iii years! It has been a joy to witness how her words reach those who pick upwardly her books, especially blackness women and women of color. Lorde shows us what is painfully familiar and still can somehow remain obscure. I recollect of how she calls racism and sexism grown-up words, and I think, yes: we feel something before we take the words for it, and once we have the words, we become attuned to what information technology was that we experienced.
Thinking from the point of view of my journey equally a feminist bookish, I estimate there were some texts that are part of what we might telephone call "feminist theory" that I establish disappointing. These might be the texts that bracketed the questions I idea were of import—for instance texts that did not engage with the questions of racism and sexism within the academy, and fifty-fifty implied that questioning racism and sexism is an overly negative or knee-jerk response to bodies of piece of work. Those kinds of texts exercise not make it into my kit. Just I am non going to proper name them. Non hither, not now! One of my very pocket-size premises is that sexism and racism are philosophically interesting. We generate knowledge from working out the mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion, including within the academy.
All feminists are students in one way or some other. We have to written report the world in lodge to transform it. We will all assemble different survival kits. I encourage each pupil to assemble their ain. I take a lot of books in mine; other feminists might find companionship elsewhere. For those of u.s. who establish feminist visitor in books, I retrieve it is helpful to enquire ourselves what we desire from those books. We can want different things, of course, and we practice non always know what nosotros desire until we find it. Sometimes it is a matter of what finds you lot. I retrieve of companion books as those books that brand me feel less lonely, and also those that allow me to run across myself in a dissimilar way.
Guernica: As someone whose parents emigrated from India, I appreciate that you call out the pervasive mythology that feminism originated in white civilisation. My parents were the outset feminists I knew; my father was probably the start person I ever heard articulating feminist ideas. Can you talk more almost how you see the narrative of feminism as an "majestic gift," as you put it in the volume's introduction, playing out in contemporary feminist theory and spaces? What are the ways y'all see this notion being perpetuated, and how can we interrupt information technology?
Sara Ahmed: I take learned a lot from reading feminist work on the function of white women in empire. At Lancaster, I used to teach on white women missionaries in Republic of india. We need to sympathise how feminism was historically used, and is thus usable, as an imperial projection, saving dark-brown women from their culture and/or patriarchy. Gayatri Spivak's diagnosis of the imperial mission [in her 1988 essay "Can the Subaltern Speak?"] as "white men saving chocolate-brown women from chocolate-brown men" remains precise. Additionally, imperial feminism can have the form of "white women saving brown women from brown men."
We still witness all effectually u.s.a. how feminism is narrated as an imperial projection. Even anti-racism tin become a discourse of white feminist pride: what white women can give us by overcoming their whiteness. If feminist agency is found in whiteness, then the passivity and helplessness of women of colour becomes the occasion to demonstrate this agency. As we know as well well, Muslim women are assumed equally passive, oppressed, and in need of beingness saved past feminists who seem curiously more concerned with other women's liberation than their own. Coming from a mixed religious as well every bit mixed racial background, I take encounter this assumption, because it was frequently used as an explanation of my own feminist story: that I was lucky to have lived in the West, otherwise I would not have go a feminist, or that my feminism came from my mother's (English) side. Exposing what's wrong virtually this case reveals the problem with assumptions.
My Pakistani auntie, a brown, Muslim woman, was my first feminist teacher. Information technology is her phonation I hear when I hear the word "feminism." She did not need to be saved. She was 1 of the near strong-willed women I take ever known. This is not just my personal revelation. This is about showing how racism works every bit an assumption of who is passive and who is active. The binary passive/active is racialized besides every bit gendered. If we challenge the distinction, we modify the script.
The supposition that feminism travels from the West to the residue tin hateful that you simply do non notice the transit that moves in the other direction. We have to interrupt the feminist story by changing how we outset a chat, by starting with those who found feminism in a different mode.
Guernica: I felt personally bedevilled by your test of the intersection of queerness and brownness; I accept certainly been guilty, equally a queer, dark-brown woman, of ascribing to the notion that happiness comes simply in proximity to whiteness, that to have a "happy" queer life is to model oneself after the behavior of queer whites. It'south a double-whammy of heteronormativity and white normativity.
In my mind, this has much to do with the push for marriage equality, what information technology has and hasn't done for queer people, how it can be used equally a pacifying response to obstruction. I'grand curious about your choice non to speak about marriage in the book.
Sara Ahmed: I think marriage comes up occasionally in the text. Just y'all are quite correct: the book does not offering a sustained critique of gay marriage. That the book doesn't offering a sustained critique of gay marriage is probably a way of imposing a critique. I do not wish to brand spousal relationship the horizon of my life or my politics. And yet I empathize how and why for some queer people, access to spousal relationship might thing the style access to other institutions matters.
I exercise think we need to fight to transform structures that have been oppressive and non just endeavor and be included within them. Having said this, I think we can differentiate between forms of inclusion. Sometimes inclusion is about identifying with a norm— saying, for instance, that gay union strengthens marriage, a projection that rests on queers straightening themselves out and distancing themselves from those who refuse that project. Merely sometimes, nosotros can aim to transform institutions through the endeavour to make them more accommodating. When we think of "queer families," we are thinking how nosotros queers tin be inventive with the family unit class by not allowing it to presume the aforementioned old course.
Guernica: At the end of the book, you telephone call for a revival of lesbian feminism, "in order to build worlds from the shattered places." Y'all insist on the connected relevance and utility of the term "queer," and bespeak to the importance of "wiggle room"—predominantly queer spaces like bars, coffee shops, etc.—for those of us then often constrained by society. What does information technology at present mean to occupy queer spaces?
Sara Ahmed: I e'er think of toes when I remember of wiggle room—a petty toe with no room at the terminate of the shoe because the shoe is too tight. A world tin can be tight; norms tin can exist felt as tight and restricted when they do not accommodate your desires or your being, and loose and complimentary when they do. I retrieve of how it feels to be cramped, when you have no room, and sometimes nosotros create room by wiggling about.
It does non ever work; no amount of wiggling will create more than space in some instances. If we have many feminist stories to tell as feminists, no doubt nosotros have many queer stories to tell equally queers: stories of how we found ourselves and each other. Queer pubs and clubs take been actually important for me in the by, sometimes because after spending fourth dimension with family, I tin just feel then constrained by the presumption of heterosexuality, however well-meaning my family are, however much I love them. Then any old gay bar volition exercise; it is similar a tonic.
I similar the old gay bars. My favorite place when I commencement came out was a bar in Lancaster called The Albert, where my girlfriend and I would but become and hang out and trip the light fantastic to Kylie Minogue. I used to like how tattered and scruffy it was. But that bar disappeared, equally many gay bars tend to exercise. There are bars that I can nevertheless become to in my mind, fifty-fifty if they don't be anymore. Queer tin can so become similar a pocket in your old tattered glaze that you can crawl into when you lot experience those norms tighten.
I think jerk rooms thing because —or when —you exercise not feel at domicile in norms, still much those norms have been extended, however much you accept been invited to hang out in them. So talking well-nigh wiggle rooms is a way of not telling the queer story from the betoken of view of those who are trying to be more normal. Gentrification can mean the loss of the spaces, without question, and a loss of a feeling. For me, a queer feeling is harder to detect in shiny bright venues. And we don't all have access to venues of our ain, shiny or not. I have been lucky to live in London, and nourish queer nights, like at Club Wotever, until quite recently. But these days I live in the country, and for me wiggle room is as much a walk with my dog Poppy every bit it is a night out with friends. Wiggle rooms alter equally we do.
I think equally well of the work nosotros do to create queer and feminist spaces in the university. The Centre for Feminist Research that we created at Goldsmiths felt like that; we repopulated the university with bodies for whom it was not intended, different bodies, not the same old, aforementioned erstwhile. Much of the time we create our own spaces and shelters even if that is at each other's houses or on each other'southward Facebook walls. The kitchen tabular array can become a publishing house.
Guernica: In the book, yous examine various aspects of the power of fragility, from the style it reifies and recreates problematic relationships to the mode it could potentially be reclaimed in order to rebuild those relationships on different terms. I read this as a nod to Lorde's assertion that we tin never dismantle the master's house with the master's tools; is fragility, perchance, a tool that doesn't exist in the master's toolbox?
My own experiences with grief have taught me to think about brokenness differently, and I wonder if yous see a correlation between the experience of grief and the ability to relate to breakage without rushing to restore what has been broken. How might nosotros retrieve differently near these concepts if, as you put it, "a shattering can exist an affinity?"
Sara Ahmed: It is interesting which words we pick upwardly, which words we follow, which words get the tools with which nosotros exercise something. I always recall it is helpful to work out how we option things up. The discussion "fragility," I think, came from my reading of George Eliot in my book Willful Subjects (2014). I was reading Factory on the Floss because I was so absorbed by Eliot's delineation of Maggie Tulliver, and how Maggie'south issues were narrated as a problem of will. A will that is a problem is oft called a willful will. And every bit I turned to other work by Eliot, I began to notice all the fragments of broken things in her piece of work. I began to realize how willfulness comes upwardly then often in scenes of breakage, as what is behind something. The girl and the jug both "fly off the handle." So really it was willful girls who led me to fragility. I remember we should follow the pb of willful girls.
A more pop word in current academic literature is "precarity." I recollect fragility and precarity can be side-past-side, unlike accounts of related phenomena. If you lot think of a jug that is precarious, you might be referring to its position. Maybe it is too near the edge of the mantelpiece. Merely a piddling push and it would fall right off. Precarity tin can be a generalized position; when we say a population is precarious we would refer to how much piece of work has to exist washed just to maintain a position, how easy information technology is, because of how hard life is, for some to autumn right off.
I became interested in how some become understood as being frail, in fragility as an expression of their qualities. Today, from the employ of expressions such as "snowflake," we know how the image of an overly fragile group can work; critique or protest becomes expressive of an internal weakness, pointing out damage as a sign of being damaged. And then here fragility can be a frame, a style of framing a state of affairs so that what is beingness said is deflected.
Fragility tin also be an expectation that you lot live with. When you are told you can't do something, y'all don't have to agree, just it is difficult not to be affected or concerned. And if you do non manage to confront it, that concern can be confirmed. I call this an "internal wall," when we internalize other people'south judgments about what we are like, cartoon on Iris Marion Young's of import work Throwing Similar a Girl (1980).
Awkwardness can besides work like this. I don't think of awkwardness so much as fragility simply as what threatens the fragility of objects and others. I was a clumsy, as well as willful, kid—I call up they become together!—ever in trouble for breaking things. The more than I tried non to pause things the more I seemed to break things. We know how this works: the more anxious you lot are most doing something the more likely yous are to do something. This is how an idea becomes generative. Once y'all take and then broken that affair, the idea of y'all, which is an idea that yous likewise have of you, as being impuissant becomes even more solid. I wanted to treat these ordinary bumps, these ups and downs, as part of living a feminist life. But I also wanted to effort to find in breakages a unlike approach to being in a trunk as well every bit a earth.
When I follow a discussion such every bit "fragility," I am not e'er trying to say the give-and-take, or a concept, is a solution. I am not trying to suggest our task is to assert the word itself. I do engage with problem of white fragility, for instance, and how so much can be stopped by the anticipation of breakage. I explored in my volume On Being Included (2012) how racism is heard as damaging to whiteness. Fragility can exist used to finish something from being expressed. In a style, then, fragility is used to preserve the correct of some not to be cleaved past others; fragile whiteness is besides a fantasy of a whiteness that should or would be whole.
Disquisitional disability studies and feminist and queer studies permit us, I recall, to nourish to brokenness differently. Through them we think of fragility not as a weakness that tin exist overcome, or what we should try to overcome, but every bit a responsiveness to a world. In my new project on uses of utilize, I describe fragility as a "tape of a life."
In Exile and Pride: Inability, Queerness and Liberation , Eli Clare describes how once a bone has broken, even after it has healed it is non the aforementioned os as information technology was before. In one case we break something, once nosotros lose somebody, nosotros find means to live on, which is not most going back. It can take time. The expectation that mending oneself is about returning to what one was before tin create even more than anguish. I wrote in The Cultural Politics of Emotion (2004) about the idea that a "good scar" is difficult to meet and how we need a different thought. A lumpy, bumpy scar can be an important reminder of an injury or a loss. A loss is function of united states of america; what and who we lose remain office of united states of america.
I retrieve at that place are many ways we are asked to rush over things that are hard—in politics and in life—and the writers who have taught me most, including Audre Lorde, especially Audre Lorde, have taught me to stay with what hurts nevertheless much it hurts, until you take worked something out about yourself and the earth. Audre Lorde also says that sometimes to survive we have to become rock. Sometimes to survive the conditions you take to harden yourself. She invites us to encompass our imperfect broken bodies with $.25 and pieces missing. I think when the projection is to survive heavy, difficult histories, we do need multiple tactics; sometimes they are in tension with each other. Sometimes we need to lighten our loads, to express joy. Sometimes we need to exist weighed down, to stop under the weight.
We are not going to get it right when nosotros are living with wrongs. We are non going to build a house that is low-cal enough to adjust anybody. Information technology is an ongoing, unfinished projection considering information technology is a question: how to build a feminist earth when the world we oppose is the earth nosotros nonetheless inhabit.
Guernica: In an interview you did with Migrazine in 2013, yous spoke well-nigh your involvement in the political dimension of emotions and the style emotions can piece of work in social encounters. You said that emotions are "a crucial engineering science for governing people." Tin can you lot expand on that, especially in calorie-free of our current political reality? As debate rages in the The states regarding the removal of Confederate monuments in the Due south, your observation that "emotion is performed to imply that that history is behind united states of america" seems more than relevant than ever.
Sara Ahmed: You could write a whole book to answer this question! I remember we can witness how fear is used by governments both as a feeling—a sense of crunch or emergency—but as well as an explanation, a way of explaining harm or thwarting equally the consequence of such-and-such groups of people—immigrants, Muslims, queers, trans people. And this use of emotions is not only about the use of "bad feeling." I would contend that ideas of happiness are cardinal to the direction of populations—that such-and-such group has deprived you lot, the legitimate citizen, of the happiness that would or should be yours—besides as love—that we have to restrict or eliminate such-and-such grouping out of love for the nation. Nosotros have an of import body of work on how emotions work in these ways, and we need more of that work every bit we collect more than and more data.
I was very shaped by growing upward in Australia, a white-settler colonial land where the occupiers did non leave. Even when apologies came up as something that should be given in recognition of the injustice of the stolen generation, it was often as if the amends would be a way of getting over it, of moving beyond the history that was being apologized for. I accept learned a great deal from indigenous scholars and writers such every bit Aileen Moreton-Robinson and Tony Birch about these mechanisms. And working in the UK today, so oftentimes you hear this idea: that colonialism was in the by and the trouble is with those who are not over it, who are not willing to put that history behind them. So everywhere "getting over it" has get an injunction. We need to refuse that injunction. It is not the time to exist over information technology because it is not over.
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