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.

About the Author
Hannah McGregor is an Associate Professor of Publishing at Simon Fraser University. She is the host of the podcasts Secret Feminist Agenda and The SpokenWeb Podcast, and co-host of Witch, Please, a feminist podcast about the Harry Potter world. She also co-edited the book Refuse: CanLit in Ruins (Book*hug 2018).

Reviews

A Sentimental Education is a generous work of unfolding. From Pamela to podcasts, scholar Hannah McGregor troubles the white woman sentimentalism that informed her childhood and later transformed her approach to scholarship. A queer, shapeshifting bunny emerges from a well-loved bedtime book. A fat girl podcast episode you loved once, doesn't really see you after all. Intimate, vulnerable, pointy and kind, this is where personal memories and embodied experiences exist in relation with the ideas and arguments of queer, BIPOC, and feminist theory. This book is a journey, a reminder that "stories don't interpret themselves, they unfold in relation to the reader".

- Chantal Gibson, author of with/holding

In a pointedly powerful yet lyrical voice, McGregor offers us a timely and valuable series of insights that will resonate for many. McGregor demonstrates an acute ability to evaluate and comment on her own reflexivity as a white feminist scholar. A Sentimental Education is a love letter for those who have long awaited a discussion on the complex relationship between care, theory, love, and loss.

- Minelle Mahtani, author of Mixed Race Amnesia

In A Sentimental Education Hannah McGregor extends generosity on each page. The essays in this collection are deeply insightful, citational, and conversational. They are unwavering in their critique of the myriad boundaries that oppress us, and they offer ideas for collective resistance. A Sentimental Education made me laugh, cry, and reach for my pen to write everything down. This book is necessary, luminous, and crackling with joy and kindness. What is the collective noun for a group of essays that teaches, gives care, critiques repressive systems, and offers both humor and friendship? A companionship of essays? A feminist provocation of essays? An education of essays. - Erin Wunker, author of Notes from a Feminist Killjoy

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. ... 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 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.

"[A Sentimental Education] is a rich and extended meditation on what a feminist education looks like, and on the complex issues of sentimentality and care in literature and in life." - Tom Sandborn, Vancouver Sun

"Given her success as a podcaster, it's not surprising that McGregor's writing is powerfully conversational - not in the sense of being informal or casual, but instead in the sense that it engages very thoughtfully and thoroughly with other people's words and ideas. McGregor is a highly collaborative thinker, and A Sentimental Education benefits from both her curiosity and her generosity." - Vanessa Warne, The Winnipeg Free Press

"Words with Friends and "Getting to Know You" provide a fascinating insider's perspective on podcasting. Along with her friend Marcelle Kosman, McGregor prepared her first podcast in 2015, an experience which drew her into the "pleasures and risks of digital life-writing." Although these two essays are replete with the rhetorical questions we have come to expect from this author, they also exude a quiet confidence and a joy in recounting the delights, challenges and learning experiences of creating several successful podcast series." - Suzanne James, The British Columbia Review

Book Information
ISBN 9781771125574
Author Hannah McGregor
Format Paperback
Page Count 176
Imprint Wilfrid Laurier University Press
Publisher Wilfrid Laurier University Press
Weight(grams) 150g