Ahmed concludes the text with the Feminist Killjoy Manifesto, a document that attempts to expose the existing violence of institutionalised sexism, and to disturb those who are willing to progress their careers through an academic institution that constantly depreciates the contributions of women.

Another willful girl who might help us to make sense of the gendered nature of the assignment is Maggie Tulliver.But willful is pejorative while strong-willed is not…and you are reminded of all the ways what is good in a man is unwelcome in a woman. Sara Ahmed’s Living a Feminist Life gives the old feminist mantra of “the personal is political” a new boost of relatability. Living a Feminist Life is a work of embodied political theory that defies the conventions of feminist memoir and self-help alike. I can still hear the sound of the voices, the car as it slowed down, the bike that rushed past, the door that opened, the sound of the footsteps, the kind of day it was, the quiet hum of a plane as I woke up. While Ahmed is a scholar, I found the language relatively accessible but will require a basis in feminist thought.

We are creating a support system around the killjoy; we are finding ways to allow her to do what she does, to be who she is. I did not appreciate how questioning sexism is one of the most profound ways of disrupting what we take to be given and thus learning about how the given is given. Experiences like this: they seem to accumulate over time, gathering like things in a bag, but the bag is your body, so that you feel like you are carrying more and more weight. When you speak as a feminist, you are often identified as being too reactive, as overreacting, as if all you are doing is sensationalizing the facts of the matter; as if in giving your account of something you are exaggerating, on purpose or even with malice. Ranging from how she pushes Betty Friedan's feminism to include more intersectionality to how she describes "diversity" as a word used to avoid discussions of racism and sexism, Ahmed implores us to elevate our feminism to more radical, transformational heights.

You are in being assigned x or y also being assigned to a group; an assignment is what you receive from others that will determine how you are positioned in relation to others. All of this is beautifully compared to variety of traditional feminist texts, such as Mrs Dalloway, Audre Lorde, and the writings of George Eliot. There is something organic in her approach, drawing from her experiences as a woman, as a woman of color, as a queer woman of color.

There is something to be said about individualism in organizing, but there is most definitely something to be said about the myriad shortcomings that radical political projects have suffered from past and present. The violence of judgments that tend to follow violence against women and girls has been documented by feminists over generations.According to Ahmed, to be a feminist killjoy, and to live a feminist life, is to take the eyes that roll at us and make it our pedagogy. She has much to say that is original and valuable and this writing tic detracts from her effectiveness.

Ahmed references work she has done in previous books including the themes of willful subjects, sweaty concepts and walls. Showing how feminist theory is generated from everyday life and the ordinary experiences of being a feminist, Sara Ahmed highlights the ties between feminist theory and living a life that sustains it by building on legacies of feminist of color scholarship and discussing the figure of the feminist killjoy. Maybe there are compromises; maybe there is a diversification of styles of feminine accomplishment; maybe heterosexuality can now be done in more ways than one; but the investments remain rather precise.In chapter 1 the author runs us through what makes a feminist in her opinion, and it isn't anywhere near comprehensive enough in my own humble opinion. To be assigned a sex in this binary system is a way of being directed toward a future, as I explore in more detail in chapter 2 . When you refer to structures, to systems, to power relations, to walls, you are assumed to be making others responsible for the situation you have failed to get yourself out of. As Alison Jaggar describes, "Only when we reflect on our initially puzzling irritability, revulsion, anger, or fear may we bring to consciousness our 'gut-level' awareness that we are in a situation of coercion, cruelty, injustice or danger" (1996, 181; see also Spelman 1989).