Living a Feminist Life by Sara Ahmed

Author:Sara Ahmed
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf, mobi
Publisher: Duke University Press
Published: 2017-01-12T23:00:00+00:00

CONCLUSION: THE MASTER’S RESIDENCE

I want to return to the Grimm story “The Willful Child” discussed in chapter 3. This story is also an institutional story. It is a story that circulates within institutions. It offers a warning, a threat: speak up and you will be beaten. The story is also an invitation to those who are at risk of identification with the wayward arm: become the rod as a way of avoiding the consequences of being beaten. Become the rod: too much violence is abbreviated here. But we witness the endless invitations to identify with those who discipline as a way of being disciplined without being beaten. No wonder: the willful child comes up whenever there is a questioning of institutional will. Whenever, say, she brings up sexism or racism, the willful child quickly comes after her: as if to say, speak up and her fate will be yours. There are many within institutions who cannot afford that fate; there are many who cannot raise their arms in protest even when the will of the institution is exposed as violence, even when that violence is directed against many. We need to give support to those who are willing to expose the will of the institution as violence; we need to become our own support system, as I explore in more detail in part III, so that when she speaks up, when she is, as she is, quickly represented as the willful child who deserves her fate, who is beaten because her will is immature and impoverished, she will not be an arm coming up alone; she will not be an arm all on her own.

In the conclusion to chapter 3, I assembled a feminist army of arms. Perhaps the arm in the Grimm story is also a feminist point. To make a feminist point is to go out on a limb. No wonder the arm keeps coming up. She makes a sore point. She is a sore point. We keep saying it because they keep doing it: assembling the same old bodies, doing the same old things. She keeps coming up because there is so much history to bring up. But when she comes up, this history is what is not revealed. Her arm is spectacular; when she makes these points, she becomes the spectacle. Her soreness becomes the spectacle. And no wonder: what follows her aims to discipline her. And no wonder: what precedes her aims to warn her. If we are to bring the walls down, we have to be willing to keep coming up, whatever precedes or follows.

When the arms come up, they come up against walls: that which keeps the master’s residence standing. Arms in the labor and effort of what they come up against show us what is not over, what we do not get over. It can take willfulness to insist on this not over because the masters will not admit this world as their residence. To recognize the walls would get in the

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