Book Review: Living a Feminist Life, by Sara Ahmed
Duke University Press
ISBN electronic: 978-0-8223-7337-7
Published 2017
Amazon link here.
Everand (formerly Scribd) audiobook link here. 

I suggest the title of this book under review - Living a Feminist Life - is a bit misleading.

Picture: Writer Sara Ahmed 

Having listened to the audiobook from beginning to end - I say the more accurate title would be Living a Lesbian Life.

Notwithstanding, time spent listening to this audiobook wasn't wasted: it was educational.

It's always a challenge to try and understand others - especially public intellectuals who seem to be living under a different worldview than myself. 

The fluent Aussie accent of the narrator on the Scribd site (now Everand), Larissa Gallagher, was appealing. But I’m biased, being an Aussie myself.

The book’s title seems some kind of ideological declaration.    However, the word feminist these days does not mean one thing. This is because (in Australia in this instance) we have no legal definition of the word woman under anti-discrimination law. That legal regime in Australia - over represented by LGBT activists occupying most staff positions - generally accepts the proposition that a man can identify as a woman.   It even goes one step further, to accept the idea that a man can be a woman.

Sara Ahmed pushes the notion - in one of the final chapters of this book, that anti-trans is anti-feminist.

This is an odd viewpoint. 

There are many feminist-identifying women fighting for women’s rights who call for the exclusion of “transgender women” - i.e., the exclusion of psychosexually-deranged men - from women’s sports and from women’s public toilet facilities.

Are these feminists, referred to as TERFs in popular parlance, anti feminist?   Sara Ahmed would tell us yes, they are anti-feminist feminists.   It’s a bit confusing. 

The author - without doubt - is a gifted writer when it comes to literary expression.  She's highly educated to boot, yet thoroughly brainwashed in postmodern social-science so-called scholarship, as in gender studies, cultural studies, queer theory, critical race theory, post colonial studies, so on and so forth. 

All this body of academic scholarship comes under the general label Theory, according to Helen Pluckrose & James Lindsay. Those two defectors from the academy of Social Justice wrote a popular book exposing the epistemic techniques by which the neo-Marxist professors in the humanities department of many Western universities have, over the past three decades, been graduating hoards of deluded social justice warriors who have moved to take up positions in the major institutions. 

These institutions are primarily the media, the judiciary, the parliament, and QANGO’s set up to enforce human non-discrimination. There is a reason why, these days, the driving revolutionary slogan and non-negotiable standard of these institutions is Diversity, Inclusion, and Equality.   It is of course all hypocritical and illogical nonsense, but the author Sara Ahmed would dismiss such a comment as the foam coming from the mouth of an ignorant bigot consumed by unconscious bias formed by white privilege.   She would be right, of course, from her own postmodern perspective wherein truth is not related to universal ideas or empirical evidence, but rather to feelings & perception moulded by ideology. 

There is no universal truth, because truth comes from lived experience, and everybody’s lived experience is different.

For example, Sara Ahmed’s lived experience would be that of what we call a lesbian, having no opposite-sex attraction.  That is not me saying this.   It is from her own story, her own testimony.   

As a heterosexual man, I cannot even begin to imagine what that would be like.  Her sexual neurology I assume gives her an aversion towards the thought of having sexual interaction with a man.   I can relate to that, because I have the same sort of aversion towards the thought of having sexual interaction with a man.   In this sense the psychosexual neurology of such a woman is similar to that of a truly heterosexual man, as I am.    Also we both have a sexual orientation towards women.   I’m sure evolutionary psychologists could have a field day researching the genetic explanation for source of the similar sexual-attraction brain-wiring in a lesbian woman and a truly heterosexual man. 

That popular book mentioned above by Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay has the interesting title CYNICAL THEORIES: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything about Race, Gender and Identity . . . and Why This Harms Everybody.  (Amazon link here.)

Sara Ahmed, in this part-biography/part-crusade, has fun playing around with the meaning of words. She’s into etymology, syntax, metaphor & poetry. Doors, walls, snap, killjoy. She gives those words new metaphorical meanings that relate to oppression and cultural hegemony or predominance.  

The book appears quite a sad story of a girl growing up in Adelaide, Australia, of culturally-diverse migrant parents and - as a teenager - more interested in horses than boys, she writes. In itself, this is not unusual.   I see her problem as being wired up in a way that made her averse to heterosexuality.  And so, all the social consequences of heterosexuality become a problem. The parental expectations, their subconscious wish for the joy of grandchildren; and the loss of freedom that, by necessity, a woman experiences when she becomes a mother.    Sara reports that the final irreconcilable rift with her father came when he said at the dinner table “women are not equal because babies need breast milk”.     Oh, that is biological essentialism!  That’s anathema to the intellectually woke, because gender is fluid and a social construct, as explained by Judith Butler in her milestone book Gender Trouble (Amazon link here.)

Who knows whether or not lesbianism is a cause or consequence of this negative attitude or aversion to heterosexual marriage and family? 

This book could be described as postmodern social justice ideology well-oiled with personal narrative.   It is the writer’s position statement in relation to her alienation from, and aversion to, the imagined hetero-patriarchy. This of course is an ideological construct based on the worldview that sees everything in terms of power relationships.   And so, one is either put into the cultural majority oppressor class, or one can adopt a minority group identity and claim to be victim of majority cultural oppression. Sara squarely positions herself in the latter group identity. She does not seems to have any unique individual thoughts and views of her own, because she could be categorised as being ideologically possessed. 

Sara is expert on theoretical social justice concepts like intersectionality. She thinks like those black+lesbian women who founded the Black Lives Matter movement.

This ideological stance no doubt arose from the author’s academic studies in postmodern philosophy & sociology combined with her subsequent career as a lecturer in gender studies in a London institution that she was trying, as an activist, to transform.

To me the book was a cri de coeur of a girl growing up in a world to which she could not relate.  In this, the author could be compared to a child born neurologically atypical.  Such a child will feel they were born on the wrong planet. Such a child will have a hidden handicap and be out-of-sync with reality accepted by most ordinary people, causing much worry & stress for his or her mother & father.   Is that a tragedy, or should it be seen as normal diversity or neuro-diversity to be more specific, and something to be celebrated under the Diversity, Inclusion & Equality mantra?

Can a square peg fit into a round hole? What happens when you try? That’s what this book is all about according to my reading.  Sara Armed says that one snaps on occasions when the friction gets too high.  And she blames the hole, not the peg. The hole is the hetero-patriarchy that creates sexism & racism - a social construct that probably does not exist in the minds of most ordinary reasonable people.

That having been observed, the writing of this book I suspect would have been therapeutic for the author. Writing becomes a compulsion: the attempt to make sense of one’s reality. Writing thus puts one’s thoughts in order. To write, solitude helps. What better occupation could there be for gifted square peg?  Sara Ahmed seems to be an acolyte of the postmodern social justice religion - sometimes described as cultural Marxism - that seeks to change society so that all sorts of square pegs can fit in the majority cultural round hole. The hole, in her mind, is the hetero-patriarchy. But in the glorious future dreamed of by these progressive folk, there will be no majority hole, because everyone will be equal.  Society's traditional culture borne of Judeo-Christian values will have died and be replaced with an anti-culture. 

Hers is a rebellious ideology promoted by the disaffected & marginalized who experience the walls barring their entry and the doors that do not open for them. They snap when it all becomes too much. They are not stoics like Ned Kelly, whose last words, when the rope was around his neck, expressed resignation and acceptance of reality, with the phrase Such is life.

Rather, the author comes across as an idealist who blames her alienation on to the man-made socially-constructed world.   And she blames men, in general. Straight men, not gay men. She snaps and blames the imagined/socially-constructed oppressor class of citizens. She wants to change society, by means of a neo-Marxist cultural revolution.

Aside: China’s rise - as evidenced today - owes its success largely to the ending of Chairman Mao’s Marxist cultural revolution in 1978, by Deng Xiaopeng’s coup.  Sara Ahmed’s idealism appears to be a result of lacking a tragic vision. Discrimination is seen as some kind of evil, rather than the way nature works, which is tragic for some, and benefits others who have more luck in life.   

Regarding the snap - about which the author writes eloquently - the neurologically atypical philosopher Wittgenstein expressed it this way: You get tragedy where the tree, instead of bending, breaks.

I would recommend this book for those who think they would benefit by getting a look into the human side of a whinging victim of cultural oppression.

Above picture: snapshot, Dymocks bookshop, George St Sydney, June 2023. This is Sara Ahmed's later handbook of feminist activism visibly promoted in several areas, including front window.   Amazon link here.

Above picture: from The Australian newspaper,  digital edition, Tuesday, January 30, 2024.  

Robinsons Bookshop owner Susanne Horman is clearly not a square peg like Sara Ahmen.  She is pointing out the cultural revolution happening in Australia, as evidenced by the new wave of queer books on the shelves of our bookshops.  

See full story below. 

STRAIGHT WHITE MEN NEED NEW SHELF LIFE

BY CAROLINE OVERINGTON

Published in The Australian newspaper,  Tuesday, January 30, 2024 

Wander into your local bookshop, what will you find? Books by white women, mainly. Also, books on "diverse" themes, with rainbows on the cover.

Guess what you won't find, in anything like the same numbers? Novels by straight white men.

Maybe it's time for the publishing industry to do a little more to help men get published. It's an idea that would have seemed ridiculous, even 20 years ago. Male writers have dominated literature for centuries.

But Australian publishing houses have in recent years been pushing female writers, and "diverse" books by Indigenous writers, transgender writers, Arab-Australians and "rainbow writers" from the queer
community.

White male writers, writing about white men and boys, have been pushed out.

Susanne Horman, owner of the Robinsons chain of bookshops in Victoria, says this is the point she was trying to make in a series of admittedly clumsy posts on X over the summer.

"What's missing from our bookshelves in store? Positive male lead characters of any age, any traditional white family stories, kids picture books with just white kids on the cover, and no wheelchair, rainbow or indigenous art, non-indigenous history," Ms Horman wrote.

Ms Horman vowed this year not to stock books that "cause harm and make Australians hate each other".

"Books we don't need: hate against white Australians, socialist agenda, equity over equality, diversity and inclusion ... basically the woke agenda that divides people," she posted, adding a hashtag: We Need Better Stories.

Melbourne writer Emily Bitto was among those who objected: "This is horrifying. The owner has publicly declared that we need more white males in books and vowed not to stock diverse reads."

Well-known agent Jacinta di Mase said: "How is Suzanne even a bookseller? ... Why not just name the shop 'Books for Fragile Egos'."

Ms Horman's X account has since been deleted, but she told The Australian her comments had been misunderstood. Some of her shelves ¬ those stocking women's fiction, for example - are overflowing, while "positive stories with men and boys as the hero are almost missing from the mix", she said.

"We are not making a value judgment on this observation and apologise if people have taken this comment as a negative reflection on an excellent range of diverse books."

When it comes to gaining a mainstream audience, the truth is most "diverse" books struggle.

Australian fiction is dominated by white women, who filled seven of the top 10 places in 2023.

White men took the remaining three.

Female writers also took seven spots in the international Top

The children's top 1.0 was a little different: Mem Fox was the only woman on the list. But five spots were taken by Bluey, a cartoon dog.

Some "diverse" books do quite well at some bookshops: at Readings in inner-city Melbourne, for example, Indigenous writer Tony Birch will easily outsell a writer who makes the top 10 at Big W.

Australian literature's cultural value can't be measured by volume. That said, a bookshop is a business. According to the website, Robinsons has been in business more than 50 years, with stores at Airport West, Fountain Gate, Frankston, Greensborough, Highpoint, and Werribee. It probably does have some idea as to what customers might like to see more of on its shelves.

--ooOoo--