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312 pages, Hardcover
First published February 3, 2017
"It is hard labor to recognize sadness and disappointment when you are living a life that is meant to be happy but is not happy, which is meant to be full but feels empty. It is difficult to give up an idea of one’s life when one has lived one’s life according to that idea."
"From a shattering, a story can be told, one that finds in fragility the source of a connection."
It is as if the response to power and violence is or should be simply to adjust or modify how we feel; for instance, by transforming a social relation of exploitation into a personal feeling of empowerment.This is a weird book. I'm not going to say it's a bad one, as some of what it had to say had so much relevance to recent events in my life that the read was as painful as it was vindicating. On the other hand, that positive is only due to how much my current working situation (master's degree full-timer) mirrors Ahmed's in certain key ways: white collar, education dependent, far closer to the management side of things than the proletariat, and otherwise insulated in certain important respects, if not quite status quo inviolable. So, while I personally resonate with certain topics, I still found this piece to be more of a selective thought experiment than other feminism-oriented books that I've read this year (Against White Feminism, Killing Rage), which certainly made it great at finding le mot juste but not so much at being consistent. All in all, when it was good at parsing out the intricacies of a feminist life and some of its choices, it was very very good. When it said it was being good at one thing and then uncritically referenced some sources that are very much the opposite (e.g. denouncing transphobia/TERFs but raising up Adrienne Rich w/out the slightest qualifier), or otherwise valued the representation more than the solidarity, it was more of the diversity/equity/inclusion events that my workplace puts out whenever they get caught leaving the union out of the loop. In other words, if you've been fortunate enough to get enough of a handle on the academic breed of feminism, you'll probably like this one. If you've done your time with this kind of piece and found it lacking in key ways, though, you may find a familiar breed of less than enthused feeling informing your reading experience.
We must still tell these stories of violence because of how quickly that violence is concealed and reproduced. We must always tell them with care. But it is risky: when they are taken out of hands, they can become another form of beating.
No wonder there is so much investment in not recognizing how restrictions are structured by decisions that have already been made.At the start of next month, I will have officially been at my job for a year, and thus will face both my final performance evaluation and my own personal evaluation of whether it has all been worth it. I wouldn't say everything has gone absolutely perfect every single time, but I have learned a great deal and gained a much stronger appreciation for many things I had not had previous exposure to. One major revolution in my thinking that has occurred as direct result of this is that, I've started viewing the distance that typically lies between diversity/equity/inclusion efforts and unionization movements as a deep and debilitating wound in the side of any sort of social justice action. So, when I'm reading Ahmed's discussions of arms and striking and withholding labor and yet no real push towards conscious raising or solidarity building, I think, well. I certainly have the frame of mind to appreciate quotes of Mary Ann Evans/George Eliot and Audre Lorde, and it makes sense for Ahmed to talk about a feminist life within her personal experiences that are far more of the academic variety than anything else. And yet, when I see talk of movements 'dying out' and still no reach out to those who have plentiful experience with stonewalling committees, dehumanizing management, and institutions whose 'damage control' is code for 'divide and conquer those who would question our inherited right to promulgate violence', I have to wonder what hope there is for folks reaching across the table if a topic as seemingly straightforward as equitable pay is avoided like the plague. That and the 'have-your-cake-and-eat-it-to' approach to intersectionality, where the statements didn't quite align with the sources quoted without any sort of qualifier, were rather off-putting. However, Ahmed's comment about how feminist departments can normalize injustice by blocking themselves off and not passing judgment on what is happening in other departments, not to mention the institution at large, hit the nail so on the head for my own experiences that I have to give credit where credit is due. I just can't really recommend this to anyone who's looking for something a tad more utilitarian than having a safety net in case you have to quit your job in protest or surrounding yourself with knickknacks at home.
Lauren Berlant (2011) introduces the idea of "cruel optimism" to explain how we can end up holding on to what diminishes us; how we can stay attached to a life that is not working. To be in a relation of cruel optimism does not necessarily mean that we feel optimistic; that we hold on to something because we hope that it could get us somewhere; although we can feel like this. Rather the bond itself is the scene of optimism; a cluster of promises that can surround an object (an idea, a thing, a person, a relation). Cruel optimism might be one way of explaining how we do not snap the bonds that are, at some level, compromising, maybe of our existence; maybe of our capacity to realize an idea of an existence.
The first principle has been the basis of much feminist knowledge and activism: the identification of how institutions are built as promises of happiness; promises that often hide the violence of these institutions.Times were that my reading was incentivized by the quotes I had hopes of finding amongst the pages of reads that would prove themselves worthy via their more memorable segments. These days, I've gotten even lazier about compiling them, and it's only for the truly special works that I bother to unpick the scraps of receipts from their pages and attempt to parse what made them so hallowed at that transient period of time. Case in point, this particular? Eminently quotable. Holistically speaking in terms of what I gained overall, however? The way in which this was structured and the choices Ahmed made in making her points made it at time feel that the same point was being reiterated multiple times, and if the author hit upon the right combination words after two, five, ten instances, it wasn't entirely clear whether it was intended or not. Just as what was being clarified in the endnotes (aware of disability, aware of the malignancy of TERFs, aware class) didn't quite jive with what was being uncritically presented in the text, I can't say that I came away with a definite finger of the pulse of Ahmed's overall point. Of course, perhaps what I am bemoaning is the lack of a single-minded and full bodied thrust of an argument, something easily connected to the phallic connected to the patriarchy and so on and so forth. Or perhaps my hard won confidence to cut through the stonewalling nonsense of management during union negotiations has left me little patience for equivocators. In any case, if Ahmed's words do something for you, all the better. These days, I like my theorizing with more meat on its bones.
To protect the feminist bubble you may want to protect it from exposure to the violence of the institution, a violence that is happening elsewhere (another center, another department). Protecting the feminist bubble ends up becoming a means of protecting the institution.
When you assume your own oppositionality too quickly, you can inflate a minority into a majority, hear an injury as a lobby; interpret a fight for survival as the formation of an industry.