The stories that lead us to feminism are the stories that make us fragile. From this experience of the world, Sara Ahmed builds what she calls a house theory – a shelter for a “we” which would not be the foundation, but the purpose. Drawing on the history of ideas, literature and activism, she summons a collective emotional heritage to write a feminist biography, her own, which allows her to hold theory and politics together.
Because she affirms that being a feminist means remaining a student, she transforms the slightest gesture into an object of questioning throughout the three parts which constitute her feminist life: “Becoming a feminist”, “The work of diversity” and “ Live the consequences.”
Becoming a feminist describes the sensitive dimension of feminist subjectivation: an incessant assault on our senses, hindered intentionalities[1]oriented futures[2]. Feminist consciousness consists first of all in recognizing injustices, contesting them, revealing their motives in order perhaps, finally, to re-inhabit one’s body and one’s past. Feminist consciousness, she says, is when the switch is turned on by default (p.75).
To describe how words and objects surround us and how they carry worlds with them and direct our experiences, she calls on literature, and images these directions which are experienced as a flow, a beaten path, a path, a line . Maintaining one’s position in this flow leads to strengthening it at the risk of alienating oneself; to contest it is to become the foreigner incarnated by the figure of the Feminist killjoy. These ways straight are perceived as a promise of happiness – a perception evidenced by the concern of loved ones when leaving[3].
Becoming a feminist requires measuring the weight of this path, illuminating the way in which deviations are made pathological and revealing our collective incapacity to unmask relations of oppression under the veneer of a empowerment satisfied. Sara Ahmed invites us in this sense to pierce the “seals of happiness” (p. 131) and to remain in contact with the world as it escapes under the lexical field of decorum, in empathy with all women who do not aren’t happy when they’re supposed to be.
This will which allegedly fails or overflows does not only provide information on the history of violence; it is also a story of women who vibrate more with life than with the law. In this struggle to conquer a will of one’s own, Sara Ahmed shows that not all stories are the same: being stubborn is a means of survival when one fights against the expropriation of one’s culture, one’s land, one’s language and his memory (p.169).
This is why, she says, some queer and Afro-descendant feminisms see obstinacy as a responsibility rather than a sentence.[4]a responsibility that involves work: the one that made it possible to build a house and the one that will make it possible to demolish it (p. 184).
The 2th part of Living a feminist life describes the attempts at feminist transformation of an institution, which Sara Ahmed calls “diversity work”, an expression which she illustrates by recounting a series of difficulties she encountered. It shows how a system works precisely when attempts to transform it are blocked. In the stories she relays, institutions authorize this work, declare it, make it visible, but ultimately prevent it. She describes this mechanism as “non-performative”: when naming an action has no effect, or even when it is named precisely so that it has no effect.
Promises are thus crushed by the weight of the past, and as an effect of this inertia, words are overused. One of the main characteristics of diversity work therefore requires giving them meaning. However, even when feminist work highlights the institution’s failures, it risks presenting them as proof of its success. In other words, the illusion of inclusion can turn out to perpetrate a logic of exclusion, and the house thus erected continues to create strangers. Furthermore, this work consists of showing the continuities and resonances between the questions (where do you come from?) which assign certain bodies residence in an overwhelming objectivity, which dislodge them (p. 236).
Sara Ahmed describes how some people must insist that they belong in the same categories where others reside comfortably – when there is a mismatch between body and space, when we think about passer, when we have to rearrange our vocabulary and when our mere presence causes discomfort. Because privilege is also just a way to preserve one’s energy.
She uses the metaphor of the wall which allows us to think about the materiality of the limits that certain bodies confront, cemented by habits of citational practices, networks of comfort, whiteness. Thus, it shows that a wall can be formed by a perception, that a body can be stopped, killed for a perception. However, while the walls are supposed to convey the image of sovereign power, they in reality show a failing authority and allow the law to transform racism into a right, even to the point of causing death (p. 292).
The effects of these clashes constitute the third part. Live the consequences presents as a preamble the fragility of things, of relationships, of our shelters. Objects that break, a social fabric that fragments, precarious homes, sick bodies that compromise the happiness of others. A feminist politics of fragility requires awareness of how the vulnerability of women and queer lives has been seen as a cause of power, even though it is a consequence of it.
It sometimes also requires us to lose a little confidence in ourselves, to bring about doubt and movement. To admit that we are part of the problem – when we have so often been considered the source and personification of the problem. Recognize white fragility, the narrative that racism is primarily a damage to whiteness. Inhabiting awkwardness as a queer ethic, accepting the desynchronization between body, time and space, and awkwardness as the effect of a history of shame[5].
She observes how being a “broken arm”[6]in what this implies as fracture, allows it not to be used for a useful purpose. Thus a feminist and queer genealogy unfolds from points of rupture (p. 368). In the sequel to If These Walls Could Talk which tells the story of three lesbian couples, Sara Ahmed questions the circumstances of Abby’s mourning after the death of her partner. The people who were biologically related to her assigned her to the position of roommate, and, while they lived together as a couple, gave her an object that she could keep as a souvenir.
Through this gift, we watch her be dispossessed of this object, and in the same gesture, of past love. The objects that made up Abby’s daily life, that were part of her and their love life, become objects to be passed down in a logic of hereditary lineage, objects that give the family its sanctified form. It’s this loss that pushes her over the edge. Here, the feminist shelter is seen as paying attention to these fractures, as a place where information on the invisible part of violence is shared. To this end, there is, of course, feminist studies, but because they aim to destroy the foundations on which they simultaneously try to build, they are and will remain a fragile dwelling.
As conclusions, she equips us with a survival kit and a resistance manifesto, two provocative companions with whom she wishes us to surge together. Vital tools more than practical, they synthesize the joyful rage with which she has led us here. In ten tools and ten principles, she takes up her main thoughts and challenges us. What do we mean when we hear “feminism”? Close to the skin, Sara Ahmed offers a personal history of the word, where metaphors, comparisons and analogies print affecting images in the hollow of a meander and sometimes lose us through their translation in a folded reflection.
While in English, her proposed concepts are part of a language game that gives substance to the sensations of dissonance that she excels in expressing, they fall apart and struggle to be gripping as one reads their French translation. Without an empiric other than her experience, and at the heart of an extraordinarily rich theoretical landscape informed by the rigor of her commitment, her phenomenological approach nevertheless allows us to overcome oppositions to write the material and immaterial springs of a feminist biography anchored in the real.
With it, the structure is also or above all a man who attacks you because he has permission to do so; intersectionality, as material as class issues; the theory of affects, eminently political; and the struggle for recognition, of the objects that we bequeath to ourselves when we are in mourning.
Notes
[1] Iris Marion Young, “Throw Like a Girl.” A phenomenology of female motility, spatiality and bodily behavior”, Symposiumvol.21, n°2, fall 2017
[2] Sara Ahmed, Queer phenomenology: Orientations, objects and others, Montreal and Paris: Éditions de la rue Dorion and Éditions Le Manuscrit, 2022 [2006].
[3] Sara Ahmed, The Promise of Happiness, Durham, Duke University Press, 2010.
[4] Alice Miller, It’s for your own good. Roots of violence in child education, trad. Jeanne Étoré-Lortholary (Aubier, 1984) de Am Anfang war Erziehung (1980), Flammarion, « Champs », 2015.
[5] Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, « Queer Performativity: Henry James’s The Art of the Novel », GLQ, vol.1, n°1, 1993.
[6] Gloria Anzaldúa, “La Prieta”, in In This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Colour; Cherríe Moraga et Gloria Anzaldúa (dir.), Watertown (Mass.): Persephone, 1983.
