Living a Feminist Life

In Chapter 4, Ahmed focuses on the first kind of diversity work: the work one does in their efforts to transform institutions, to make them more inclusive and open to those who have historically been excluded and/or oppressed. This work includes relying on praxis: the creation of knowledge/theory while simultaneously enacting practical applications to real-world situations. She argues that it is through the effort of transforming institutions that we can generate more knowledge about those institutions. She also warns that diversity work is “messy, even dirty, work” that requires acknowledging and accepting our own complicity in the very problems we are trying to address.

By diversity work, Ahmed primarily means those who work in official roles as hired and appointed by universities in positions of “diversity officer,” “diversity committee,” and other similar positions tasked with ensuring that universities comply with national equality initiatives. What diversity practitioners quickly learn, however, is that such an appointment can block any substantial change to the university. In many cases, diversity becomes the work of this one individual (or committee) rather than the work of the entire university. In fact, appointing someone to this work is an attempt to prove the work is already complete.

In this way, institutions block the path to genuine transformation. As one of the diversity workers Ahmed spoke to states: “so much of the time it is a banging your head on a brick wall job” (96). The more one works for diversity and change, the more solid these walls become. Much of what organizations call “diversity work” is, in truth, merely rearranging things so that they might appear better, without changing anything. When diversity workers push, obstruct these efforts of mere appearance, or speak up about institutional problems, they become the problem just like the feminist killjoy.

Once one has become the problem, it can stop them from getting their message through. Therefore, diversity work is often the work of image management—both how organizations manage their image, and how diversity workers manage their own image to facilitate communication. In other words, the diversity worker may have to “pass” as “willing” to continue their work being willful.

One obstacle the diversity worker must work around is documentation. Just as universities use appointing a diversity worker to avoid doing the actual work of diversity, documentation (e.g., writing reports and studies about racial inequality in the university) is meant to show that the work is done. The document is proof of positive change, and the university congratulates itself on a job well done, even as nothing improves.

Due to these obstacles, diversity work requires being pushy; it requires willfulness. As Ahmed states: “we have to keep pushing if we are to open up spaces to those who have not been accommodated. Or those who are not accommodated have to keep pushing even after they have apparently been accommodated” (114). Merely existing within an institution that is not accessible to you is its own kind of diversity work. This is the second kind of work discussed in the next chapter.

Chapter 5 considers the second kind of diversity work. Ahmed first discusses “norms” as being like a room or building. A norm is a space for bodies to inhabit, physically or metaphorically. When one does not comfortably fit or inhabit a norm in an institution or community, they feel that they do not belong. Sometimes the feeling of not belonging comes from one’s own sensation, sometimes it is imposed from the outside. As an example. Ahmed recalls being stopped on the street (in England) by a man who asks her: “where are you from?” Even though she knows what he is really asking, she says she is from Australia, to which he becomes irritated and demands: “where are your parents from then?” Finally, she gives him the answer he is looking for, explaining that her father is from Pakistan.

This experience shows how some people become marked by race, gender, and disability. They are questioned and expected to explain why and how they are where they are. As Ahmed states: “To be asked ‘where are you from?’ is a way of being told you are not from here” (116). In this way, one’s entire being is put into question and asserted as “not belonging.”

Sometimes even when one is not explicitly questioned, they might feel questionable when sensing they do not inhabit a norm correctly. Ahmed uses the example of heteronormativity here. Those who do not fit within the norm of heteronormativity feel uncomfortable. For the person who fits, that comfort becomes so normal and expected that they stop noticing it. A norm becomes invisible, except to those who do not fit within it.

Ahmed then returns to diversity work in institutions. Institutions create norms, both through formal rules and arrangements, and through tradition and unspoken agreement. When those who have historically been excluded from these spaces try to inhabit the institution and their norms, they do not fit. Struggling for accessibility then becomes more diversity work. Not only do those who do not quite fit have to fight harder for the same level of accommodation that others receive without effort or thought, the mere fact that they need to fight for it marks them as being incongruous, out of place, in the wrong place.

Ahmed argues that “institutional passing” (127) is one method for navigating this sense of not belonging. Institutional passing may include making an effort not to stand out or stand apart. One might attempt to pass by not talking about their own status as a minority, by not calling attention to it, and by behaving in “the right way.” While some might dismiss this as assimilation, it is in fact a kind of diversity work sometimes necessary for survival. Diversity work becomes the effort of trying “to make others comfortable with the fact of your own existence” (131).

Diversity work is what happens when those whose very being is questioned also begin to question. Ahmed refers to theorist Frantz Fanon, who posited that “white” is made the “universal.” Just as white equals universal, so too does heterosexual equal universal, and male equals universal, et cetera. Those who do not fit the universal begin to question the universal.

Next, Ahmed focuses on the metaphor of brick walls. She argues first that the two senses of diversity work discussed in Chapters 4 and 5 often “meet in a body” (135). Those whose bodies are marked as not inhabiting the norms of an institution are often the same people who are assigned the task of transforming those norms of the institution. Ahmed states that “if you are not white, not male, not straight, not cis, not able-bodied, you are more likely to end up on diversity and equality committees” (135). Worse, because diversity work is devalued in institutions, those who are already excluded are then left to do the devalued labor while those who already fit the norms are allowed the time for valued work.

Those who do not correctly inhabit the norms of the institution come up against the walls that block both their passage and efforts to change the institution at the same time. The more diversity workers do this work, the more they learn about the walls they face, and how those walls are constructed and maintained. These walls are built by what Ahmed calls “the hardened histories” (136): histories, traditions, and norms that solidify into expectation, rule, and restriction. These walls are a defense system. However, they are invisible and intangible to those who already fit and do not need to be blocked. The harder one comes up against these walls, by nature of being “not” or in the work to transform the institution, the more apparent the walls become to them but not to others.

As an example, Ahmed discusses her efforts to address sexual harassment in universities. Even discussing sexual harassment is viewed as an attack, not only against individuals who are accused of harassment, but the institution as a whole. The same is also true for accusations of racism. By attempting to dismantle this wall of sexism and racism, one is seen as attempting to dismantle the entire institution.

The processes by which institutions block complaints of sexual harassment are both metaphorical and material. They create patterns of behavior, institutional tradition, that set like cement into yet more walls. These patterns of history become weight, and “the weight of history can be thrown at you; you can be hit by it” (140). If one attempts to expose a problem, they are instead seen as being the problem. When a killjoy describes the walls they hit against, they are accused of creating those walls. The feminist killjoy is seen as a wall maker: “one who makes things harder than they need to be; she makes things hard for herself” (142).

Moving back to intersectionality, Ahmed argues that “coming up against walls teaches us that social categories precede a bodily encounter” (147), such that the social categories enforced through walls are evidence of the reality and materiality of race and gender. Recent arguments that race and gender are “somehow less material than class can be understood as an enactment of privilege, the alignment of body to world” (147). The walls that stop some bodies, allow others to pass through without comment or notice: “what is hardest for some does not exist for others” (147).

Ahmed then returns to the walls experienced in academic settings. One such wall is citational practice (i.e., the texts and authors read, cited, and canonized in research and writing within a field). Echoing the introduction, she equates citations to bricks. When certain kinds of citational practices become habit, these “bricks form walls” (148). For instance, when white men cite only other white men, they justify it by saying, “these are the writers who just happen to be here,” or “this field just tends to be mostly white men,” etc. They call it happenstance rather than structure. However, these happenstances become tendencies, and tendencies have direction, just like the traffic flow example from Chapter 2. Once a tendency forms, no effort or consideration is needed to continue, as the tendency replicates itself.

One such tendency is what Ahmed calls “citational relational” tendencies. White men excuse their sexist or racist citational practices by claiming “they were simply the traditions that influenced” them, or because these male scholars are all colleagues. Thus, the relationships between men becomes the basis for scholarship. When they do cite women, it is only in relation to men. Sexism, then, is “women existing only in relation to men” (150).

This same practice works to uphold racism as well. White men function as an institution, by which Ahmed means not only the institutions that already exist to uphold that history, but also “the mechanisms that ensure the persistence of that structure [. . .] is shaped by regulative norms” (153). If citations are bricks, then those bricks can be white as well as male.

Institutions uphold these brick walls by declaring sexism and racism already solved. By announcing that sexism and racism are already “over,” they imply that the histories of these problems would be gone if only the killjoy could “get over” them. The killjoy, then, is one who refuses to get over it because these histories are not gone. Ahmed argues that “we need to give support to those who are willing to expose the will of the institution as violence” (159) so that when that willful arm comes up, it is not alone.