Living a Feminist Life

By: Sara Ahmed

Narrated by: Larissa Gallagher

Length: 14 hrs and 20 mins

Publisher's Summary

In Living a Feminist Life Sara Ahmed shows how feminist theory is generated from everyday life and the ordinary experiences of being a feminist at home and at work.

Building on legacies of feminist of color scholarship in particular, Ahmed offers a poetic and personal meditation on how feminists become estranged from worlds they critique - often by naming and calling attention to problems - and how feminists learn about worlds from their efforts to transform them.

Ahmed also provides her most sustained commentary on the figure of the feminist killjoy introduced in her earlier work while showing how feminists create inventive solutions - such as forming support systems - to survive the shattering experiences of facing the walls of racism and sexism.

The killjoy survival kit and killjoy manifesto, with which the book concludes, supply practical tools for how to live a feminist life, thereby strengthening the ties between the inventive creation of feminist theory and living a life that sustains it.

©2017 Duke University Press (P)2017 Tantor

A great book ruined by the narrator

Living a Feminist Life is one of my top books of 2017 and I'm a huge fan of Sara Ahmed's work in general. But the narration of this audiobook edition simply does not work for this text. I'm teaching this book in a feminist theory class, so I decided to also get the audiobook to review relevant passages during my commute to campus. I listened to the first several seconds, where the book is introduced, and then jumped to the chapter I was planning to discuss with my class that day. The book is over 14 hours long but I couldn't make it through even a full hour--and this is a book that I've reread several times in print. The narration is a terrible fit for the text. I know that the narrator cannot be an expert in the field, but her emphasis is off more often than not. More egregious are missteps such as her mispronunciation of the author's name (watching a couple of YouTube videos where Ahmed introduces herself would have done the trick) and of the word 'affect' as a noun. Ahmed is known as an affect theorist. Affect is key to her argument here and in her larger body of work. The odd choices of inflection and emphasis and the relentless repetition of the wrong pronunciation of affect obscure Ahmed's points, at best--I have a hard time seeing how a listener of this narration and without the benefit of the printed text would be able to grasp much of what the author is trying to convey.

10 of 10 people found this review helpful

important read

This book is poignant and well written. It speaks to many experiences of folks working in higher education contexts and beyond. Sarah Ahmed is brilliant and relatable. I highly recommend!

Should be required for ever person on the planet

This book has changed me. This book should change you. This book should change everyone.

Don't be put off but,

if this is the only way you can access this important book then don't let the reviews of the narrator put you off. It is possible to get the gist of Ahmed's important and challenging work from this reading.

That said this is one of the poorest examples of a narrator showing utter indifference to the content of a text.Whilst not quite as bad as those computer style monotone readings, there are endless errors. Mis-reading 'feminist' over and over as 'feminine' is ridiculous, utterly changing the message of the book (what IS a feminine protest?) but slightly funny I suppose once you realise. By far the worst is the constant mispronunciation of the author's name. In narrating a book concerned with words, women, racism, you think you might bother to get the author's name right. However it seems 'Ahmed' is far too complicated to pronounce so our fearless narrator plumps - repeatedly- for 'Akmed'.

All that said this ia a brave and important book which deserved far better from audible, and now you are forewarned about the narrator's errors don't let it put you off accessing it via audiobook if you cannot access it in print.

8 of 8 people found this review helpful