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Week Two: Contemporary Feminist Debate - Seminar

Sara Ahmed:
How having feminist opinions in everyday life can effect you. Straining and tiring vs. having good company.
The feminist 'we' - who is included.
Bringing feminist theory home - if you live it, do you need theory? Is it possible to practice it in everyday life? What is the value of academic feminism? How do you take that theory out of the university, and if it comes out, what is the value?

Feminist theory travels between disciplines and expands by borrowing from other practices.
Use feminist theory to question how knowledge is produced in other disciplines.
Creating a home within the university for gender studies - citation is like building blocks that creates a shelter within academia.

Theory can be a healing process - bell hooks
Theory is a personal practice - that is production of feminist theory.

Responsibility of feminists is to bring feminist theory into our own world and question hierarchical power structures.

Legitimising feminist theory carves your own space in academia.

Home as a metaphor: shelter, safety, uncomfortable in regards to the nuclear family - it should be engaged with critically. It is a constant reworking, making the world a home.
"Feminists want to destroy the home" - in a non-traditional way, it is empowering to make their own homes. Can be triggering to people who are outside the heteronorm, who have had to leave their own.
Housekeeping metaphor - should be part and parcel of the everyday, everyday politics, which queers traditional gender norms. It is a form of self-care, community care.

Feminism is all about new beginnings, it is about realisation after realisation - still striving for justice and equality for all.

Locate yourself whilst you grapple with theory - to avoid loving knowing ignorance

Communicating is not about speaking to, or speaking about but speaking with - allowing affinity to be at the centre of feminist ethics.

Wendy Brown: is feminist studies too theoretical, too political? How is it justified within academia?
She investigated her own curriculum, but she found it wasn't reflecting what women's studies stands for. Do we still need women's studies?

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