The Feminist Killjoy Handbook by Sara Ahmed

[Igneococcus]

I have no idea who Sara Ahmed is but it seems she doesn't like GC women much. Sarah Ditum's review in the Times here:

www.thetimes.co.uk/article/2aa66c3e-ac89-11ed-93b3-46d2df37c42d?shareToken=e2289e4176e0d4f2f694e80e459c6381

but it's nonsense on all counts!

This is why I am now working on common sense: to describe how and why 'reality' is being re-weaponized. What they call 'reality' is the distortion, achieved politically, turning social forms into statues that must be preserved.

now admittedly I’m a mathsy sciencey sort of person, not much given to reading social science literature which has generally seemed to me to be just some randomer’s opinions and a questionable use of my time

but does this make any sense whatsoever?

The fact that only women have the kind of bodies that can gestate babies is a distortion of reality? Really?

It’s all rhetoric and clever words, isn’t it? Reality in quotation marks, reference to controversies around statues (because of course knowledge of how babies are made = honouring a man who profited from the slave trade) and anything that we think we know has been put in our heads by evil, right-wing white male middle-class politicians (because anybody who ever held any political power until about five years ago fits that description).

It’s such nonsense and an insult to anybody who actually creates new knowledge or technological innovations that demonstrably change our world. That stuff is a lot harder than cheap polemics. I don’t think the arts and humanities do themselves any favours when they produce these kinds of lame takes instead of critically engaging with the world as it actually is.

The statues comparison is just awful.

As is gaslighting people over ‘reality’ while actually reifying individual feelings, desires and so on.

it makes me think of a Bright eyes lyric:
And if you swear that there's no truth and who cares,
How come you say it like you're right?

Is social forms meant to be sex in the statue analogy? Or gender? If the former, is she saying we are preserving binary sex as a social form like a statue? That doesn't make sense because sex is not a social form, it's a biological category. So does she mean gender? If so, that wouldn't make sense either because while gender is a social form, it's not one gender critical feminists wish to preserve. Or at least, not as gender stereotypes associated with one sex. Am I missing something here? I saw Ahmed is speaking at the WOW festival in London. I wonder if the audience will all be adoring fans or whether there will be any meaningful debate.

This quote caught my attention as well. It is a not so subtle attempt to use and turn the common sense reality of biological sex against women and girls who are assaulted, disadvantaged, and experience the daily impact of a living in a patriarchal society because of their biological sex.

Time and time again I think of the tragedies women suffer such as the young Pakistani woman who was murdered, her body burned and hung from a bridge because a woman was not allowed to wear jeans. It doesn’t seem that the men who killed her held any doubts as to the fact that she was a woman. Not a social form or a statue. Is this what SA means by re weaponising reality? Deeply unpleasant sort of DARVO’ish attack on women trying to protect SSS’s.

As well as being distasteful, the Karen insult is unfortunately timed - Victoria Smith's book Hags, about the demonisation of older women, comes out in two weeks, and the use of the term "Karen" is one of the things she writes about.

I thought she was referring to that hipster trend of turning old doors into big trestle tables on which to put your artisanal bread and I was thinking, well, it's neither killjoy nor feminist especially but I don't like that trend either...
<blithely missing the point of her incoherent nonsense>

Is social forms meant to be sex in the statue analogy?

I read this as her argument is that the category ‘woman’ is a social form. But that GC hate that term, sane people is a better one people want to use the ‘reality’ of biological sex to preserve the class of woman as a biological statue ie a woman can only be a woman on the basis of biological reality.

She’s right on that point. People do want to reassert this. Somewhere in there is a tangled argument about how women’s biological sex has been weaponised against them, but I do not see gendered feelings stopping that or freeing women from having their biological sex used against them..

Rather, the primacy of gendered feelings has become another weapon against women by taking away safe/r places and enabling men to assume places that women fought to claim such as being the head of a rape relief centre or political short lists or sport podiums or woman of the year. It is a depressing mystery why ‘feminists’ like SA fail to acknowledge this?

A depressing mystery sums it up. I would love to see her asked these questions, in-depth. I wonder whether that will happen.

Now there's a book I'm looking forward to.