Asia Tonja Marie Amos, University of Memphis

This how-to is not actually a how-to. This how-to, in alignment with feminist praxis, does not provide linear answers, but instead, a map, with many turns, forks in the road, and destinations. As a third-year doctoral student studying counseling psychology, I often struggle with my identities as a queer, cisgender, African American, woman working within the highly colonized and WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrial, Rich, Democratic) spaces of the academy (Adams, Dobles, Gómez, Kurti?, & Molina, 2015). In Sara Ahmed’s book Living a Feminist Life she draws on her personal and professional experiences facing racism, sexism, heterosexism, and xenophobia to describe how feminism both frees and fails her. The author invites readers to apply feminist theory across identities, intimate spaces, and institutionalized places to reflect and interrogate what it means to do feminist work. Readers are asked what is our feminism, how do we embrace our inner “killjoy” and what will we do to survive the systems which seek to disenfranchise and dehumanize us.  

I wrote in a class paper that reading Sara Ahmed’s work was like, “Reading my life in another skin, at another time, in another place.... I had to look at my relationships again. I took stock of my body, the thoughts I think toward myself, the way I’d grown tired and silent since beginning my program... None of it felt like the me I thought myself to be. Through this book, I reimagined my feminism, and I remembered why I became a feminist.”  

Here, I highlight crucial notes from the book, which led me to reflect on my positionality as an African-American woman and feminist studying psychology in higher education. Specifically, I chose to write about the meaning of wishes in a capitalist system which alienate us from our desires and how my advocacy efforts have developed over time. My only hope is that this atypical how-to provides some level of comfort and connection or perhaps a new perspective into another way of living life.  

“Alienation is studious; you learn more about wishes when they are not what you wish for,” (p. 41).  

I don’t make wishes anymore. I set intentions. Wishes are about where we locate power. I think about my experience as a young Southern Black woman. All my wishes were based on what people wanted for me. I placed power in their ideals and values. I placed power into society to tell me what it meant to be a Southern Black woman. I felt unseen, almost always. Now, I’m working with memory, rewriting my script. Places like academia which have wishes for my black body (referencing Nash, 2019) make me alien to myself all over again. That programming is strong. I began wishing what the system wished, again. I felt lonely; I felt unlovable. Something is changing though. I’m remembering how to set intentions. I’m remembering that I have my own inherent power, will, and worth. I’m locating inside myself again--I AM. I can be as studious of connection as I am of alienation.  

 “Activism might need us to involve losing confidence in ourselves, letting ourselves recognize how we too can be the problem. And that is hard if we have a lifetime of being the problem,” (p. 175).  

This is the hardest part. This is the reason my feminism is changing all the time. I’ve taken my bite from the “liberal bargain” pie. I’ve made my race to the bottom of the marginalization pool. I’ve realized I can’t stay there, and I don’t want to, but what does this mean for my activism, and how I conceptualize an activism that does not inevitably oppress others? Lately, I’ve been struggling with capitalism, and how much my desire to engage has pushed me into consuming other issues without really engaging in their struggle. For instance, I bought my “Black Lives Matter” t-shirt to wear to the National Multicultural Summit in Denver, Colorado last year, and I have my “This Is What an Intersectional Feminist Looks Like” sticker smacked center stage on my laptop, but I am not a member of the local Black Lives Matter chapter in Memphis, and I have yet to attend a single feminism community-based activism event which I consistently receive emails about.  

I am coming to accept that my idea of liberation involves having a certain amount of money and power in a capitalist world, which means there’s someone underneath my liberation holding it up. I haven’t reconciled which things I do not advocate. I keep thinking, aren’t I consuming enough? And that’s the problem. So, what is advocacy without consumption? I think the answer—one of many answers— is an activism of connection. When I genuinely connect with other people from marginalized identities, I cannot escape into consumer-activism, because consuming them would mean consuming myself and consequently losing our relationship. Connection over consumption. In my advocacy this means using my leadership roles in APA as a launchpad where I can be changed and challenged. It means, attending Pride in Memphis, and working with people from the Mid-South to create archives of LGBTQ+ oral histories and to share their stories. It means, not only buying the shirt that says “Black Lives Matter” but also living as if my Black life matters.  

“Any feminism that leaves women behind is not feminism,” (p. 208).  

Lastly, can this be a reminder, a mantra, a poem, a call to action, a way of living and being? It has to be. It has to be for me. It has to be for the movement, for the people, for the culture. If I can write this into my way of being perhaps, I can be the feminist I want to be. The feminist who doesn’t free up my arms only to bind another.  

Adams, G., Dobles, I., Gómez, L. H., Kurti?, T., & Molina, L. E. (2015). Decolonizing psychological science: Introduction to the special thematic section. Journal of Social and Political Psychology, 3, 213-238. 

Ahmed, S. (2017). Living a feminist life. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. 

Nash, J.C. (2019). Black feminism reimagined after intersectionality. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.