Indeed, if you do not modify your behavior in accordance, if you are not careful and cautious, you can be made responsible for the violence directed toward you (look at what you were drinking, look at what you wearing, look at where you were, look look).

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. Living a Feminist Life puts a name to her life’s work, while also serving as a guide of sorts for other feminist killjoys, Ahmed’s reclaimed term for feminists who (among other things) dare to be wilful by rejecting social and gender norms that demand otherwise. If a sensation is how a body is in contact with a world, then something becomes sensational when contact becomes even more intense. Feminism helps you to make sense that something is wrong; to recognize a wrong is to realize that you are not in the wrong.Reaction has been what one expects with white defensiveness and anger such as “it wasn’t YOUR march to begin with. It has often been the case that I do indeed find myself decrying horrors that should never exist in a civilized world, to be met with absolute indifference.

Much of it is about reactions to feminists speaking up in private or public spaces, and how words (such as "killjoy") are used against feminists and how they can be retaken. Ahmed’s Killjoy is also deeply collectivist, group oriented and maintains a delicate balance between the altruism necessary for the well-being of others and egoism required for the well-being of self: in this her activist figure is profoundly different from the right wing killjoy invoked by late capitalist individualism and powerfully channelled by Trump and his populist posse (the right populism of Trump, Orban and the like is also collectivist, but in an inward looking homogenising form that lacks the altruism necessary for the well-being of the Other/ed, aiming instead to bring about the end of the Other/ed). Already we sense some consequences: if becoming feminist cannot be separated from an experience of violence, of being wronged, then what brings us to feminism is what is potentially shattering. The word sensational relates both to the faculty of sensation and to the arousal of strong curiosity, interest, or excitement.You are taught to be careful: to be full of care as to become anxious about the potential to be broken. then again maybe not, although everything I've read labeled as feminist (albeit western in origin) seems built around the Foucauldian model of thought.

In chapter 1 the author runs us through what makes a feminist in her opinion, and it isn't anywhere near comprehensive enough in my own humble opinion. A beautifully written, smartly provocative book that belongs on our shelves, in our classrooms, and in our daughters’ hands.Every person who feels isolated in the righteous and often lonely fight for equality would benefit from Ahmed’s book.