In Living a Feminist Life, Sara Ahmed shows how feminist theory is generated from everyday life and the ordinary experiences of being a feminist at home and at work. Building on legacies of feminist of colour scholarship in particular, Ahmed offers a poetic and personal meditation on how feminists become estranged from worlds they critique—often by naming and calling attention to problems—and how feminists learn about worlds from their efforts to transform them. Ahmed also provides her most sustained commentary on the figure of the feminist killjoy introduced in her earlier work while showing how feminists create inventive solutions—such as forming support systems—to survive the shattering experiences of facing the walls of racism and sexism. The killjoy survival kit and killjoy manifesto, with which the book concludes, supply practical tools for how to live a feminist life, thereby strengthening the ties between the inventive creation of feminist theory and living a life that sustains it.
With an introduction by Chayanika Shah.
“From the moment I received Sara Ahmed’s new work, Living a Feminist Life, I couldn’t put it down … Ahmed lifts us higher.”
— bell hooks
“I read Living a Feminist Life with a deep sense of recognition. This is a book that feminists will find illuminating—acutely painful at times, but mostly profoundly insightful … A beautifully written, smartly provocative book that belongs on our shelves, in our classrooms, and in our daughters’ hands.”
— Chandra Talpade Mohanty, author of Feminism without Borders: Decolonizing Theory, Practicing Solidarity
SARA AHMED is a feminist writer, scholar, and activist. She works at the intersection of feminist, queer, and race studies. Her research is concerned with how bodies and worlds take shape; and how power is secured and challenged in everyday life worlds as well as institutional cultures. She is the author of Willful Subjects, On Being Included, The Promise of Happiness, and Queer Phenomenology.
CHAYANIKA SHAH is an optimist activist at heart, a physicist by training and a teacher by choice. She has worked in areas like politics of population control, communalism, feminist studies of science, and sexuality, which seem to have no connection with each other but which have come together of late to define her as a queer feminist. Her co-authored books include No Outlaws in the Gender Galaxy (Zubaan 2015); Bharat ki Chaap, and We and Our Fertility: The Politics of Technological Intervention.
Across the South Asian region, water determines livelihoods and in some cases even survival. However, water also creates exclusions. Access to water, and its social organisation, are intimately tied up with power relations. This book provides an overview of gender, equity and water issues relevant to South Asia. The essays empirically illustrate and theoretically argue how gender intersects with other axes of social difference such as class, caste, ethnicity, age and religion to shape water access, use and management practices. Divided into six thematic sections, each of which starts with an introduction of relevant concepts, debates and theories, the book looks at laws and rights, policies, technologies and intervention strategies. In all, the book clearly shows how understanding and changing the use, distribution and management of water is conditional upon understanding and accommodating gender relations.
Contact Us
© Zubaan 2019. Site Design by Avinash Kuduvalli.
Payments on this site are handled by CCAvenue.