6 Quotes & Sayings By Sara Ahmed

Sara Ahmed is a literary theorist and postcolonial feminist who has explored the impact of race, gender, and sexuality in the contemporary arts in her books The Cultural Politics of Emotion (2007) and Becoming a Muslim: Religious Change in African American Journeys (2010), as well as in articles, essays, speeches, and interviews. Her scholarship concerns the poetics of emotions, affective labor, race/gender/class politics, literary theory, queer theory, postcolonialism, feminism, activism, and transnational studies. Her pedagogical research interests include how literary theory can be used to challenge dominant power structures that marginalize minority voices.

1
When you expose a problem you pose a problem. It might then be assumed that the problem would go away if you would just stop talking about or if you went away. Sara Ahmed
2
Let’s take this figure of the feminist killjoy seriously. Does the feminist kill other people’s joy by pointing out moments of sexism? Or does she expose the bad feelings that get hidden, displaced, or negated under public signs of joy? Does bad feeling enter the room when somebody expresses anger about things, or could anger be the moment when the bad feelings that circulate through objects get brought to the surface in a certain way? . Sara Ahmed
3
Let's take the figure of the feminist killjoy seriously. One feminist project could be to give the killjoy back her voice. Whilst hearing feminists as killjoys might be a form of dismissal, there is an agency that this dismissal rather ironically reveals. We can respond to the accusation with a "yes. Sara Ahmed
4
Every writer is first a reader, and what we read matters. Sara Ahmed
5
Away from home, my partner and I are on holiday on a resort on an island. Mealtimes bring everyone together. We enter the dining room, where we face many tables places alongside each other… I face what seems like a shocking image. In front of me, on the tables, couples are seated. Table after table, couple after couple, taking the same form: one many sitting by one woman around a ‘round table, ’ facing each other 'over’ the table… I am shocked by the sheer force of the regularity of that which is familiar: how each table presents the same form of sociality as the form of the heterosexual couple. How is it possible, with all that is possible, that the same form is repeated again and again? How does the openness of the future get closed down into so little in the present? . Sara Ahmed