For anyone looking to understand contemporary feminist theory, this book is for you. Drawing mainly on the scholarship of feminists of color, Ahmed brings critical theory to life through practical examples and personal experience. This is an essential toolkit for building a feminist consciousness, practicing feminism, and surviving life as a 'feminist killjoy.' bell hooks couldn’t put it down." — WATER But snap has a history. I was exhausted from the struggle to get the college to take the problem of sexual harassment more seriously. So really the lead-up to the decision was slow. Once I made the decision, it was such a relief. It is one of the best decisions I have made. I have much work to do, and I miss very much being part of the Centre for Feminist Research (which was a real feminist shelter for many and will remain so) but I need to do my feminist work somewhere else. And it was also energising to witness how making public the reasons for my resignation had an impact on others fighting similar battles in their respective institutions. We need to keep naming the problem even if it means becoming a problem.” Ahmed’s resignation in the summer of 2016 from her post as director of the Centre for Feminist Research at Goldsmiths, University of London had an impact beyond the academy. She articulated her position on her blog, feministkilljoys, in a remarkable post called “Resignation is a Feminist Issue”. “We are not having the conversations” about sexual harassment on university campuses, wrote Ahmed, “because they would get in the way of our happiness. If our happiness depends on turning away from violence, our happiness is violence.” I remember how difficult it was to walk long distances to my classes in my last trimester of pregnancy (at that time junior faculty were not given classrooms close to our department offices). I remember how impossible it was to find time and place to pump milk after my son was born (my classes were often scheduled too close together, and the women’s bathroom was on the other side of the building from my department and far from any refrigerator). I remember late afternoon faculty meetings, the time of which “could not possibly change” until it did change, when a high-powered male colleague was hired and “needed” an earlier meeting time to fit his weekly flight schedule. My stated “need” to be home with my children from 3–6 p.m. was literally invisible and inadmissible. These may be the least infuriating examples in my memory, but they are the ones I can bring myself to relate. In Living a Feminist Life, Sara Ahmed weaves together threads from her previous and current work; some of which support entire books in their own right. The result is both a helpful entry point into her theoretical corpus and, more to the point of Living a Feminist Life, a demonstration of the way in which the everyday work of living is inextricable from theoretical work. Everyday life and feminist theory move and breathe together into the figure of the feminist killjoy, the figure that focuses Ahmed’s book. In what follows we focus on the contribution of considering the resemblance between Ahmed’s feminist killjoy and our liberationist view of the Christian evangelist.

LFL is bursting with sentences that I want to turn into billboards or imprint on departmental stationary. One of my favorites is the slogan-like phrase, “history enacted as judgment.” 12 The phrase sums up with enviable conciseness numerous enfleshed paths and dynamics of the book: Ahmed writes to us of how she snaps, she flies off the handle, she wiggles, she kills the joy (again), she rolls her eyes. These feminist actions get accused of (judged as) instigating altercation or disrespect when actually they are responses, reactions, to long-established patterns that are activated over and again (history). There is something remarkably intimate for me as a reader, touching the same scenes again. The quality of this touch is specifically animated by the feeling that I know this place, I know this table where the family gathers. Across Ahmed’s work, I have felt like I was visiting the same places. In this account, she draws specific detail and attention to embodied experiences of power, and writing “animated by the everyday” (10). Ahmed also defines a sweaty concept as “another way of being pulled from a shattering experience” (12). Sweaty concepts help us to understand how descriptive work is also conceptual work (13); sweaty concepts are “generated by the practical experience of coming up against a world, or the practical experience of trying to transform a world” (13–14). Living out of joint as feminists sometimes means shifting your politics because of your context. As an undergraduate, I recall being a new student, a feminist student in the midst of an anti-identitarian college climate. A recent graduate told me, “If I could do it all over again, I would be a militant second-wave feminist.” As a then self-professed postmodern feminist, I found her statement constrictive and caught up in a world I was more interested in critiquing than embracing. As the experiences of sexism and sexual harassment accumulated in a place where I thought they would be absent, I understood what she meant. These were situations in which, as Ahmed writes, “Feminist and anti-racist critique are heard as old-fashioned” (155). Being tied to the past is a charge meant to dismiss, not historically locate. Many of the men with whom I spent time knew gender theory and used constructivism as a lever to shift the locus of sexist blame away from them and their actions and onto my “limited notions of gender.” So when theory is what you believe but in living out that theory you are met with cooptation and twisted practice, you may need to be out of joint with yourself. Over time, my theoretical leanings have reassembled, and while I did not convert into a militant second-wave feminist, I see these tactics as part of what works. I am not alone in this tactical shift. In living a feminist life, “recent feminist strategies have revived key aspects of second-wave feminism”; Ahmed indicates “we are in the time of revival because of what is not over” (30). When I first found Sara Ahmed’s work, almost ten years ago as a graduate student, I remember having all the feelings of hope up there in my tiny attic room in New Haven, Connecticut, that maybe I could be a scholar after all. Here was someone who wrote in ways where I felt multiple modes of rigor were being combined, simultaneously, in ways that mattered to me. Here was someone who showed how attunement to one’s embodiment—of understanding what different bodies experience within the materiality of relations of power—is central to feminist knowledge.So when I am saying that white men is an institution, I am referring not only to what has already been instituted or built but the mechanisms that ensure the persistence of that structure. A building is shaped by a series of regulative norms. White men refers also to conduct; it is not simply who is there, who is here, who is given a place at the table, but how bodies are occupied once they have arrived. 7 In this accusation, we draw a dramatic if unexpected resemblance between Ahmed’s figure of the feminist killjoy and the Christian figure of the evangelist. On the one hand, Ahmed’s feminist killjoy reveals the Christian evangelist of US settler colonialism, who affirms white supremacy in terms of theological anthropology, to be a corruption of Christian faith. This colonial figure is the bearer not of gospel (good news) but of terror and horror. This figure declares the brutal colonial violence of genocide of indigenous peoples and land theft as manifestations of God’s providence, chattel slavery as the slave’s path to salvation, and aggressive militarization as a vehicle for evangelizing where the lure of white supremacist culture falls short. The feminist killjoy kills the joy of this Christian evangelist—and rightly so. For example, in part 2: Diversity Work, Ahmed argues that diversity work is feminist theory, and you learn the knowledge within the praxis. You also learn it in the experience of a space not being made for your body. She emphasizes in this section that trying to change an institution is political labor, but so is just trying to survive a space that was never made for you in the first place. Ahmed defines privilege as “an energy-saving device” (125), given to those who can inhabit the norms, who don’t do the labor of not belonging. But if you cannot belong, if you do not inherit the norm, if you were never supposed to be there in the first place, daily life in the institution involves the labor of hitting walls. At the same time, “the wall is a finding” (137); it is also an archive. The wall reveals the materiality of systems that have hardened through histories. The wall reveals whiteness and heteropatriarchy. As she writes, “I have learned about how power works by the difficulties I have experienced trying to challenge power” (90). See Gorata Chengeta “Challenging the Culture of Rape at Rhodes,” Mail and Guardian, April 25, 2017 ( https://mg.co.za/article/2017-04-25-00-challenging-the-culture-of-rape-at-rhodes). ↩

It is true that Ahmed rallies us once again under the banner of “women.” Note, however, that hers is a category reinvented to reference “all those who travel under the sign women” (p. 14). Transwomen are now not only included but in some sense exemplary, for “it is transfeminism today that most recalls the militant spirit of lesbian feminism in part because of the insistence that crafting a life is political work” (p. 227). Needless to say, Ahmed also understands identity in emphatically intersectional terms. If the book’s middle section on “Diversity Work” seems to veer from sexism to racism, “I am not,” Ahmed reminds us, “a lesbian one moment and a person of color the next and a feminist at another. I am all of these at every moment” (p. 230). Feminists have, of course, been theorizing identity as complex and contextual for several decades now, but it helps to have someone with Ahmed’s political and theoretical cred insist so passionately that issues of sexuality, race, class, and immigrant status can be usefully assembled under the sign of “women.” The postinaugural Women’s March on Washington—giving voice to a panoply of demands for social justice—was a similarly vivid demonstration of feminism’s ability (too often unrealized in the past) not only to mobilize huge numbers but also to sponsor a genuinely diverse resistance movement. Anyone at odds with this world—and we all ought tobe—owes it to themselves, and to the goal of a better tomorrow, to read this book." — Mariam Rahmani, Los Angeles Review of BooksThe heart of Christian theology is christology—who we say Christ is. As long as we describe our savior as the god who was an outsider among their own people, and who was tortured and executed by Roman crucifixion, Christian proclamations of good news—gospel—will be simultaneously bad news and judgment against some. Gospel snaps ties with systems and structures that categorize some as disposable. The gospel is a break for those who have been broken: it is the breakaway necessary for the potential of theological alternatives. Our alternative Christian archive, like t Ahmed’s work is persuasively evocative in its resonances, the repeatability of the personal across bodies, across oceans. In appreciation of this, I am here, enveloped in my own discomfort, beginning to venture, yes—with great trepidation, into making the personal the foundation from which I write. And, in so doing, I focus on the problems that arise in the living of this call. That said this is one of the poorest examples of a narrator showing utter indifference to the content of a text.Whilst not quite as bad as those computer style monotone readings, there are endless errors. Mis-reading 'feminist' over and over as 'feminine' is ridiculous, utterly changing the message of the book (what IS a feminine protest?) but slightly funny I suppose once you realise. By far the worst is the constant mispronunciation of the author's name. In narrating a book concerned with words, women, racism, you think you might bother to get the author's name right. However it seems 'Ahmed' is far too complicated to pronounce so our fearless narrator plumps - repeatedly- for 'Akmed'. Ahmed describes the impetus to become a feminist as an accumulation, in which the experiences of sexist subjugation function as a “gathering like things in a bag, but the bag is your body” (23). So through the experiences of my own life and those closest to me, I understand the influence of the personal in feminist theories. The hard thing for me is writing feminism through my personal life.