"Feminism is a sensible reaction to the injustices of the globe," writes Sara Ahmed, self-described feminist killjoy. In Living a Feminist Life , her latest work, Ahmed considers how her own agreement of feminism has adult 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 look like. The volume, while grounded in theory, is likewise her near personal to date, filled with stories from Ahmed'south everyday, her experience of being "a feminist at work." "Theory can do more the closer information technology gets to the skin," she reminds her readers, demonstrating that good 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; one year ago, she resigned from her position at Goldsmiths, University of London, where she had been the inaugural director of the Heart for Feminist Research. Her leaving was in protestation of what she felt was the university's failure to address the problem of sexual harassment on campus. Sharing the details of the decision on her blog, feministkilljoys.com—" You lot have had hundreds of meetings, with students, with academics, with administrators. You have written blogs about the problem of sexual harassment and the silence that surrounds information technology. And nevertheless there is silence"— served to move her work further into the lived world.

It was through her web log posts that the idea forLiving a Feminist Life  was built-in; the blog'due south proper noun,"feminist killjoys," refers back to a cultural trope that Ahmed examined in her 2010 book, The Hope of Happiness . In it, she examines the idea of that figure—forth with the unhappy queer, the aroused black woman, and the melancholic migrant—to demonstrate how our Western obsession with acquiring and maintaining happiness tin be problematic for those whose experience interrupts the happiness narrative. "To kill joy," she writes in the volume's introduction, "is to open a life, to make room for life, to make room for possibility, for gamble." This reclamation of the term "killjoy" struck a cultural nerve; Ahmed now has over 24,000 followers on Twitter.

ReadingLiving a Feminist Life  felt like having aspects of my ain experience explained to me—interactions with male colleagues, the dynamics of existence dark-brown and queer in bookish spaces—while also being instructed in how to resist and interrupt those structures at piece of work in the future. The book ends with two refreshingly practical tools: a killjoy survival kit, which suggests categories of items one might collect to help sustain ane's 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 doubtable 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 becoming a feminist, the persistent myth of feminism equally a white royal gift, the continued relevance of the term "queer," and Ahmed'due south new project on the "uses of use."

— Nishta J. Mehra for Guernica

Guernica: Y'all write that "feminism is homework," which fabricated me think immediately most my students. Last year, a group of young women at the high schoolhouse where I teach founded a Feminist Club, carving out infinite for themselves to larn, vent, and take action. They grapple with what information technology means to be a practicing feminist, to cultivate what you refer to as "feminist tendencies." One subject that often 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 one time they notice the problematic gender tropes that run through them?

Sara Ahmed: I describe the process of becoming a feminist as a bumpy process; you bump into a world as you begin to realize that it does not adjust y'all. You lot go conscious over time of how things are not what they seem; how stories that you are told for your own enjoyment narrow down what is possible, especially, but not only, for girls.

In one case you are a feminist, once yous come up to identify that word as your own, it is every bit though you are "switched on," such that existence "on" is your default position, and all that you encounter, all that you eat, that you do, becomes something to be challenged, questioned, resisted. Information technology can be exciting—to become attuned to how things take taken a shape in the manner that a story is a shape, how things are not necessary or inevitable, how they are open to being challenged, how nosotros can create culling stories. Simply it can exist tiring, always being "on," and there is no doubt that sometimes we wish we could simply switch off and lookout man a movie! In a way yous could apply permission notes—I put some in my killjoy survival kit. You can give yourself permission to turn off when beingness on is too hard. This does non always work, mind you. Sometimes, you might be tired, and yous just want to lookout a feel-practiced moving picture, when the killjoy comes upwardly again, which is to say, you become her. You can find yourself questioning and critiquing things again.

Since sexism and racism are in the globe, nosotros need to engage with the globe—know it, empathize information technology—if we are to transform it. We cannot withdraw from sexism and racism.  And we can exist engaged and fifty-fifty enjoy what we claiming.

Sometimes being a feminist killjoy can experience like you lot are getting in the fashion of your own happiness; and if happiness means non noticing the injustices around us, so be information technology. Simply that'southward non the only way of telling a feminist story, considering apprehending the earth 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 plow away from what compromises our happiness. Of grade sometimes information technology tin be tiring being unhappy nigh so many things! Just I find joy in the fullness of living a feminist life, though not only, and not always.

Guernica: InLiving a Feminist Life,  yous refer often to your "killjoy survival kit," which includes texts that accept agency in your life and propel you frontward. Are there texts or works of art that you've discarded along the fashion because they didn't fit into the survival kit?

Sara Ahmed: I exercise think survival kits are what we assemble every bit we go along. We piece of work out what helps option us upwardly, what gives united states energy to proceed. I certainly remember the books in my kit from the touch on they had on me. So by virtue of the nature of my ain feminist memory, what makes it into the kit is what has left the strongest impression. Every bit a teacher I have shared [those] texts. I taught Audre Lorde's Sister Outsider every year I was an bookish, every year for twenty-three years! It has been a joy to witness how her words reach those who choice up her books, especially black women and women of color. Lorde shows us what is painfully familiar and withal can somehow remain obscure. I retrieve of how she calls racism and sexism grown-up words, and I think, yes: we experience something before we take the words for it, and once nosotros take the words, we get attuned to what it was that we experienced.

Thinking from the point of view of my journey as a feminist academic, I guess there were some texts that are part of what we might call "feminist theory" that I institute disappointing. These might be the texts that bracketed the questions I thought were of import—for example texts that did not engage with the questions of racism and sexism within the academy, and even implied that questioning racism and sexism is an overly negative or knee-wiggle response to bodies of piece of work. Those kinds of texts do not make it into my kit. But I am not going to name them. Not here, non now! I of my very pocket-sized premises is that sexism and racism are philosophically interesting. We generate cognition from working out the mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion, including within the academy.

All feminists are students in i way or another. We take to study the world in order to transform it. We will all get together different survival kits. I encourage each educatee to get together their own. I have a lot of books in mine; other feminists might find companionship elsewhere. For those of us who found feminist visitor in books, I think it is helpful to ask ourselves what we desire from those books. We can want dissimilar things, of course, and nosotros do not always know what we want until we discover it. Sometimes information technology is a matter of what finds you. I think of companion books equally those books that brand me feel less lonely, and also those that allow me to encounter myself in a different way.

Guernica: As someone whose parents emigrated from India, I appreciate that yous call out the pervasive mythology that feminism originated in white culture. My parents were the get-go feminists I knew; my male parent was probably the first person I e'er heard articulating feminist ideas. Can you talk more almost how you lot run into the narrative of feminism as an "imperial souvenir," as you put it in the book'south introduction, playing out in gimmicky feminist theory and spaces? What are the ways y'all meet this notion existence perpetuated, and how can nosotros interrupt it?

Sara Ahmed: I have learned a lot from reading feminist piece of work on the role of white women in empire. At Lancaster, I used to teach on white women missionaries in Bharat. We need to understand how feminism was historically used, and is thus usable, as an regal project, saving brown women from their culture and/or patriarchy. Gayatri Spivak's diagnosis of the regal mission [in her 1988 essay "Can the Subaltern Speak?"] as "white men saving brown women from dark-brown men" remains precise. Additionally, imperial feminism tin take the form of "white women saving dark-brown women from chocolate-brown men."

We however witness all around u.s.a. how feminism is narrated as an purple project. Even anti-racism can become a discourse of white feminist pride: what white women tin requite the states past overcoming their whiteness. If feminist bureau is found in whiteness, then the passivity and helplessness of women of color becomes the occasion to demonstrate this agency. As we know too well, Muslim women are assumed as passive, oppressed, and in need of being saved past feminists who seem curiously more concerned with other women's liberation than their own. Coming from a mixed religious besides every bit mixed racial groundwork, I accept come across this assumption, because it was often used every bit an caption of my own feminist story: that I was lucky to take lived in the West, otherwise I would not have become a feminist, or that my feminism came from my mother's (English) side. Exposing what'south incorrect about this example reveals the trouble with assumptions.

My Pakistani auntie, a brown, Muslim adult female, was my start feminist teacher. Information technology is her vocalisation I hear when I hear the word "feminism." She did not need to exist saved. She was one of the near strong-willed women I have ever known. This is non just my personal revelation. This is about showing how racism works as an supposition of who is passive and who is active. The binary passive/active is racialized as well as gendered. If we challenge the distinction, we alter the script.

The supposition that feminism travels from the West to the rest can hateful that you but do non notice the transit that moves in the other direction. We take to interrupt the feminist story by changing how we start a chat, by starting with those who institute feminism in a different style.

Guernica: I felt personally bedevilled past your examination of the intersection of queerness and brownness; I have certainly been guilty, as a queer, brownish woman, of ascribing to the notion that happiness comes only in proximity to whiteness, that to take a "happy" queer life is to model oneself after the beliefs of queer whites. It's a double-whammy of heteronormativity and white normativity.

In my mind, this has much to do with the push for union equality, what it has and hasn't done for queer people, how information technology can be used as a pacifying response to obstacle. I'chiliad curious near your choice not to speak about union in the book.

Sara Ahmed: I think wedlock comes up occasionally in the text. Merely you are quite right: the volume does not offer a sustained critique of gay marriage. That the book doesn't offer a sustained critique of gay union is probably a way of imposing a critique. I practise non wish to make marriage the horizon of my life or my politics. And nevertheless I understand how and why for some queer people, access to marriage might matter the way admission to other institutions matters.

I do think we need to fight to transform structures that take been oppressive and not only effort and be included within them. Having said this, I call up we can differentiate between forms of inclusion. Sometimes inclusion is most identifying with a norm— saying, for instance, that gay marriage strengthens marriage, a projection that rests on queers straightening themselves out and distancing themselves from those who refuse that project. Simply sometimes, nosotros tin can aim to transform institutions through the endeavor  to make them more accommodating. When we think of "queer families," we are thinking how nosotros queers can be inventive with the family class by non assuasive information technology to presume the same old class.

Guernica: At the end of the volume, you call for a revival of lesbian feminism, "in gild to build worlds from the shattered places." You insist on the continued relevance and utility of the term "queer," and indicate to the importance of "jerk room"—predominantly queer spaces like confined, java shops, etc.—for those of us so oftentimes constrained past guild. What does it now mean to occupy queer spaces?

Sara Ahmed: I e'er think of toes when I think of jerk room—a little toe with no room at the end of the shoe because the shoe is too tight. A world can be tight; norms can be felt as tight and restricted when they do not suit your desires or your beingness, and loose and free when they do. I retrieve of how information technology feels to be cramped, when you accept no room, and sometimes we create room by wiggling about.

Information technology does not ever piece of work; no amount of wiggling will create more infinite in some instances. If nosotros have many feminist stories to tell every bit feminists, no dubiousness we have many queer stories to tell as queers: stories of how we found ourselves and each other. Queer pubs and clubs have been actually of import for me in the by, sometimes because after spending fourth dimension with family unit, I can just experience then constrained by the presumption of heterosexuality, however well-pregnant my family are, however much I beloved them. And so whatever quondam gay bar volition exercise; it is like a tonic.

I like the onetime gay bars. My favorite place when I first came out was a bar in Lancaster called The Albert, where my girlfriend and I would just get and hang out and dance to Kylie Minogue. I used to like how tattered and scruffy information technology was. Simply that bar disappeared, every bit many gay confined tend to practice. There are bars that I tin still go to in my listen, even if they don't exist anymore. Queer can then become like a pocket in your sometime tattered coat that you can crawl into when y'all feel those norms tighten.

I think jerk rooms thing considering —or when —yous practice not feel at home in norms, however much those norms have been extended, however much you accept been invited to hang out in them. Then talking about wiggle rooms is a way of not telling the queer story from the point of view of those who are trying to be more normal. Gentrification can hateful the loss of the spaces, without question, and a loss of a feeling. For me, a queer feeling is harder to find in shiny brilliant venues. And we don't all have admission to venues of our ain, shiny or not. I have been lucky to live in London, and attend 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 domestic dog Poppy as it is a night out with friends. Wiggle rooms change every bit we do.

I retrieve likewise of the piece of work we do to create queer and feminist spaces in the academy. The Centre for Feminist Enquiry that nosotros created at Goldsmiths felt like that; nosotros repopulated the university with bodies for whom it was not intended, unlike bodies, non the aforementioned old, same old. Much of the time we create our ain spaces and shelters even if that is at each other'due south houses or on each other's Facebook walls. The kitchen table tin can get a publishing house.

Guernica: In the book, you examine various aspects of the ability of fragility, from the mode it reifies and recreates problematic relationships to the way it could potentially exist reclaimed in order to rebuild those relationships on different terms. I read this equally a nod to Lorde'southward exclamation that we can never dismantle the chief'due south house with the chief'south tools; is fragility, perhaps, a tool that doesn't exist in the master's toolbox?

My ain experiences with grief have taught me to recall about brokenness differently, and I wonder if you run into a correlation betwixt the experience of grief and the ability to chronicle to breakage without rushing to restore what has been broken. How might we think differently about these concepts if, as y'all put information technology, "a shattering can exist an affinity?"

Sara Ahmed: It is interesting which words we pick upwardly, which words we follow, which words go the tools with which we practice something. I e'er think information technology is helpful to work out how we pick things upwards. The word "fragility," I remember, came from my reading of George Eliot in my book Willful Subjects (2014). I was reading Manufactory on the Floss because I was so captivated past Eliot'southward depiction of Maggie Tulliver, and how Maggie'southward issues were narrated as a trouble of will. A will that is a trouble is oft called a willful volition. And as I turned to other work past Eliot, I began to notice all the fragments of cleaved things in her work. I began to realize how willfulness comes up so often in scenes of breakage, as what is behind something. The daughter and the jug both "fly off the handle." So really information technology was willful girls who led me to fragility. I think we should follow the pb of willful girls.

A more pop word in electric current academic literature is "precarity." I recall fragility and precarity tin be side-by-side, different accounts of related phenomena. If you lot recall of a jug that is precarious, you might be referring to its position. Mayhap information technology is too most the edge of the mantelpiece. Just a fiddling push and it would fall right off. Precarity can be a generalized position; when we say a population is precarious nosotros would refer to how much work has to be washed only to maintain a position, how like shooting fish in a barrel it is, considering of how hard life is, for some to autumn right off.

I became interested in how some become understood as being fragile, in fragility equally an expression of their qualities. Today, from the apply of expressions such as "snowflake," nosotros know how the paradigm of an overly fragile group can piece of work; critique or protest becomes expressive of an internal weakness, pointing out impairment as a sign of being damaged. Then hither fragility can exist a frame, a way of framing a situation then that what is being said is deflected.

Fragility can too be an expectation that yous live with. When you are told you can't do something, yous don't have to hold, merely it is difficult not to be affected or concerned. And if you practise not manage to face up information technology, that business concern tin can exist confirmed. I phone call this an "internal wall," when nosotros internalize other people's judgments most what nosotros are similar, drawing on Iris Marion Young's important piece of work Throwing Like a Daughter (1980).

Clumsiness can as well work like this. I don't recollect of awkwardness and so much as fragility but as what threatens the fragility of objects and others. I was a impuissant, as well as willful, child—I recall they get together!—always in problem for breaking things. The more than I tried non to break things the more I seemed to break things. We know how this works: the more than broken-hearted y'all are about doing something the more probable y'all are to practice something. This is how an idea becomes generative. Once you lot have so broken that thing, the thought of yous, which is an idea that you also have of y'all, every bit being clumsy becomes even more solid. I wanted to treat these ordinary bumps, these ups and downs, as office of living a feminist life. But I likewise wanted to try to find in breakages a different approach to being in a body as well as a world.

When I follow a word such as "fragility," I am not e'er trying to say the give-and-take, or a concept, is a solution. I am not trying to advise our task is to affirm the word itself. I do engage with trouble of white fragility, for instance, and how and then much tin can be stopped by the anticipation of breakage. I explored in my book On Being Included (2012) how racism is heard as dissentious to whiteness. Fragility can exist used to stop something from being expressed. In a style, and so, fragility is used to preserve the right of some not to be broken by others; delicate whiteness is too a fantasy of a whiteness that should or would be whole.

Critical disability studies and feminist and queer studies allow us, I retrieve, to attend to brokenness differently. Through them we think of fragility not every bit a weakness that can be overcome, or what we should try to overcome, only equally a responsiveness to a earth. In my new projection on uses of utilize, I describe fragility as a "record of a life."

In Exile and Pride: Disability, Queerness and Liberation , Eli Clare describes how once a bone has broken, even after it has healed information technology is non the same bone as it was before. One time nosotros break something, one time we lose somebody, we find means to alive on, which is not about going back. It can take time. The expectation that mending oneself is about returning to what one was before tin create even more anguish. I wrote in The Cultural Politics of Emotion (2004) about the idea that a "good scar" is hard to run into and how we demand a different thought. A lumpy, bumpy scar can be an important reminder of an injury or a loss. A loss is office of united states; what and who nosotros lose remain part of us.

I call up there are many means nosotros are asked to rush over things that are difficult—in politics and in life—and the writers who have taught me near, including Audre Lorde, especially Audre Lorde, have taught me to stay with what hurts still much information technology hurts, until you take worked something out about yourself and the world.  Audre Lorde likewise says that sometimes to survive we have to become stone. Sometimes to survive the weather you have to harden yourself. She invites us to encompass our imperfect cleaved bodies with $.25 and pieces missing. I think when the project is to survive heavy, difficult histories, nosotros do need multiple tactics; sometimes they are in tension with each other. Sometimes we need to lighten our loads, to laugh. Sometimes we need to be weighed down, to stop under the weight.

Nosotros are non going to get it right when nosotros are living with wrongs. We are not going to build a firm that is light enough to arrange everyone. Information technology is an ongoing, unfinished projection considering it is a question: how to build a feminist world when the world we oppose is the world we still inhabit.

Guernica: In an interview you did with Migrazine in 2013, you spoke about your interest in the political dimension of emotions and the way emotions tin work in social encounters. Y'all said that emotions are "a crucial applied science for governing people." Can you expand on that, especially in lite of our current political reality? As contend rages in the United States regarding the removal of Amalgamated monuments in the South, your observation that "emotion is performed to imply that that history is behind the states" seems more relevant than ever.

Sara Ahmed: You could write a whole book to answer this question! I think we can witness how fear is used past governments both every bit a feeling—a sense of crisis or emergency—but also as an explanation, a style of explaining damage or disappointment as the consequence of such-and-such groups of people—immigrants, Muslims, queers, trans people. And this use of emotions is not simply about the use of "bad feeling." I would argue that ideas of happiness are key to the management of populations—that such-and-such group has deprived you, the legitimate citizen, of the happiness that would or should be yours—as well as love—that nosotros have to restrict or eliminate such-and-such group out of love for the nation. We have an important body of work on how emotions work in these means, and we need more of that work as we collect more and more information.

I was very shaped by growing upwardly in Australia, a white-settler colonial country where the occupiers did not go out. Even when apologies came up as something that should exist given in recognition of the injustice of the stolen generation, it was often as if the apology would be a manner of getting over it, of moving beyond the history that was being apologized for. I have learned a great deal from indigenous scholars and writers such equally Aileen Moreton-Robinson and Tony Birch nigh these mechanisms. And working in the Great britain today, so frequently y'all hear this thought: that colonialism was in the past and the problem is with those who are not over information technology, who are non willing to put that history behind them. So everywhere "getting over it" has get an injunction. We need to turn down that injunction. It is non the time to exist over it because information technology is not over.

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