Sara Ahmed Quotes

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.

Solidarity does not assume that our struggles are the same struggles, or that our pain is the same pain, or that our hope is for the same future. Solidarity involves commitment, and work, as well as the recognition that even if we do not have the same feelings, or the same lives, or the same bodies, we do live on common ground.

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?

The personal is theoretical.

Where we find happiness teaches us what we value rather than simply what is of value.

We become a problem when we describe a problem.

To live a feminist life is to make everything into something that is questionable. The question of how to live a feminist life is alive as a question as well as being a life question.

Rolling eyes = feminist pedagogy.

When you have to fight for an existence, fighting can become an existence.

We are dismissed as emotional. It is enough to make you emotional.

There is nothing more vulnerable than caring for someone; it means not only giving your energy to that which is not you but also caring for that which is beyond or outside your control. Caring is anxious—to be full of care, to be careful, is to take care of things by becoming anxious about their future, where the future is embodied in the fragility of an object whose persistence matters. Becoming caring is not about becoming good or nice: people who have “being caring” as their ego ideal often act in quite uncaring ways in order to protect their good image of themselves. To care is not about letting an object go but holding on to an object by letting oneself go, giving oneself over to something that is not one’s own.

a system is working when an attempt to transform that system is blocked.

Every writer is first a reader, and what we read matters.

I think of feminism as poetry; we hear histories in words; we reassemble histories by putting them into words.

Queer and feminist worlds are built through the effort to support those who are not supported because of who they are, what they want, what they do.

Sexual harassment works—as does bullying more generally—by increasing the costs of fighting against something, making it easier to accept something than to struggle against something,

Indeed so often just talking about sexism as well as racism is heard as damaging the institution. If talking about sexism and racism is heard as damaging institutions, we need to damage institutions.

Those of us committed to a queer life know that forms of recognition are either precariously conditional, you have to be the right kind of queer by depositing your hope for happiness in the right places (even with perverse desire you can have straight aspirations), or it is simply not given.

When we have to think strategically, we also have to accept our complicity: we forgo any illusions of purity; we give up the safety of exteriority. If we are not exterior to the problem under investigation, we too are the problem under investigation. Diversity work is messy, even dirty, work.

The impossibility of 'fellow feeling' is itself the confirmation of injury. The call of such pain, as a pain that cannot be shared through empathy, is a call not just for an attentive hearing, but for a different kind of inhabitance. It is a call for action, and a demand for collective politics, as a politics based not on the possibility that we might be reconciled, but on learning to live with the impossibility of reconciliation, or learning that we live with and beside each other, and yet we are not as one

it is dangerous to be perceived as dangerous.

Among white people, black people are allowed to talk about their precarious lives, but they are not allowed to implicate the present company in that precariousness. They are not allowed to point out its causes. In “Sexism—a Problem with a Name,” Sara Ahmed writes that “if you name the problem you become the problem.”7 To create discomfort by pointing out facts is seen as socially unacceptable. Let’s get over ourselves, it’s structural not personal, I want to shout at everyone, including myself.

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.

Feminist consciousness can be thought of as consciousness of the violence and power concealed under the languages of civility, happiness, and love, rather than simply or only consciousness of gender as a site of restriction of possibility. You can venture into the secret places of pain by recalling something. You can cause unhappiness by noticing something. And if you can cause unhappiness by noticing something, you realize that the world you are in is not the world you thought you were in.

A significant step for a feminist movement is to recognize what has not ended. And this step is a very hard step. It is a slow and painstaking step. We might think we have made that step only to realize we have to make it again.

These ways we have to settle. Moving house. I hate packing: collecting myself up, pulling myself apart. Stripping the body of the house: the walls, the floors, the shelves. Then I arrive, an empty house. It looks like a shell. How I love unpacking. Taking things out, putting things around, arranging myself all over the walls. I move around, trying to distribute myself evenly around the rooms. I concentrate on the kitchen. The familiar smell of spices fills the air. I allow the cumin to spill, and then gather it up again. I feel flung back somewhere else. I am never sure where the smell of spices takes me, as it had followed me everywhere. Each smell that gathers returns me somewhere; I am not always sure where that somewhere is. Sometimes the return is welcome, sometimes not. Sometimes it is tears or laughter that makes me realize that I have been pulled to another place and another time. Such memories can involve a recognition of how one's body already feels, coming after the event. The surprise when we find ourselves moved in this way or that. So we ask the question, later, and it often seems too late: what is it that has led me away from the present, to another place and another time? How is it that I have arrived here or there?

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 it or if you went away. The charge of sensationalism falls rather quickly onto feminist shoulders: when she talks about sexism and racism, her story is heard as sensationalist, as if she is exaggerating for effect.5 The feminist killjoy begins as a sensationalist figure. It is as if the point of making her point is to cause trouble, to get in the way of the happiness of others, because of her own unhappiness.

Doing diversity work has taught me that agreeing to something is one of the best ways of stopping something from happening. Agreeing to something is an efficient technique for stopping something because organizations can avoid the costs of disagreement.

To be a feminist at work is or should be about how we challenge ordinary and everyday sexism, including academic sexism. This is not optional: it is what makes feminism feminist. A feminist project is to find ways in which women can exist in relation to women; how women can be in relation to each other. It is a project because we are not there yet.

Once upon a time I had the light, time passed and I didn't realize my light was slipping away.. I just woke up one day and it was dark.

But think of this: those of us who arrive in an academy that was not shaped by or for us bring knowledges, as well as worlds, that otherwise would not be here. Think of this: how we learn about worlds when they do not accommodate us. Think of the kinds of experiences you have when you are not expected to be here. These experiences are a resource to generate knowledge.

Gentrification is a public policy for managing strangers: a way of removing those who would be eyesores; those who would reduce the value of a neighborhood; those whose proximity would be registered as price.

an institution being willing to appoint someone (to transform the institution) is not the same thing as an institution being willing to be transformed (by someone who is appointed). An appointment can even be about an appearance: being given a diversity mandate might be how an institution appears willing to be transformed.

Sara Ahmed Happiness is no protection, and certainly it is not a responsibility. The freedom to be happy restricts human freedom if you are not free to be not happy. But one can make of either freedom a habit, and only you know which you’ve chosen.

Someone says something you consider problematic. At first you try not to say anything. But they keep saying something. So maybe you respond, carefully, perhaps. You say why you think what they have said is problematic. You might be speaking quietly, but you are beginning to feel wound up, recognizing with frustration that you are being wound up by someone who is winding you up. The feminist killjoy appears here: when she speaks, she seems wound up. I appear here. This is my history: wound up.

The more nots you are, the more committees you might end up on. Not being not can mean being less likely to end up doing this kind of work. Given that diversity work is typically less valued by organizations, then not being not can mean having more time to do more-valued work.

Alienation is studious; you learn more about wishes when they are not what you wish for.

Perhaps sometimes we just can’t do this; it means being prepared to be undone, and we just don’t know if we are ready to put ourselves back together again,

Individuals within the institution must act as if the decision has been made for it to be made. If they do not, it has not. A

Within the organization there is a gap between words and deeds, between what organizations say they will do, or what they are committed to doing, and what they are doing.

Having evidence of being wronged does not stop you from being judged as in the wrong.

So much feminist and antiracist work is the work of trying to convince others that sexism and racism have not ended; that sexism and racism are fundamental to the injustices of late capitalism; that they matter.

Your own body becomes used as evidence that the walls of which you speak are not there or are no longer there; as if you have eliminated the walls through your own progression. You got through, so they are not there.

And then your frustration can be taken as evidence of your frustration, that you speak this way, about this or that, because you are frustrated. It is frustrating to be heard as frustrated; it can make you angry that you are heard as angry.

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?

By using the idea of sweaty concepts, I am also trying to show how descriptive work is conceptual work. A concept is worldly, but it is also a reorientation to a world, a way of turning things around, a different slant on the same thing. More specifically, a sweaty concept is one that comes out of a description of a body that is not at home in the world. By this I mean description as angle or point of view: a description of how it feels not to be at home in the world, or a description of the world from the point of view of not being at home in it. Sweat is bodily; we might sweat more during more strenuous and muscular activity. A sweaty concept might come out of a bodily experience that is trying. The task is to stay with the difficulty, to keep exploring and exposing this difficulty. We might need not to eliminate the effort or labor from the writing. Not eliminating the effort or labor becomes an academic aim because we have been taught to tidy our texts, not to reveal the struggle we have in getting somewhere. Sweaty concepts are also generated by the practical experience of coming up against a world, or the practical experience of trying to transform a world.6

A complaint can be how you live with yourself because a complaint is an attempt to address what is wrong, not to cope with something, not to let it happen, not to let it keep happening. You refuse to adjust to what is unjust. A complaint can be a way of not doing nothing. I think the double negative is often the terrain of complaint

It is certainly the case that responsibility for diversity and equality is unevenly distributed. It is also the case that the distribution of this work is political: if diversity and equality work is less valued by organizations, then to become responsible for this work can mean to inhabit institutional spaces that are also less valued.

I was profoundly shy growing up, and my sense of human sociality was of something from which I was barred: almost like a room with a locked door for which I did not have the key. Perhaps that was it: gender seemed like a key to a lock, which I did not have, or which I did not fit. Looking back, I think I decided to self-girl when I went to university, as I was exhausted by not fitting or not fitting in.

No wonder then that the social struggle within families involves a struggle over the causes of unhappiness. Perhaps the parents are unhappy as they think their daughter will be unhappy if she is queer. They are unhappy with her being unhappy. The daughter is unhappy because they are unhappy with her being queer. Perhaps the parents would then witness the daughter’s unhappiness as a confirmation of their fear: that she will be unhappy because she is queer. Even happy queers would become unhappy at this point.

To learn from those who try to intervene in the reproduction of something is to learn about reproduction. To stop a system from being reproduced, you have to stop it from working. You have to throw a wrench in the works or to become, to borrow Sarah Franklin’s (2015) terms, “wenches in the works.” When you throw your body into the system to try to stop it from working, you feel the impact of how things are working. We learn how those who try to stop a culture from being reproduced are stopped. But in learning this, we also learn that reproduction is not inevitable, nor is it smooth, despite the failure to stop something from working.

Sexual harassment is material. It is a network that stops information from getting out. It is a set of alliances that come alive to stop something; that enable a complaint to be held up or to become confidential, so that it never comes out into the public domain. And notice here: so many complex things are going on at the same time. It is not activity that is coordinated by one person or even necessarily a group of people who are meeting in secret, although secret meetings probably do happen. All of these activities, however complex, sustain a direction; they have a point. Direction does not require something to originate from a single point: in fact a direction is achieved through consistency between points that do not seem to meet. Things combine to achieve something that is solid and tangible; bonds become binds. If one element does not hold, or become binding, another element holds or binds. The process is rather like the cement used to make walls: something is set into a holding pattern. The setting is what hardens. Perhaps when people notice the complexity, or even the inefficiency and disorganization, they don’t notice the cement. When you say there is a pattern, you are heard as paranoid, as if you are imagining that all this complexity derives from a single point.

We need to tell each other stories of different ways you can live, different ways you can be; predicated not on how close you get to the life you were assumed or expected to have, but on the queer wanderings of a life you live. I would have liked to have known there were other ways of living, of being. I would have liked to have known that women do not have to be in relation to men. Of course, I struggled for this realization: I became a feminist; I found women’s studies; I met women who taught me what I did not have to do; I found women who helped me deviate from an expectation. Queer: the moment you realize what you did not have to be. We can become part of a widening when we refused to be narrowed. And each time we reject or widen the happiness script, we become part of an opening. We have to create room if we are to live a feminist life. When we create room, we create room for others.

Becoming the race person means you are the one who is turned to when race turns up. The very fact of your existence can allow others not to turn up.

We have different tactics for dealing with sexism and racism; and one difficulty is that these tactics can be in tension. When we give problems their names, we can become a problem for those who do not want to talk about a problem even though they know there is a problem. You can cause a problem by not letting things recede.

The family is performed by witnessing her being wound up, spinning around.

What does it mean to redirect children out of fear that they would be unhappy?

To want happiness for a child can be to want to straighten the child out.

that in some parental responses to a child coming out, this unhappiness is expressed not so much as being unhappy about the child being queer, but as being unhappy about the child being unhappy.

Translation: happiness becomes proximity to whiteness. Camel Gupta (2014) notes how it is sometimes assumed that brown queers and trans folk are rescued from unhappy brown families by happy white queer and trans communities. We are not a rescue mission. But when you deviate, they celebrate. Even happy brown queers would become unhappy at this point.

You can kill joy by not looking happy enough. If

I looked in the mirror sadly and waited for a different version of myself to appear.

And note then: you can killjoy not as a deliberate or intentional act; you might even be trying to participate in the joy of others. You can killjoy because you are not properly attuned to the requirements of a social system.

Diversity workers could be described as institutional plumbers: they develop an expertise in how things get stuck, as well as where they get stuck.

for. We have feminist centers and feminist programs because we do not have feminist universities: that

accommodated. For example, even when universities have access policies, it is often still left to students with disabilities to find out about those policies, to ask about access arrangements at each and every event. 7 The very effort required to find out about access can end up making events inaccessible.

It is deemed more polite to assume you are white.

This is what intersectionality can mean in practice: being stopped because of how you can be seen in relation to some categories (not white, Aboriginal; not middle class), being able to start up because of how you are seen in relation to others (not Aboriginal; middle class, white). 1

of how diversity can be used by organizations as a form of public relations.

Diversity is thus increasingly exercised as a form of public relations: “the planned and sustained effort to establish and maintain good will and understanding between an organisation and its publics.

Mainstreaming did not work. This practitioner gave no more detail than necessary to convey why it did not work: “We haven’t been able to give as much attention as we would have liked to it.

Sometimes we are too fragile to to this work; we cannot risk being shattered because we are not ready to put ourselves back together again.

I close my eyes and listen to every thought, every dream, every sigh, and I; at some point may win the battle and exhale heavily everything and everyone including myself. And then, only then I may become so light that I can fly away to the sky.. become the wind and get lost in the horizon.

To become a complainer can also mean becoming the object of other people’s complaints.7 Members of her department submitted an informal complaint to Human Resources identifying her as a bully. It should not surprise us that a “pushy minority” can morph into a bully. Bullying often works to create a narrative about a person as behind whatever is deemed problematic. She was a new head of department; she was trying to make changes to the culture of that department.

When violence gets in, a complaint comes out.

Whiteness can be reproduced in the spaces where it is supposedly being questioned. You even have to do the work of questioning the terms of their terms (“if you want to decolonize, we’ll do it on our terms”). If you don’t use their terms, or if you question their terms, what happens then? You might be dropped; you might be stopped. But the questions you raise are turned into questions about you.

You complain because you do not belong here. And your complaint becomes evidence you do not belong here. When the judgment that you do not belong here has already been made, you have to work hard not to provide evidence to support that judgment. She

A complaint can come out of a sense that unless you complain, the same thing will keep happening. In other words, a complaint can be what you have to make to stop the same thing from happening.

An old syllabus, an old word, an old policy: these habits hold despite the modifications. The modifications made in response to previous complaints can end up reproducing the structure the complaints were about.

Complaints about hostile environments might be necessary in order not to reproduce hostile environments. But complaints about hostile environments are often made in hostile environments.

When a complaint about a hostile environment collides with another complaint, that collision reproduces the hostile environment. To identify an environment as hostile is to be identified as hostile, as causing damage. You can become a “malicious complainer,” even though the complaint that is taken forward is not your complaint but the complaint made about you. And so we learn: it becomes more damaging to call a person, department, or institution transphobic than to be transphobic. We also learn: not all complaints are nonreproductive labor. In fact, complaints are more likely to get uptake when they are made against those who are trying to intervene in the reproduction of a problem. Reproduction is also about immanence: what is reproduced tends to be what we are

A complaint can be a point you reach when you can’t take it, when you are “just done with this,” the violence

centering of whiteness, white tears, the racism of denying racism, hurt feelings, white supremacy performed as hurt feelings.30 She is told off, called out for calling them out, for complaining in the wrong way.

A classroom can be a post box. In writing that letter, she is trying to stop the same things from being posted: white supremacy as occupying of space. But the letter ends up being what is posted. A complaint about the letters in the box becomes another letter in the box. This is why to hear complaint is to learn about occupation. What usually happens keeps happening because those who try to stop it from happening, who complain about the hostility of an environment, are stopped. To post that letter, to make that complaint, can mean to end up being displaced. PART III IF THESE DOORS COULD TALK?

complaining often means drawing attention to yourself at the very time you draw attention to structures.

A complaint becomes a recording device; you have to record what you do not want to reproduce. This is what I mean by complaint as nonreproductive labor: all the work you have to do in order not to reproduce an inheritance.

those chips have come up again. The more nots you are, the more committees you are on. The more nots you are, the more chips they find. If we keep chipping away at the old block, no wonder they keep finding those chips on our shoulders. She added, “They treated the submission as an act of arrogance on my part.” It is as if she puts a complaint forward as a way of putting herself forward; the complaint is treated as self-promotional. So, it is not only that in making a complaint, you come to stand out. A complaint is treated as how you are promoting yourself.

A structure can enable promotion. And if you challenge those structures, you are the one who becomes self-promotional.

Jennifer Doyle (2015, 33) observes that “the filing of a complaint often leads to the filing of more complaints—counter-complaints and complaints about the complaints process.” The immanence of complaints—complaints are made in situations that complaints are about—could be well described as a crash site: to complain is to collide into other complaints. Another way of saying this: some complaints get uptake; others do not.

Marilyn Frye (1983, 88) describes anger as akin to a speech act: “It cannot ‘come off’ if it doesn’t

get uptake.” Some complaints get uptake, which is to say, they come off, they survive a collision.

The technologies we have available to challenge abuses of power—from complaints procedures to antidiscrimination policies to equality polices to the very languages of

harm and oppression—can be used to deflect attention from abuses of power. Those who abuse power given to them by virtue of their position can use the technologies intended to challenge abuses of power to abuse power. A bully with a complaint procedure is a bully with another weapon. Power is also the ability to influence how we are received. When some people matter more, their feelings matter more (“his distress was worth so much more than mine”). We are back to the significance of immanence. You don’t need to complain about not being taken more seriously if you are taken more seriously. But if those who are taken more seriously complain, then their complaints are taken more seriously.

But rather than respond to her, the Indigenous student who called it out, the white professor prints out her letter and reads it out to the class, the same class she was complaining about. He does so without her permission. I think of that complaint, that letter, being read out by him. I think of what he is expressing in doing that. She is complaining about what is taken from her; white supremacy as the theft of space. And then her complaint is taken from her, turned into another way he expresses himself.

White supremacy can be enacted in the response to a complaint about white supremacy; you can be dispossessed from a complaint about dispossession.

Even though it may look gloomy and messy, it's how beauty begins to rise above all and fill the soul.

We need to tell each other stories of different ways you can live, different ways you can be; predicated not on how close you get to the life you were assumed or expected to have, but on the queer wanderings of a life you live.

We need to tell each other stories of different ways you can live, different ways you can be; predicated not on how close you get to the life you were assumed or expected to have, but on the queer wanderings of a life you live. I would have liked to have known there were other ways of living, of being. I would have liked to have known that women do not have to be in relation to men. Of course, I struggled for this realization: I became a feminist; I found women’s studies; I met women who taught me what I did not have to do; I found women who helped me deviate from an expectation. Queer: the moment you realize what you did not have to be. We can become part of a widening when we refused to be narrowed. And each time we reject or widen the happiness script, we become part of an opening. We have to create room if we are to live a feminist life. When we create room, we create room for others.

Lorde asks, “Was I really fighting the spread of radiation, racism, woman-slaughter, chemical invasion of our food, pollution of our environment, and the abuse and psychic destruction of our young, merely to avoid dealing with my first and greatest responsibility to be happy?

This kind of caring for oneself is not about caring for one’s own happiness. It is about finding ways to exist in a world that makes it difficult to exist. This is why, this is how: those who do not have to struggle for their own survival can very easily and rather quickly dismiss those who attend to their own survival as being self-indulgent. They do not need to attend to themselves; the world does it for them.