Sara Ahmed - Complaint!

PRAISE FOR SARA AHMED

PRAISE FORWHATS THE USE?

In this close reading of use, Sara Ahmed leads the reader from object to object at a pace that moves with the deliberateness of a philosopher and the grace of a literary scholar. With this and other books, Ahmed has established herself as one of the most important feminist thinkers in the world.ROSEMARIE GARLAND-THOMSON, author of Staring: How We Look

A well-written, engaging text. Highly recommended. All readership levels.C. R. MCALL,Choice

As with many of Ahmeds writings, Whats the Use?, with feminist solidarity radiating from its pages filled with her characteristic rhetorical and language-repurposing writing, will allow readers to question and contest their lived realities and surroundings. Ahmed leaves another landmark impression on intersectional feminist thinking, praxis, and pedagogy, and develops new modes for examining the co-constitution of spaces, bodies, and social relations that will animate feminist and queer geographical study.JAMES D. TODD,Gender, Place and Culture

Ahmed sought to write a text that intervenes in the everyday, that elevates a threadbare backpack to a place of unbound theoretical play. And she has done so. Accessible and innovative, Whats the Use? will be of serious interest to activists, artists, and academics working at the intersections of queer and critical race studies.CAITLIN MACKENZIE,QED

PRAISE FORLIVING A FEMINIST LIFE

From the moment I received Sara Ahmeds new work, Living a Feminist Life, I couldnt put it down. Its such a brilliant, witty, visionary new way to think about feminist theory. Everyone should read this book. It offers amazing new ways of knowing and talking about feminist theory and practice. And, it is also delightful, funny, and as the song says, your love has lifted me higher. Ahmed lifts us higher.BELL HOOKS

Beautifully written and persuasively argued, Living a Feminist Life is not just an instant classic, but an essential read for intersectional feminists.ANN A. HAMILTON, Bitch

Anyone at odds with this worldand we all ought to beowes it to themselves, and to the goal of a better tomorrow, to read this book.MARIAM RAHMANI,Los Angeles Review of Books

Living a Feminist Life is perhaps the most accessible and important of Ahmeds works to date. [A] quite dazzlingly lively, angry and urgent call to arms. In short, everybody should read Ahmeds book precisely because not everybody will.EMMA REES,Times Higher Education

Fans of bell hooks and Audre Lorde will find Ahmeds frequent homages and references familiar and assuring in a work that goes far beyond Betty Friedans The Feminine Mystique, capturing the intersection so critical in modern feminism. ABBY HARGREAVES,Library Journal

Living a Feminist Life offers something halfway between the immediacy and punch of the blog and the multi-layered considerations of a scholarly essay; the result is one of the most politically engaged, complex and personal books on gender politics we have seen in a while.BIDISHA,Times Literary Supplement

Living a Feminist Life hopes we can survive doing feminist theory, and energizes us to do so.CLARE CROFT,Feminist Theory

Undeniably, Ahmeds book is a highly crafted work, both scholarly and lyrically, that builds upon itself and delivers concrete, adaptable conclusions; it is a gorgeous argument, crackling with kind wit and an invitation to the community of feminist killjoys.THEODOSIA HENNEY,Lambda Literary Review

Ahmed gifts us words that we may have difficulty finding for ourselves. [R]eading her book provides a tentative vision for a feminist ethics for radical politics that is applicable far beyond what is traditionally considered the domain of feminism.MAHVISH AHMAD,New Inquiry

PRAISE FORON BEING INCLUDED

Just when you think everything that could possibly be said about diversity in higher education has been said, Sara Ahmed comes along with this startlingly original, deeply engaging ethnography of diversity work. On Being Included is an insightful, smart reflection on the embodied, profoundly political phenomenology of doing and performing diversity in predominantly white institutions. As Ahmed queers even the most mundane formulations of diversity, she creates one eureka moment after another. I could not put this book down. It is a must-read for everyone committed to antiracist, feminist work as key to institutional transformation in higher education.CHANDRA TALPADE MOHANTY, author of Feminism without Borders: Decolonizing Theory, Practicing Solidarity

This book offers a grounded and open exploration of what it means to do diversity, to be diverse. It challenges the reader, both in style and in content, to reconsider relations of power that stick to the multiple practices, meanings, and understandings of diversity, and to reconsider how we engage, reproduce, and disrupt these relations.JULIANE COLLARD AND CAROLYN PROUSE,Gender, Place and Culture

PRAISE FORWILLFUL SUBJECTS

Like her other works known for their originality, sharpness, and reach, Ahmed offers here a vibrant, surprising, and philosophically rich analysis of cultural politics, drawing on feminist, queer, and antiracist uses of willing and willfulness to explain forms of sustained and adamant social disagreement as a constitutive part of any radical ethics and politics worth its name.JUDITH BUTLER, Maxine Elliot Professor of Comparative Literature, University of California, Berkeley

Ahmeds insights, as always, are both intellectually fertile and provocative; Willful Subjects will not disappoint.MARGRIT SHILDRICK,Signs

There is no one else writing in contemporary cultural theory who is able to take hold of a single concept with such a firm and sure grasp and follow it along an idiosyncratic path in such surprising and illuminating ways.GAYLE SALAMON, author of Assuming a Body: Transgender and Rhetorics of Materiality

PRAISE FORTHE PROMISE OF HAPPINESS

Ahmeds language is a joy, and her work on each case study is filled with insight and rigor as she doggedly traces the social networks of dominance concealed and congealed around happiness. The Promise of Happiness is an important intervention in affect studies that crucially approaches one of the major assumptions guiding social life: the assumption that we need to be happy. SEAN GRATTAN,Social Text

The Promise of Happiness bridges philosophy and cultural studies, phenomenology and feminist thoughtproviding a fresh and incisive approach to some of the most urgent contemporary feminist issues. Ahmed navigates this bridge with a voice both clear and warm to convey ideas that are as complex as they are intimate and accessible. Her treatment of affect as a phenomenological project provides feminist theorists a way out of mind-body divides without reverting to essentialisms, enabling Ahmed to attend to intersectional and global power relations with acuity and originality.AIMEE CARRILLO ROWE,Signs

PRAISE FORQUEER PHENOMENOLOGY

Ahmeds most valuable contribution in Queer Phenomenology is her reorienting of the language of queer theory. The phenomenological understanding of orientation and its attendant geometric metaphors usefully reframes queer discourse, showing disorientation as a moment not of desperation but of radical possibility, of getting it twisted in a productive and revolutionary way.