Ahmed’s writing style has always been quirky, and this quirkiness is ramped up in Living a Feminist Life. Those years of academic apprenticeship have equipped her to write in a variety of styles, from the confessional to the anecdotal to the deadly serious (her discussion here of the murder in 2012 of Trayvon Martin is superb), and also to the very funny (“In my killjoy survival kit I would have a bag of fresh chilies; I tend to add chilies to most things. I am not saying chilies are little feminists.”). Ahmed describes the impetus to become a feminist as an accumulation, in which the experiences of sexist subjugation function as a “gathering like things in a bag, but the bag is your body” (23). So through the experiences of my own life and those closest to me, I understand the influence of the personal in feminist theories. The hard thing for me is writing feminism through my personal life.

LFL is bursting with sentences that I want to turn into billboards or imprint on departmental stationary. One of my favorites is the slogan-like phrase, “history enacted as judgment.” 12 The phrase sums up with enviable conciseness numerous enfleshed paths and dynamics of the book: Ahmed writes to us of how she snaps, she flies off the handle, she wiggles, she kills the joy (again), she rolls her eyes. These feminist actions get accused of (judged as) instigating altercation or disrespect when actually they are responses, reactions, to long-established patterns that are activated over and again (history). This is the first time I have written a book alongside a blog,” Ahmed writes early on. And the narrative style of Living a Feminist Life is variable, perhaps because of this parallel. It is, at times, a quite dazzlingly lively, angry and urgent call to arms. But in some sections the material is more laboured. The “companion texts” that Ahmed uses, “feminist classics” including Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway and Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, and films such as Marleen Gorris’ A Question of Silence, are intended to “spark a moment of revelation in the midst of an overwhelming proximity”. Instead, they interrupt the flow of the book’s otherwise engaging project of the feminist making her “own experience into a resource, my experiences as a brown woman, lesbian, daughter”. In other words, the book’s core project of showing how the personal is political – of how an individual’s crises and traumas can be reconfigured as springboards into resistance and renewal – loses momentum.But when that momentum is given free rein, Ahmed’s writing is glorious: poetic and inspiring. Feminism becomes “that which infects a body with a desire to speak in ways other than how you have been commanded to speak”; “diversity work” is described as taking “the form of repeated encounters with what does not and will not move”; and to critique racism in the academy is to “become a threat to the easing of a progression when you point out how a progression is eased”. This is still a book with its gaze very firmly fixed on the academy. It doesn’t “bring feminist theory home” in quite the way Ahmed hopes. It will not have the broad appeal of hooks’ own Feminism Is for Everybody, or of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s We Should All Be Feminists (2014).

In regards to other students I know, whose cases were not prosecuted, in taking the decision to not prosecute, the university’s proctors privileged the legal-based knowledge system over other forms of knowledge. In effect, this rendered evidence of these other co-complainants’ pain insufficient: not having sufficient evidence means that in the view of the university, no violation had occurred. I appreciated Ahmed’s transforming everyday words that we don’t think about, words like willful, arm, wall, and snap and making us think more deeply and see them as something profound, something activist and powerful." — Tonstant Weader

That said this is one of the poorest examples of a narrator showing utter indifference to the content of a text.Whilst not quite as bad as those computer style monotone readings, there are endless errors. Mis-reading 'feminist' over and over as 'feminine' is ridiculous, utterly changing the message of the book (what IS a feminine protest?) but slightly funny I suppose once you realise. By far the worst is the constant mispronunciation of the author's name. In narrating a book concerned with words, women, racism, you think you might bother to get the author's name right. However it seems 'Ahmed' is far too complicated to pronounce so our fearless narrator plumps - repeatedly- for 'Akmed'. For example, in part 2: Diversity Work, Ahmed argues that diversity work is feminist theory, and you learn the knowledge within the praxis. You also learn it in the experience of a space not being made for your body. She emphasizes in this section that trying to change an institution is political labor, but so is just trying to survive a space that was never made for you in the first place. Ahmed defines privilege as “an energy-saving device” (125), given to those who can inhabit the norms, who don’t do the labor of not belonging. But if you cannot belong, if you do not inherit the norm, if you were never supposed to be there in the first place, daily life in the institution involves the labor of hitting walls. At the same time, “the wall is a finding” (137); it is also an archive. The wall reveals the materiality of systems that have hardened through histories. The wall reveals whiteness and heteropatriarchy. As she writes, “I have learned about how power works by the difficulties I have experienced trying to challenge power” (90). Ahmed’s work is eloquent, inspiring, and tremendously useful. I wish to turn now from academic summary to something more like an extension of her argument, in an attempt to talk about yet one more body type to which the academy remains unreceptive. It’s not easy being a feminist and Sara Ahmed has written a powerful, thought provoking and moving account of just what that means. But more than that, she provides us with a survival guide, some coping strategies combined with wisdom and inspiration. To read this book is to feel the warmth and strength of a sister(hood) wrapped around you." — Heather Savigny, European Journal of Women's Studies There is something remarkably intimate for me as a reader, touching the same scenes again. The quality of this touch is specifically animated by the feeling that I know this place, I know this table where the family gathers. Across Ahmed’s work, I have felt like I was visiting the same places. In this account, she draws specific detail and attention to embodied experiences of power, and writing “animated by the everyday” (10). Ahmed also defines a sweaty concept as “another way of being pulled from a shattering experience” (12). Sweaty concepts help us to understand how descriptive work is also conceptual work (13); sweaty concepts are “generated by the practical experience of coming up against a world, or the practical experience of trying to transform a world” (13–14).

So when I am saying that white men is an institution, I am referring not only to what has already been instituted or built but the mechanisms that ensure the persistence of that structure. A building is shaped by a series of regulative norms. White men refers also to conduct; it is not simply who is there, who is here, who is given a place at the table, but how bodies are occupied once they have arrived. 7 At another feminist conference. 2 I ask another friend what she thinks about this book. She thinks and she laughs, and then she smiles and tells me that she feels a bit cross. (Only a bit, for the most part she feels affirmation/breaking). Why would Ahmed put us all through all of her other work, solidly shaped by paranoid writing and a genealogy of uncles, and then write this book? Why not this one first? Next, Danai Mupotsa crafts her response in the form of five love letters themed: fragility, companions, feminism as pedagogy, manifestos, and a dedication. She describes her situation in the academy as a feminist killjoy: I hesitated too in writing the book as personally as I did because of this problem: that being personal is what I am expected to be. This is my hope: in fulfilling an expectation we can challenge an expectation. If we fall on one side of the line, we can cross that line. Nicely capturing for me the affective mess of my visceral disgust with “white men” that sits side by side with my love and admiration for certain individual white men, Ahmed writes:

Living a Feminist Life is a work of embodied political theory that defies the conventions of feminist memoir and self-help alike. . . . Living a Feminist Life makes visible the continuous work of feminism, whether it takes place on the streets, in the home, or in the office. Playful yet methodical, the book tries to construct a living feminism that is neither essentialist nor universalist." — Melissa Gira Grant, Bookforum The admixture of sex, power, young people and feminism that characterised the story of Ahmed’s principled stance proved irresistible to the British press. “Sex cover-up row: Feminism professor quits university post over claims drunk staff groped students”, bellowed The Sun, and the Daily Mail, never a publication to bypass an opportunity to foment moral panic (or, it appears, to eliminate syntactical ambiguity), reported on how “students had become pregnant by academics, and staff had groped and ‘forced themselves’ on students while drunk”.

Given the pressures of compulsive happiness, to be/come feminist entails developing the ability to notice patterns and to hold onto experiences of being wronged (27–28). When you become wrong for noticing some things are wrong, you may no longer want to live in the world as it is (62). To change this world, feminists “might have to become willful to hold on when you are asked to let go; to let it go” (235). However this holding on requires a capacity to withstand what it feels like to be made wrong, to be made to feel like one’s arrival deflates others and immediately puts them on edge. To hold on can mean to be worn down, exhausted to the point of self-doubt and surrender. I remember how difficult it was to walk long distances to my classes in my last trimester of pregnancy (at that time junior faculty were not given classrooms close to our department offices). I remember how impossible it was to find time and place to pump milk after my son was born (my classes were often scheduled too close together, and the women’s bathroom was on the other side of the building from my department and far from any refrigerator). I remember late afternoon faculty meetings, the time of which “could not possibly change” until it did change, when a high-powered male colleague was hired and “needed” an earlier meeting time to fit his weekly flight schedule. My stated “need” to be home with my children from 3–6 p.m. was literally invisible and inadmissible. These may be the least infuriating examples in my memory, but they are the ones I can bring myself to relate. See Gorata Chengeta “Challenging the Culture of Rape at Rhodes,” Mail and Guardian, April 25, 2017 ( https://mg.co.za/article/2017-04-25-00-challenging-the-culture-of-rape-at-rhodes). ↩ Ahmed’s work is persuasively evocative in its resonances, the repeatability of the personal across bodies, across oceans. In appreciation of this, I am here, enveloped in my own discomfort, beginning to venture, yes—with great trepidation, into making the personal the foundation from which I write. And, in so doing, I focus on the problems that arise in the living of this call. Feminism often begins with intensity: you are aroused by what you come up against. You register the sharpness of an impression. Something can be sharp without it being clear what the point is. Over time with experience, you sense that something is wrong or you have a feeling of being wronged. You sense injustice. (22)Ahmed borrows from Donna Haraway’s formulation “companion species”; which Haraway offers through a manifesto; “a personal document, a scholarly foray into too many half-known territories, a political act of hope in a world on the edge of global war, and a work permanently in progress, in principle.” 3 For Ahmed, “a companion text [can] be thought of as a text whose company enable[s] you to proceed on a path less trodden,” “spark[s] a moment of revelation in the midst of an overwhelming proximity; they might share a feeling or give you resources to make sense of something that had been beyond your grasp; companion texts can prompt you to hesitate or to question the direction in which you are going, or they might give you a sense that in going the way you are going, you are not alone” (16). 3. Feminism as Pedagogy Living a Feminist Life hopes we can survive doing feminist theory, and energises us to do so." — Clare Croft, Feminist Theory Sara Ahmed’s latest work, Living a Feminist Life, dismantles the false divide between academic theory and the embodied world in which our concepts come alive. It is the kind of book we need more and more of by feminist scholars. It is an intervention not only in academic feminism, but also an invitation to rethink (and, indeed, re-feel and re-sense) the writing and reading practices we are relying upon to translate the sensuality of life into the conceptual structures of language. This translation process is a particular feminist labor, and all three of the book’s sections—Becoming a Feminist, Diversity Work, and Living the Consequences—make visible and palpable the processes within that labor.