title: Living with feminist angst: an autoethnography
Creators: name: Kukkaje Ramakrishna, Mythri
Publisher: name: The University of Edinburgh
Year: 2025
Subjects: subject: Feminist Angst
subject: Killjoy Commitment
subject: Social Transformation
subject: Feminist Principles for Social Transformation
subject: feminist killjoy

description: In this autoethnography, I closely follow my experiences of the emotional consequences of my commitment to the revolutionary politics of gender justice, to being a feminist killjoy (Ahmed 2010a). An awareness of this previously obscured emotional experience emerged during the research design process and became the focus of this doctoral study. I identify these as affects (Sedgwick 2003) – embodied emotional responses within particular sociocultural contexts that enmesh bodies and histories – originating in small (Chawla 2024), ordinary (Stewart 2007) moments of living a feminist life. I collectively call the affects feminist angst. They seem to arise from a realisation of the unfulfilled promise of gender equality made by feminism that now, to me, feels like a stalled revolution. The aim of the thesis is twofold: firstly, to voice and acknowledge the experience of feminist angst, which, as a psychotherapist, I believe is the first and significant step to making sense of experiences that rattle us. Secondly, to causally and structurally analyse the socio-cultural context from which feminist angst originates. I mine for insights that emerge in this analysis about my role and the role of the socio-cultural dynamics in maintaining gender-oppressive structures and argue that these insights help reframe the central focus of feminist interventions to reduce gender oppression. In this thesis, I respond to the call by Mackinlay (2022) to depart radically from academic writing and resist the expectations of straightforward, experience-far prose presentation of research design and findings in conventional doctoral writing to allow space for unexpected knowledge to emerge. The research design process is presented as a methodological autoethnography to mark the evolution of my research paradigm and uncover a dimension of my feminist angst that was masked under the struggles of a novice non-conventional qualitative researcher. I rely on critical researcher reflexivity and the metaphor of a night-drive to chronologically follow my process of deciding to do an autoethnography. I follow my intrigue in the small moments of feminist angst and stay close to them to make sense of the underlying socio-cultural dynamics that continue to perpetuate sexism and to challenge the incomplete formulations of feminist principles that contribute to maintaining gender oppression. In this work, I explore my feminist angst from my positionality as a heterosexual cis-gendered woman from a previously colonised country (India), a researcher-psychotherapist-activist from the Global-South studying at a Western university and working-living in the country that has benefitted from colonising my country. Through exploring the feminist angst in my experience of living with chronic menstrual illness, I highlight the epistemic injustice (Fricker 2007) in the healthcare system and the lack of evolution in health and labour institutions to support women’s empowerment. I then examine the nuances in the situations of women (including me) that reflect adaptive preferences (Khader 2012) while negotiating for independence and intimacy. I finally argue that the social interventions for empowering women based on Western liberal feminist principles through education and employment do not effectively address the concerns of gender oppression, not only for the women under intersectional oppression in the Global-South but also for the women and men across geopolitical contexts. Feminists need to reframe the principles central to the revolutionary politics of gender justice to empower women to resist their oppression and, crucially, to work to transform the socio-cultural structures to support women’s choices. It would offer the feminists ways to survive feminist angst, sustain a continued commitment to feminism and make the revolution relevant to all.