Living a Feminist Life

Ahmed says that “feminism is sensational” (21). By this, she means both as “provoking excitement” (as in sensational news) and being of the senses. Thus, feminism is not merely an academic, theoretical, or mental exercise, but a matter of physicality, of sensing the world and one’s place in it. It is also about “making sense” of the world—as in coming to some kind of understanding of it. This often begins with the sensation of being wrong, and being wronged. These things are felt more than thought, as Ahmed argues: “Feminism can begin with a body, a body in touch with a world, a body that is not at ease in a world; a body that fidgets and moves around” (22).

A feminist body feels out of place and uncomfortable in the world, and senses that they are wrong in the world, but also wronged by the world. As an example, Ahmed recalls being sexually harassed by a man while out jogging, and feeling angry and violated, but also shamed and timid, as if she was the one who behaved wrongly. She adds that feminism as sensation includes gut instinct, which “has its own intelligence” and “might sense something is amiss” (27).

Women can learn to be feminists by sensing the wrongness of the way their bodies are directed and gendered through a mechanism that feminist theorist Judith Butler calls “girling.” Girling is a verb: to make something a girl, to impose gender on the body. By being made into girls, the feminist body feels inhibited, contained, pressured, and pushed in specific directions. Girling is part of what Ahmed calls “gender fatalism” (See: Index of Terms), which applies to boys as well. Gender fatalism makes assumptions about gender—such as in the statement “boys will be boys”—that move beyond description to “acquire the force of prediction” (25), and from there become a command.

The process of “becoming a feminist” begins when one notices other problems as well. This noticing is like having a switch turned on. For some, it is necessary to turn the switch off and stop noticing for a while, but Ahmed argues that “feminist consciousness is when the on button is the default position” (31). Noticing is a “form of political labor” (32) that is helped along by giving names to the problems one notices: sexism, racism, etc. With a name, the initial sensation of wrongness becomes a specific problem or structure that feminists can address and dismantle. However, when the feminist points to a problem in a structure or institution, those invested in maintaining that structure will call her the problem instead, as if by naming a problem she is actually causing it rather than describing it.

Therefore, it is the feminist’s job to become the problem. This is where Ahmed’s “feminist killjoy” arrives. The feminist killjoy is accused of causing a sensation, or exaggerating for effect, of causing problems rather than merely pointing to them. The feminist killjoy blocks something: the sexist joke she refuses to laugh at, the offensive conversation at the family dinner table. People roll their eyes at the feminist killjoy, as if to say, “here she goes again” (38).

The chapter concludes with the concept of alienation. The feminist killjoy feels alienated from a world or family because she sees a problem that no one else sees or acknowledges. She begins to doubt reality and feel as if she is living in an alternate reality. She is out of alignment with the world and the structures around her.

Chapter 2 transitions from feminism as a sensation and alienation, to what these things allow a feminist to notice: “how power works as a mode of directionality, a way of orientating bodies in particular ways, so they are facing a certain way, heading toward a future that is given a face” (43).

To illustrate this directionality, Ahmed uses Virginia Woolf’s novel Mrs. Dalloway, particularly one scene where the protagonist, Mrs. Clarissa Dalloway, becomes distracted while walking through traffic on a street. She becomes aware for the first time of her own body and her own subjectivity, disappearing as it moves with the flow of the traffic.

Ahmed argues that from this scene, one learns that “life can be understood as a path or a trajectory. There are points you should reach, points that become like punctuation: how we stop and start, how we measure our progression [...] A path gives life a certain shape, a direction, a sequence” (44-45). The crowd moving down a street, directing the flow of everyone in the crowd, becomes a metaphor of the way norms in groups (institutional, societal) become directives. The crowd and the directive form a loop that feeds itself: People are pushed in a specific direction, and the more people move in that direction, the easier the path becomes, and the more inevitable that path seems. Conversely, when one tries to move against the flow, the path becomes more difficult, and one might become discouraged and give in to the accepted path.

Ahmed refers to feminist poet and writer Adrienne Rich’s concept of “compulsory heterosexuality,” adding that compulsory heterosexuality is like a traffic system: “the route is kept clear through collective labor [...] You are given support by others when you follow the route” (46). For the feminist, the change happens when she notices this directionality and make the decision to resist, to go against the flow. If life is a directed path upon which many women feel stuck, then she might also come to know that “[she] can leave a life” (47).

One example of this directionality is what Ahmed calls “the path of happiness.” Happiness itself is directive, and often tangled with gender fatalism, as in the adage: “girls will be girls; girls will be happiest when they get married. Maybe that ‘will be’ can also be heard not only as a prediction but as a moral instruction” (48). Thus, the path of happiness is what girls are expected to do, and do happily. If demands to be happy are a way of being directed toward those things that society has dictated should make one happy, then happiness itself can be a form of pressure.

Furthermore, even when one goes in a particular direction willingly, this can likewise be a consequence of pressure. Once aware of the discomfort of that pressure, one might decide to willingly go in the dictated direction, to relieve that sense of pressure.

The feminist killjoy resists this pressure to follow the path of happiness. The feminist killjoy does not feel happiness for the things that society dictates should make her happy, and conversely is often perversely happy about things that society deems should make her sad. This can cause disappointment, “with yourself or with a world” or anger with a world “that promises happiness by elevating some things as good” (56). Ahmed states that the feminist killjoy becomes a stranger to the world in these moments, the “feminist killjoy is an affect alien. [They] are not made happy by the right things” (57).

The chapter concludes with a transition from the directive to happiness to the subject of willfulness. If the feminist is an affect alien (See: Index of Terms) who is made happy by the wrong things, she must resist the flow of traffic to live her life. This requires what Ahmed calls “willfulness.”

In this chapter, Ahmed focuses on a common accusation made against feminists, that of willfulness. She defines willfulness as “asserting or disposed to assert one’s own will against persuasion, instruction, or command; governed by will without regard to reason; determined to take one’s own way; obstinately self-willed or perverse” (65).

Ahmed uses a Brothers Grimm fairy tale, “The Willful Child,” to illustrate willfulness. In the tale, a girl is willful and disobedient. She does not do what her mother wants her to do, displeasing God, who allows her to fall ill and die. However, when she is buried, her arm keeps coming up out of the ground, until the mother hits the arm with a rod and the child finally stays buried. Ahmed uses this willful child and her willful arm as a central metaphor throughout the rest of the book. While the story is meant as a warning for children to be obedient—to relinquish their own will to the authority figures around them—Ahmed finds resistance and hope in the image of the arm that keeps coming back up.

On one hand, Ahmed argues that some “become willing to obey” to avoid the consequences of not being willing—i.e., being beaten by a rod literally or figuratively. However, the opposite is also true. Some girls (feminists) become willful—willing to face those consequences. Using the character of Maggie from George Eliot’s novel The Mill on the Floss as an example, Ahmed argues that the willful subject may not choose to be in trouble but is the one who is willing to deal with the consequences of being in trouble, for the sake of going her own way. For Ahmed, willfulness means having a will that is “wanting,” as in lacking discipline, but also as in desiring too much.

Importantly, a will that is “wanting” deserves punishment. To explain, Ahmed once again turns to personal experience. She describes her abusive father, who beat her while calling her willful. This accusation of willfulness is a “technique for justifying violence in the midst of violence. You are being punished for your subjectivity, for being the being you are. You can be beaten by a judgment. And then: you become the cause of the violence directed against you” (72-73). However, she notes that when she started screaming as her father approached her, he stopped. By screaming, she made his violence visible and audible. Willfulness, then, is “the acquisition of a voice as a refusal to be beaten” (73). Willfulness becomes something feminists need to survive the violence inflicted upon them.

Intersectionality is also vital to the figure of the willful feminist because issues of race and class are inextricable from those of gender. The violence faced by Black feminists and feminists of color is marked not only by gender, but also by race, based on histories of colonialism and enslavement. Therefore, the willfulness of feminists of color contains multiple levels of history, trauma, and resistance.

Ahmed states: “we reclaim willfulness in refusing to give up” (80), just like the arm from the Grimm fairy tale that refuses to stay buried. This willful refusal is a style of politics in which one refuses to go with the flow and is willing to cause trouble by obstructing that flow. Most importantly, this is not a matter of lonely solitary resistance, but a story of collective action, a story of a “we” forming in the shared “willingness to go the wrong way” (82). The willful arm from the Grimm story becomes an army of willful feminists. This army will be intersectional, addressing all the interconnected oppressions of race, class, and gender.