Living a Feminist Life

The introduction begins with a rhetorical question: “what do you hear when you hear the word feminism?” (1) from which Ahmed unpacks the many layers of meaning and affective (emotional) responses people have to the word. For some, feminism is a negative term, about policing and judging behavior and being angry all the time. However, for Ahmed, it is a hopeful word that “brings to mind loud acts of refusal and rebellion” (1), as well as the more subtle ways that women resist oppression to make a world that is more “bearable” and inclusive.

Ahmed says that feminism is a movement. However, it must also be about ways of living, not only ways of addressing politics. She draws on bell hooks’s definition of feminism as “the movement to end sexism, sexual exploitation, and sexual oppression” (5) but adds that it must also be intersectional—accounting for many valences of difference and oppression including issues of race, class, sexuality, disability, and others. 

Furthermore, “feminism is homework” (7), by which Ahmed means it is something that must be studied and worked on, but also must be done at home as well as in political and institutional spaces. Rather than containing feminist theory within academic spaces only, she argues that it can also be generated and explored at home. Therefore, to “become a feminist is to stay a student” (11) no matter where you reside or work. As a professor and scholar in critical theory, “academic language” is one of Ahmed’s tools. However, she also tries to “keep [her] words as close to the world as [she] can, by trying to show how feminist theory is what we do when we live our lives in a feminist way” (11). 

Ahmed briefly introduces the terms “feminist killjoy” and “willful subject” here. The figure of the “willful subject” comes from her book, Willful Subjects (2014), and “feminist killjoy” first appears in her book The Promise of Happiness (2010). She discusses both terms at length later in the book. She then introduces the idea of “sweaty concepts”: a description or thought (concept) about the world that arises out of difficult, strenuous, even painful work living in a body that is not “at home in the world” (13) (See: Index of Terms). Where most theory tries to erase or disguise the effort or labor that went into it, “sweaty concepts” reveals that effort, as the pain and struggle become an integral part of one’s understanding of the world.

Lastly, Ahmed explains her decision not to cite any “white men” in the theoretical framework of the book. By “white men” she is referring to the institutional canon of critical theory and scholarly work in general. She argues that citations (references to previous work and research), are bricks that build walls that can either block women out or create feminist dwellings. She, therefore, intends only to use “feminist bricks” in this work.