Living the Feminist life: Argument and Habit

• In Event: Philosophical Critiques of Education

Abstract

In her introduction to Living a Feminist Life (2017) Sara Ahmed offers a starting point for responding to what it means to live a feminist life. Ahmed asserted that she intended the book to be an “intervention in academic feminism” to make feminist theory more accessible but found that she ended up writing a lingering examination of her own feminist becoming and doing to show how “feminist theory is what we do when we live our lives in a feminist way” (p. 11). Deliberations on what my living in “a feminist way” expanded and grew more textured as I read Roxane Gay’s Bad Feminist, wondering how Gay, the “bad feminist” would speak to Ahmed, the “good feminist.” The paper examines how reading their insights through the feminist pragmatism of Jane Addams might complicate my thinking about my own feminist commitments in social foundations.

Author

• Becky Atkinson, University of Alabama