Living a Feminist Life

Living a feminist life does not mean adopting a set of ideals or norms of conduct, although it might mean asking ethical questions about how to live better in an unjust and unequal world (in a not-feminist and antifeminist world); how to create relationships with others that are more equal; how to find ways to support those who are not supported or

Happiness as a form of emotional labor can be condensed in the formula: making others happy by appearing happy.

Where there is hope, there is difficulty.

“Why do you use he,” she asked me gently, “when you could have used she?”

It is hard labor to recognize sadness and disappointment when you are living a life that is meant to be happy but is not happy, which is meant to be full but feels empty. It is difficult to give up an idea of one’s life when one has lived one’s life according to that idea.

It is important, however, that we not reduce willfulness to againstness. There is a family of words around willfulness (stubborn, obstinate, defiant, rude, reckless), which creates a structure of resemblance (we feel we know what she is like). This familialism also explains how easily willfulness is confused with, and reduced to, individualism.

A history of willfulness is a history of violence. An experience of violence might lead us to a sense of things being wrong, and when we sense things being wrong we are punished by violence. A feminist history is thus also a history of disobedience, of how we risk violence because we sense something being wrong.

Documents become all diversity workers have time to do. Documents then circulate within organizations, often referring to each other, creating a family of documents. They create a paper trail, a trace of where they have been. In some sense the point of the document is to leave a trail. Diversity work: a paper trail.

Renunciation can be thought of as will work: you have to work to recede, or work to become part of the background. To be willing to obey is to be willing to recede.