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Quote by Sara Ahmed

“To be a killjoy is often to be assigned as being emotional, too emotional; letting your feelings get in the way of your judgment; letting your feelings get in the way. Your feelings can be the site of a rebellion. A feminist heart beats the wrong way; feminism is hearty.”

Quote by Sara Ahmed

Work

Living a Feminist Life

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Author

Sara Ahmed
Sara Ahmed

Sara Ahmed is an influential scholar in the field of contemporary social and cultural criticism. Her research focuses on gender, race, and power structures, particularly as they manifest in academia and public life. more

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“All democratic experiments, all revolutions, all demands for equality have so far, in every instance, stopped short of sexual equality. Every society has in its prestige structures a series of subtle, interacting codes of dominance that always, everywhere, finally rank men higher than women. Nowhere has any society successfully dispensed with the age-old sex-role division of labor and the rewards in goods and power that accompany it. Nowhere do women enjoy the rights, privileges and possibilities and leisure time that men do. Everywhere men still mediate between women and power, women and the state, women and freedom, women and themselves.”

“We should treat our sexual partners with dignity. We should not regard other people as merely body parts to be enjoyed. We should aspire to love and mutuality in all of our sexual relationships, regardless of whether they are gay or straight. We should prioritise virtue over desire. We should not assume that any given feelings we discover in our hearts (or our loins) ought to be acted upon”

“The atmosphere of uncertainty, dissatisfaction and fear, though caused by larger crisis, becomes associated with the fact that women now have jobs or are no longer in the home as a warm and welcoming presence. Identified then with the bad feelings of change, women came to be seen as the cause of the badness. And not only to men - but to women too, these strains and dissatisfactions, and being made to take responsibility for being the cause of them, often seems too high a price to pay for their new freedoms.”

“Ich hatte mich immer darauf gefreut, alt zu werden, und das auch überall lauthals verkündet. Seit den Heldenanfängen hatte ich eine seltsame Sehnsucht nach dem Jenseits-Davon gehabt, mich auf Partys zielsicher neben Leute aus meiner Elterngeneration gesetzt und mein Alter auf Anfrage eher hoch- als runtergerechnet. Womit ich nicht gerechnet hatte, war das Dazwischen, die uneindeutige, demütigend lange Zeit zwischen Fräuleinwunder und Lebenswerk. Denn das ist es, wofür der Pop keine Toleranz hat. Für Frauen, die ein kleines bisschen alt sind und nicht mehr ganz jung. So wie der Pop auch Frauen wie Beth Ditto und Lizzo feiert, als dickes Feigenblatt einer anorektischen Kultur, durchschnittliche mitteldünne Frauen mit runden Schultern und Hüften aber nicht mal mit der Zange angefasst.”

“It had seemed like the beginning of happiness, and Clarissa is still sometimes shocked, more than thirty years later to realize that it was happiness; that the entire experience lay in a kiss and a walk. The anticipation of dinner and a book. The dinner is by now forgotten; Lessing has been long overshadowed by other writers. What lives undimmed in Clarissa's mind more than three decades later is a kiss at dusk on a patch of dead grass, and a walk around a pond as mosquitoes droned in the darkening air. There is still that singular perfection, and its perfect in part because it seemed, at the time, so clearly to promise more. Now she knows: That was the moment, right then. There has been no other.”