Sara Ahmed: Notes from a Feminist Killjoy

“Feminism is a sensible reaction to the injustices of the world,” writes Sara Ahmed, self-described feminist killjoy. In Living a Feminist Life, her latest work, Ahmed considers how her own understanding of feminism has developed as a way of “making sense of what doesn’t make sense.” At a time when public scholarship seems to be a thing of the past, she offers a model for what its modern incarnation might look like. The book, while grounded in theory, is also her most personal to date, filled with stories from Ahmed’s everyday, her experience of being “a feminist at work.” “Theory can do more the closer it gets to the skin,” she reminds her readers, demonstrating that good theory, useful theory, is generated from and should be relevant to ordinary life.

For Ahmed, a scholar of feminist theory and a queer woman of color, the personal is institutional; one year ago, she resigned from her position at Goldsmiths, University of London, where she had been the inaugural director of the Centre for Feminist Research. Her leaving was in protest of what she felt was the university’s failure to address the problem of sexual harassment on campus. Sharing the details of the decision on her blog, feministkilljoys.com—“You have had hundreds of meetings, with students, with academics, with administrators. You have written blogs about the problem of sexual harassment and the silence that surrounds it. And still there is silence”—served to move her work further into the lived world.  

It was through her blog posts that the idea for Living a Feminist Life was born; the blog’s name,“feminist killjoys,” refers back to a cultural trope that Ahmed examined in her 2010 book,