Living a Feminist Life

The third, and most vital, theme of the text is the Importance of Intersectionality. Ahmed signals this importance early in the introduction by paraphrasing feminist writer Flavia Dzodan and her famous essay “My Feminism Will Be Intersectional or It Will Be Bullshit,” published on the feminist blog Tiger Beatdown. Intersectionality is a complex concept that refers to the ways many layers and forms of discrimination and oppression due to identity such as race, gender, sexuality, disability, and socio-economic status, combine and intersect, becoming inextricably tangled and inseparable. Activist and lawyer Kimberlé Crenshaw coined the term in the 1970s, referring to “interlocking systems of oppression.” Audre Lorde once described it thus: “There is no such thing as a single-issue struggle because we do not live single-issue lives” (qtd in El Gharib, Sarah. “What Is Intersectionality and Why Is It Important?” Global Citizen).

Throughout the book, Ahmed offers examples of how intersectionality influences feminist issues, and why she believes it to be an important and necessary aspect of any effective feminist strategies of resistance. For instance, she offers accounts from her experiences with an abusive father and notes the ways these stories can easily be co-opted by racists who point to her father’s identity as a Pakistani Muslim rather than as a man. White feminists may dismiss these experiences by falling back on racist stereotypes about Arab and Muslim men, thus engaging in imperialist white savior tropes of “the white woman saving the brown woman from the brown man” (Mehra, Nishta J. “Sara Ahmed: Notes from a Feminist Killjoy.” Guernica). White feminists must resist this racist mode of thought. For Ahmed and other feminists of color, it is important to acknowledge and understand the ways gender, race, religion, and even sexuality intersect and cannot be isolated from each other in her experiences and in other similar experiences.

Ahmed insists on the absolute necessity of intersectionality, especially in Part 3, which draws the fragile bodies of women, queer people, and disabled people together under the same banner. All three groups overlap and intersect in vital ways, coming up against similar walls and blockages, broken by similar systems of oppression. Echoing her statement in the Introduction, Ahmed argues that any kind of feminism deserving of the name must be inclusive of other marginalized groups, and pick up queer and disabled causes as their own. This, she insists, is not only for the good of those marginalized communities, but for the good of the entire feminist collective army. To use Ahmed’s imagery, it is only when all the shattered pieces are gathered that they can build themselves into the killjoy “army of arms” that Ahmed imagines.

Importantly, Ahmed even enacts her vision of intersectionality through her citational practices. As she argues in the Introduction, citations are bricks that build up the white male institution. Therefore, to battle this, she uses feminist and intersectional citation “bricks” instead. This is clear in the fiction she cites, such as Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf and the work of George Eliot, as well as the feminist films she analyzes.

It is most powerful, however, in the theorists and thinkers she refers to most often, including Judith Butler, Adrienne Rich, bell hooks, Audre Lorde, and Gloria Anzaldua, who are all intersectional feminists inhabiting various identities of woman, queer, lesbian, white, Black and Chicana. By citing these writers, Ahmed not only incorporates their intersectional feminist theory with her own but invites their many different identities into the intersectional feminist space she is building.