A Sentimental Education
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- $12.99
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
How do you tell the story of a feminist education, when the work of feminism can never be perfected or completed? In A Sentimental Education, Hannah McGregor, the podcaster behind Witch, Please and Secret Feminist Agenda, explores what podcasting has taught her about doing feminist scholarship not as a methodology but as a way of life.
Moving between memoir and theory, these essays consider the collective practices of feminist meaning-making in activities as varied as reading, critique, podcasting, and even mourning. In part this book is a memoir of one person’s education as a reader and a thinker, and in part it is an analysis of some of the genres and aesthetic modes that have been sites of feminist meaning-making: the sentimental, the personal, the banal, and the relatable. Above all, it is a meditation on what it means to care deeply and to know that caring is both necessary and utterly insufficient.
In the tradition of feminist autotheory, this collection works outward from the specificity of McGregor’s embodied experience – as a white settler, a fat femme, and a motherless daughter. In so doing, it invites readers to reconsider the culture, media, political structures, and lived experiences that inform how we move through the world separately and together.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
McGregor, host of the podcast Secret Feminist Agenda, delivers a stirring collection of essays exploring sentimentality and the use of emotion in reading and storytelling. Combining personal anecdotes with scholarly analysis, McGregor unpacks sentimentality's shortcomings and potential to harm—as well as its opposing potential for "drawing the revolutionary out of the mundane detail"—to better understand her experience of sentimental reading and storytelling as a fat, queer, white "settler" who grew up on Anne of Green Gables and Little Women. With verve and insight, McGregor underscores the contradictions of contemporary narratives that seek out the harrowing details of societal marginalization while offering no solutions to its problems. McGregor takes up what she considers the voyeuristic, fetishizing aspects of such media as This American Life—which position the emotional response to the suffering of others as an end unto itself, and not the beginning of care—and imagines alternatives in which a sentimental response can inspire a more political one defined by "granular attention to the everyday realities of people's lives." McGregor draws on the works of feminist thinkers including Sara Ahmed, Lauren Berlant, and Jia Tolentino, and her work will surely take its place among them. This radiates with intelligence.
