Living a Feminist Life

The third part is about the consequences of living as a feminist, and the strategies one might use to deal with those consequences. Ahmed focuses on the concept of fragility and how this fragility leads to what she calls the “feminist snap.” Finally, she suggests one feminist tradition, lesbian feminism, as the best answer and way to deal with the consequences of feminism in “willful and creative” ways (162).

Ahmed states that as one comes up against the many walls in life, they risk being shattered by the experience, and that leads to fragility as “the wear and tear of living a feminist life” (163). This feeling of being worn down can happen gradually, so that one is not even aware of it until you reach a point “when it is too much” (164). Ahmed argues this fragility is a kind of “thread, a connection, a fragile connection between those things deemed breakable” (164) and examines this from the perspective of different scales—fragile things, relationships, shelters, and bodies.

Ahmed uses two examples from writer George Eliot to examine fragile objects.