Living a Feminist Life

Ahmed states that as one comes up against the many walls in life, they risk being shattered by the experience, and that leads to fragility as “the wear and tear of living a feminist life” (163). This feeling of being worn down can happen gradually, so that one is not even aware of it until you reach a point “when it is too much” (164). Ahmed argues this fragility is a kind of “thread, a connection, a fragile connection between those things deemed breakable” (164) and examines this from the perspective of different scales—fragile things, relationships, shelters, and bodies.

Ahmed uses two examples from writer George Eliot to examine fragile objects. First in Silas Marner, the main character’s beloved water pot breaks. Though the pot can no longer perform its function of holding water, he puts the pieces together again, keeping it as a kind of memorial. The second example is from Adam Bede. A small girl, Molly, accidentally breaks a jug, but her mother blames it on her willfulness. However, when the mother then turns around and accidentally breaks another jug, she concludes that the jug itself had some inherent willfulness, a desire to fly from her hand and break itself. Ahmed argues this connects the girl and the jug, creating a “fragile connection between those assumed to cause a breakage” (167), implying that to be willful and deviate from an accepted path is to cause one’s own brokenness.

Ahmed states that fragility is the “quality of being easily breakable” (168). She then explores relationships as also being fragile. She argues that some relationships are assumed to be fragile, “inherently broken, as if their fate is to break, as if a break is what we were heading for right from the beginning” (169). She uses the example of queer (LGBTQ+) relationships. These relationships begin with a prediction that it will not work out. Society presumes that a queer life is an unhappy life. Ahmed argues that “you can feel this presumption as a pressure to prove that a queer life can be a happy life” (169). She adds that this creates a “kind of queer fatalism” (169) in which any queer relationship that breaks up (as relationships often do regardless) is taken as proof that “this is where being queer led you” (169). Worse yet, this “assumption of fragility can make something fragile. The more careful you are, the more your hand trembles” (169). Just like the broken jug in Adam Bede, these relationships are blamed for their own breakage.

The feminist killjoy also echoes the broken jug. She is accused of “flying off the handle, an expression used to indicate the suddenness of anger” (171). Just like the jug, when the feminist killjoy flies off the handle, “she not only causes her own breakage, she breaks the thread of connection” (171) to her family or community.

Ahmed says some relationships still matter, even when they cause harm, which requires the decision to not be the killjoy in some situations. However, sometimes the feminist killjoy comes up without conscious decision. Ahmed describes a situation in which the feminist killjoy appears despite herself. A “feminist politics of fragility” requires finding ways of surviving the walls one comes up against, but also ways to create relationships that can survive such moments. This includes surviving moments when one might be confronted by other killjoys. Ahmed argues that feminists must not become so secure in their own belief as to become unable to connect with other minorities and other killjoys.

Ahmed then considers fragile shelters and fragile bodies. She argues that feminism must be built of fragile shelters that do not function like the brick walls of the institutions that beat them down. Fragile feminist shelters must be willing to be shaken, moved, even knocked down as needed to accommodate everyone. This includes white feminists becoming more aware of their own “white fragility,” a term coined by Robin DiAngelo, which refers to the “inability to handle the stress of conversations about race and racism” (179), and which certain white feminists use as a defense system to silence feminists of color, labeling them as an interruption to the real (i.e., white) conversation.

The feminist killjoy must also embrace the fragile body, such as those living with disability. She must “value what is deemed broken” (180). Ahmed argues that feminists, herself included, need to examine their own able-bodied privilege. This feminist politics of fragility must also include a “crip as well as queer ethics; we have to create room for bodies that do not obey commands, that do not move in straight lines, that lose their balance” (182). Quoting feminist theorist Gloria Anzaldua, Ahmed says, “I’m a broken arm” (183) and insists that the feminist killjoy arm must also be a broken arm.

Just like the feminist killjoy, the “queer and crip are willful words that work by insisting on what they bring up; a charged history, a shattering history; they are shattering words” (185). Ahmed thus suggests assembling the broken pieces, the feminist killjoy, all LGBTQ+ individuals, and all people with disabilities, into her “army of arms.” Their “brokenness” allows them to assemble, as a stone once shattered becomes many stone fragments, and those fragments assembled, become an army.

In Chapter 8, Ahmed explains her concept of “feminist snap,” the culmination of the fragility discussed in the previous chapter, and what happens when one hits the breaking point. Ahmed defines snap as: “to give way abruptly under pressure or tension; to suffer a physical or mental breakdown, especially while under stress” (188). A snap might seem like a sudden occurrence, but a snap happens as a reaction to a slow, often unnoticed, buildup of pressure. A snap only seems sudden because outsiders cannot always see or hear the buildup of pressure. Thus, a feminist politics must show how a snap is a reaction to violence, rather than a violent action.

Ahmed finds feminist snap in speaking, in “being snappy” or “having a snappy tongue.” When “she just can’t take it anymore” (190), the feminist killjoy may speak sharply. Ahmed recalls in Jane Eyre, when Jane experiences a moment when her tongue seems to speak without her consent. Tongues can therefore be willful, even towards their owners. This echoes Chicana feminist writer Gloria Anzaldua’s chapter “How to Tame a Wild Tongue,” from Borderlands/La Frontera, in which the willful tongue, like Ahmed’s willful arm, resists control and obedience. A snappy tongue and sharp words become weapons.

Ahmed also finds feminist snap in the snapping or breaking of certain bonds. Recalling the fragile relationships from Chapter 7, Ahmed argues that living a feminist life means understanding the difference between those relationships that are worth saving, and those that are not. Some bonds are damaging and must be snapped. Ahmed offers the example of her father, who “disowned” her partly because of her lesbian identity. From her perspective, he was the one who chose to snap the bond, whereas from his perspective, she caused the snap by “choosing” her lifestyle. For Ahmed, this moment was not sad. In fact, the moment of snap becomes a moment of relief for her. By snapping that bond, she frees herself to live the life she truly wants to live, one that is queer and feminist.

Having discussed individual moments of snap, Ahmed next shifts to discussing “collective snap.” To illustrate collective snap, she refers to three movies: A Question of Silence (dir. Marlene Gorris, 1982), Nine to Five (dir. Collin Higgins, 1980), and Born in Flames (dir. Lizzie Borden, 1983).

A Question of Silence follows three women all breaking under patriarchal pressure, until all three experience a collective snap when they beat a store clerk to death in a clothes boutique. During the trial they admit that it could have been any man at that moment. Meanwhile, the psychologist charged with deciding if the three women are competent to stand trial, is inspired by this collective snap to re-examine her own life. Nine to Five is a comedy in which the women working in an office under a sexist boss collectively snap and wrest control of the office away from the man. The third movie, Born in Flames, is a post-apocalyptic dystopian film in which a “war of liberation” has already been fought and a socialist revolution has won. However, the working-class and women of color find that their circumstances are no better and form a Women’s Army. Born in Flames ends with the “police killing of an unarmed black woman, a death they explain as taking her own life” (209), thus showing how the collective snap has been silenced by the police, like the willful arm beaten back into the ground by the rod.

Ahmed argues this story is “the state’s story” about the willful girl, “how those who die cause their own demise” (209). For Ahmed, “feminist snap is required to counter the story by raising the sound of protest [...] we have to give an account of her death as murder” (209). If a snap only seems sudden because the violence leading to it is invisible, then the snap is also necessary to make that violence visible. Thus, the line in Nine to Five when a woman states, “sometimes, somewhere I am going to snap” (210) is not merely a prediction but a feminist hope. Feminist collective snap is necessary.

Ahmed argues that to survive and build an army of “shattered pieces, we need a revival of lesbian feminism” (213). She explains and defends this claim in the last chapter. Lesbian feminism is often judged for conflating the personal with the political. The implication is that the way one lives is “a weak substitute for political struggle or a withdrawal of feminist energy from that struggle” (213). However, Ahmed argues that when the thing one struggles for is the right to live one’s own life, that struggle is automatically political. She insists that “lesbian feminism can bring feminism back to life” (214).

Ahmed states that living life as a lesbian offers important data for understanding the walls feminists come up against, and special tools for dismantling those walls. Ahmed argues in Chapter 6 that women are viewed only in relation to men by virtue of the compulsory requirements of heterosexuality (as wives, etc.). Lesbians, then, offer the tools necessary to fight heterogender sexism by simply exiting heterosexuality, thus refusing to be relational to men. This can come from simple moments, such as snapping family bonds to live the life one wants, or inhabiting lesbian and queer spaces. It can be fighting for an ordinary life while being not ordinary.

Lesbian feminism turns away from a world created by and for men, to create one by and for women. This may require transforming what it even means to be “women.” The word woman is bound up with concepts of ownership, as it is a compound of the words “wife” and “man.” For Ahmed, “The history of woman is impossible to disentangle from the history of wife” (224). Ahmed turns to Monique Witteg’s statement that “lesbians are not women” (224) because women are a heterosexual category oriented only in relation to men. Or, Ahmed suggests, if a lesbian is a woman, she is a particular kind of woman: a willful woman. A lesbian may be called a “man-hater,” but Ahmed disagrees. Lesbian feminism does not hate men, it is merely unconcerned with them. However, because the world is traditionally oriented toward men, any refusal to do so is pathologized, made to seem irrational or monstrous.

Ahmed refers to Adrienne Rich’s term, “lesbian continuum” (227), which advocates a redirection of attention away from men, toward women. Merely redirecting the attention of the world away from the concerns of men is enough to be threatening. Paraphrasing from transfeminist theorist Susan Stryker, Ahmed argues that if lesbians are monsters, then the “monsters will lead the way” (227). To illustrate this, Ahmed offers the example of Molly Bolt, the main character in Rita Mae Brown’s lesbian novel, Rubyfruit Jungle. Even some feminists often characterize Molly as monstrous and self-centered. However, Ahmed offers her as an example of the willful lesbian feminist as a “trouble-maker,” who pushes boundaries, refuses to inhabit norms, and hits against walls merely by living her life unapologetically.

Additionally, Ahmed turns to lesbian feminism of color to answer the need for intersectionality within feminist movements. She explains that she is “not a lesbian one moment and a person of color the next and a feminist at another,” but all of these at once. For her, “lesbian feminism of color brings this all into existence” (230). Ahmed compares the lesbian feminist with a carpenter, building worlds with her own hands, with her willful arms. Ahmed’s feminist army must be intersectional, including the arms of the strong Black woman and the butch lesbian, as well as the arms of trans women. Ahmed ends with a literal call to arms: “there are many arms; arms that are muscular, strong, laboring arms, arms that refuse to be employed, striking arms; arms that are lost in service to the industrial machine; broken arms. Intersectionality is arm. Intersectionality is army” (234).