Living a Feminist Life

The introduction begins with a rhetorical question: “what do you hear when you hear the word feminism?” (1) from which Ahmed unpacks the many layers of meaning and affective (emotional) responses people have to the word. For some, feminism is a negative term, about policing and judging behavior and being angry all the time. However, for Ahmed, it is a hopeful word that “brings to mind loud acts of refusal and rebellion” (1), as well as the more subtle ways that women resist oppression to make a world that is more “bearable” and inclusive.

Ahmed says that feminism is a movement. However, it must also be about ways of living, not only ways of addressing politics. She draws on bell hooks’s definition of feminism as “the movement to end sexism, sexual exploitation, and sexual oppression” (5) but adds that it must also be intersectional—accounting for many valences of difference and oppression including issues of race, class, sexuality, disability, and others. 

Furthermore, “feminism is homework” (7), by which Ahmed means it is something that must be studied and worked on, but also must be done at home as well as in political and institutional spaces. Rather than containing feminist theory within academic spaces only, she argues that it can also be generated and explored at home.