Sara Ahmed
Based on Wikipedia: Sara Ahmed
The Feminist Killjoy Who Became a Movement
In 2016, Sara Ahmed walked away from one of the most prestigious academic positions in feminist studies. She didn't leave for another university or a better offer. She resigned from Goldsmiths College, University of London, in protest over the alleged sexual harassment of students by staff. It was the kind of principled, career-threatening move that most academics only talk about making. For Ahmed, it was simply what practicing feminism looked like.
That decision encapsulates everything about Ahmed's work: the insistence that theory must become practice, that words must become action, and that sometimes the most feminist thing you can do is refuse to participate in a broken system.
From Salford to Adelaide: The Making of a Thinker
Sara Ahmed was born on August 30, 1969, in Salford, a working-class city in Greater Manchester, England. Her father was Pakistani, her mother English. In the early 1970s, when Ahmed was still a young child, her family emigrated to Adelaide, Australia. This journey—from the industrial north of England, across the world, to the southern hemisphere—would shape everything she later wrote about.
Think about what it means to be a mixed-race child in the 1970s, moving between two countries, two cultures, never quite fitting the expected categories. Ahmed would later develop an entire theoretical framework around concepts like "strangerness" and "not fitting in"—ideas that weren't abstract intellectual exercises but excavations of her own lived experience.
She completed her undergraduate degree at the University of Adelaide, then returned to the United Kingdom for doctoral research at the Centre for Critical and Cultural Theory at Cardiff University in Wales. Today, she lives on the outskirts of Cambridge with her partner Sarah Franklin, a professor at Cambridge University. Their partnership represents another thread in Ahmed's work: the everyday reality of queer life, the mundane and extraordinary experience of building a home with someone of the same gender.
The Circulation of Emotions
In 2004, Ahmed published what would become one of the foundational texts in a then-emerging field called affect theory. The book was called The Cultural Politics of Emotion, and its central argument was deceptively simple: emotions are not private, internal experiences that happen inside individual bodies. Instead, emotions circulate between bodies and objects, shaping how we move through the world and how the world moves through us.
What does this mean in practice? Consider fear. We tend to think of fear as something that happens inside us—a racing heart, sweaty palms, the urge to flee. But Ahmed argued that fear is also something that gets attached to certain bodies and objects through cultural processes. In many Western societies, for example, fear has been systematically attached to Muslim bodies, especially after September 11, 2001. This isn't because Muslim people are inherently frightening. It's because fear, as an emotion, has been culturally circulated in ways that stick to certain bodies.
This was a radical reframing. Emotions weren't just psychological phenomena to be studied by therapists. They were political phenomena that shaped who got to feel safe, who got to feel happy, and who got to feel at home in the world.
Queer Phenomenology: On Being Oriented
Phenomenology is a branch of philosophy concerned with how things appear to consciousness, with how we experience being in the world. It was developed primarily by German philosophers like Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger in the early twentieth century, and later taken up by French thinkers like Maurice Merleau-Ponty. At its core, phenomenology asks: what is it like to be a body in space? How do we perceive, encounter, and make sense of the world around us?
Ahmed's contribution, in her 2006 book Queer Phenomenology: Orientation, Objects, Others, was to ask: what happens when your body doesn't fit the assumed orientation of that world?
The word "orientation" is telling. We use it to describe which direction we're facing—orienting ourselves on a map, finding our bearings. We also use it to describe sexual desire—sexual orientation. Ahmed noticed that this shared language wasn't coincidental. Both kinds of orientation are about which way we turn, which objects and people we move toward, what draws our attention and desire.
Heterosexuality, Ahmed argued, is presented as the normal orientation of the world. Rooms are designed for heterosexual couples. Family tables are arranged assuming heterosexual parents and their biological children. Tax codes, hospital visitation rights, and inheritance laws all assume heterosexuality as the default direction. To be queer is to be turned the wrong way, to face in a direction that doesn't align with the assumed orientation of the world.
This might sound abstract, but Ahmed made it viscerally concrete. She described the experience of being a young queer person sitting at a family dinner table, surrounded by photos of heterosexual ancestors in their wedding portraits, feeling the weight of an assumed future that doesn't match your own desires. The discomfort isn't just psychological. It's phenomenological—a mismatch between your body's orientation and the orientation of the space you're inhabiting.
The Promise of Happiness
What if happiness itself is a form of social control?
This is the provocative question Ahmed explored in The Promise of Happiness, published in 2010. The book won the Feminist and Women's Studies Association book prize in 2011, and it challenged something that seems beyond questioning: the idea that happiness is good and we should all want more of it.
Ahmed's argument was subtle. She wasn't saying happiness is bad. She was saying that the promise of happiness—the idea that certain paths lead to happiness while others lead to misery—functions as a form of coercion. Society promises that if you follow the right path (get married, have children, work hard, consume appropriately), you will be happy. And if you're not happy after following that path, well, something must be wrong with you.
But what about people whose very existence deviates from the approved happiness script? What about queer people, who cannot follow the heterosexual family narrative? What about women who don't want children? What about anyone who questions whether the conventional path actually leads where it promises?
These people, Ahmed argued, become what she called "affect aliens"—people whose emotional responses are out of sync with what society expects them to feel. They're supposed to feel happy about weddings, grateful for the nuclear family, content with their lot. When they don't, they become problems.
The Feminist Killjoy
And this brings us to Ahmed's most famous concept, the one that has launched a thousand academic papers and even more social media posts: the feminist killjoy.
You know the scene. A family dinner, a casual gathering, a workplace meeting. Someone makes a sexist joke. Or a racist one. Or says something that assumes women should want certain things, or that gay people are somehow less than straight ones. And then someone speaks up. Points out the problem. Refuses to laugh along.
The room goes cold. The mood dies. And who gets blamed? Not the person who made the offensive comment. The person who pointed it out. The killjoy.
Ahmed embraced this figure. Rather than trying to escape the accusation of being a killjoy, she turned it into a political identity. Yes, feminists kill joy—the joy that depends on the oppression and silencing of others. Yes, speaking up ruins the mood—a mood that required women, queer people, and people of color to stay silent about their experiences. The feminist killjoy refuses the bargain. She speaks anyway.
This concept resonated so deeply that Ahmed created a blog called Feminist Killjoys, which she continues to maintain. The blog became a companion to her 2017 book Living a Feminist Life. Blog posts became book chapters; book chapters generated new blog posts. It was an experiment in what academic work might look like if it refused to stay behind university walls.
Living a Feminist Life became Duke University Press's best-selling book of the 2010s. That a dense, theoretical feminist text outsold everything else the press published tells you something about the hunger for Ahmed's ideas.
On Being Included (And Excluded)
Universities love to talk about diversity. They hire diversity officers, write diversity statements, create diversity committees. Ahmed spent years studying what happens inside these processes, first as an academic observing institutions, and later as someone who worked on diversity initiatives herself.
Her 2012 book On Being Included: Racism and Diversity in Institutional Life offered a devastating analysis. Diversity, Ahmed found, often becomes a way of appearing to address racism without actually changing anything. Institutions treat diversity as a box to tick, a statement to make, a photo to put on the website. The word "diversity" itself gets used so often that it becomes meaningless—a way of not talking about the actual problems.
This is what Ahmed calls "diversity work": the labor of trying to transform institutions that were not built to include you. It's exhausting, largely invisible, and frequently unsuccessful. The people who do diversity work—often women of color who are already marginalized within their institutions—spend enormous energy pushing against structures that push back.
Ahmed's analysis drew on scholars like Chandra Talpade Mohanty, M. Jacqui Alexander, and Heidi Mirza, all of whom had documented the specific experiences of women of color in predominantly white academic institutions. It also drew on her own experience as a woman of color in British academia, navigating spaces that assumed whiteness as the default.
Intersectionality as Starting Point
Intersectionality is a term coined by the legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw in 1989 to describe how different forms of oppression—racism, sexism, classism, homophobia—don't just add up but interact and compound each other. A Black woman doesn't experience racism and sexism separately; she experiences a specific form of discrimination that is shaped by both simultaneously.
For Ahmed, intersectionality isn't just an analytical tool. It's a description of how she exists in the world.
"I am not a lesbian one moment and a person of color the next and a feminist at another. I am all of these at every moment."
This matters because it changes how we understand feminist politics. If women's experiences are shaped by race, class, sexuality, disability, and colonial history, then a feminism that ignores these factors isn't really feminism at all. It's just advocacy for a narrow group of women—typically white, middle-class, heterosexual women—dressed up in universal language.
Ahmed follows the Black feminist scholar bell hooks in arguing that genuine liberation requires addressing all systems of oppression simultaneously. You can't fight sexism while ignoring racism, or challenge homophobia while accepting class inequality. The systems are connected. The struggle must be too.
Willfulness as Resistance
In 2014, Ahmed published Willful Subjects, an exploration of what it means to be called willful. The willful child. The stubborn woman. The person who won't go along with what they're told.
In the traditional understanding, willfulness is a problem to be corrected. The willful child must be disciplined. The stubborn woman must be broken. But Ahmed asked: what if willfulness is actually a form of resistance? What if refusing to bend is exactly what's needed when the thing you're being asked to bend toward is unjust?
She explored the history of how willfulness has been used to pathologize those who resist authority—particularly women, children, and colonized peoples. The diagnosis of willfulness has justified enormous violence: beatings, psychiatric confinement, cultural erasure. To call someone willful is to say that their will is the problem, that they should stop wanting what they want and start wanting what they're told to want.
Ahmed reclaimed willfulness as a positive term. Willfulness is what lets you persist when everything around you says you should give up. It's what keeps you fighting when the structures keep pushing back. It's the refusal to be broken.
Complaint!
In 2021, Ahmed published Complaint!, perhaps her most directly political book. It emerged from her experience resigning from Goldsmiths and from years of conversations with people who had tried to make formal complaints about harassment, bullying, and discrimination within universities.
The book documents the gap between what is supposed to happen when you make a complaint and what actually happens. Universities have policies. They have procedures. They have offices dedicated to handling complaints. But the people who actually complain often find that these systems don't protect them. Instead, the systems protect the institution.
Complainers become problems. They're told they're being difficult, that they're imagining things, that they're damaging the institution's reputation by speaking up. The process becomes a punishment—endless meetings, demands for evidence, subtle and not-so-subtle retaliation. Many people eventually give up, which is precisely what the system is designed to produce.
This echoed Ahmed's earlier work on the feminist killjoy. The person who complains about harassment is treated like the person who points out the sexist joke: they become the problem, not the harassment itself.
Use and Queer Use
What's the Use?, published in 2019, explored how the concept of use shapes our world. Utilitarianism—the philosophical tradition that says actions should be judged by their usefulness, by whether they produce the greatest good for the greatest number—has profoundly shaped modern institutions. We're constantly asked to justify ourselves in terms of use: Are you being productive? What's your value? How are you contributing?
Ahmed traced this history while also exploring "queer use"—ways of using things that deviate from their intended purpose. A building designed for one thing gets repurposed for another. A word meant as an insult gets reclaimed as a badge of pride. A body expected to perform one role insists on performing another.
Queer use, for Ahmed, is a form of resistance. It takes the world as it is—full of objects, spaces, and concepts designed without you in mind—and finds ways to make it livable anyway.
The Killjoy Survival Kit
Her most recent book, published in 2023, is called The Feminist Killjoy Handbook. Where Living a Feminist Life was theoretical, the Handbook is practical. It's a guide for surviving in a world that doesn't want you to speak up.
The book weaves together analysis of literature and film with Ahmed's own experiences as what she calls "a queer feminist scholar-activist of colour." It chronicles the work of killing joy as what she calls "a world-making project"—not just a negative act of ruining things, but a positive act of creating space for something different.
The feminist philosopher Judith Butler reviewed the book for The Nation magazine in 2024, focusing on a chapter about "the snap"—the moment when someone finally breaks, when they've absorbed too much and something gives. For Butler, Ahmed's work shows how these moments of apparent failure are also moments of possibility.
Writing as Lifeline
Throughout her career, Ahmed has acknowledged her debts to earlier generations of lesbian feminists of color: Cherríe Moraga, Gloria Anzaldúa, Audre Lorde. These writers, working in the 1970s and 1980s, insisted on writing themselves into existence when mainstream feminism either ignored or tokenized their experiences.
Ahmed calls their texts "lifelines"—not metaphorically, but literally. These are the works that let her know she wasn't alone, that her experiences weren't unique aberrations but part of a larger pattern. They showed her that survival was possible and that theory could come from lived experience rather than being imposed from outside.
In turn, Ahmed's own writing has become a lifeline for a new generation. Her blog, her books, her willingness to share her own experiences of institutional failure and personal struggle—these have created what she calls "a communication device, a way of reaching people who recognized in her something of their own experience."
The Independent Scholar
Since leaving Goldsmiths in 2016, Ahmed has continued her work as an independent scholar. She's no longer attached to a university, no longer subject to the institutional pressures she spent her career analyzing. It's a precarious position—independent scholars lack the salary, the healthcare, the retirement benefits of academic jobs—but it's also a free one.
She continues to blog. She continues to write. In 2017, she received the Kessler Award from the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies at the City University of New York for her contributions to the field of LGBTQ studies. In 2019, Malmö University in Sweden awarded her an honorary doctorate.
But the honors matter less than the work. Ahmed keeps producing theory that emerges from practice, that refuses to separate thinking from living. She keeps modeling what it might look like to be a feminist killjoy in the world—to speak up, to refuse complicity, to insist that joy built on others' silence is no joy worth having.
And perhaps that's the most important thing about Sara Ahmed: she doesn't just write about being a feminist killjoy. She is one.