Complaint, Queerness, and Killjoys: Engaging Sara Ahmed’s Theory
Description
The release of Sara Ahmed’s twelfth book, No Is Not a Lonely Utterance: The Art and Activism of Complaining (2025), underscores her profound influence on contemporary intellectual history – across feminist philosophy, queer studies, cultural studies, affect theory, and neighboring fields. For Ahmed, theory is not mere postmodern abstraction but a way of living close to the world. She understands feminism as an affective, ground-level practice that attends carefully to scenes of violence. Drawing on her own terms, her work equips readers with analytical tools to dissect power structures, revisit difficult histories, and hammer away at the past. Articulating diffuse gut-feelings into words can be an empowering act. Ahmed reconceptualizes structural power from the standpoint of those directly affected by it. In Complaint! (2021), which gathers testimonies from academic staff and students who confront abuses of power in universities, she writes: “The complainers are my guides; they are my feminist philosophers, my critical theorists, and also my collective.” A recurring motif across her books is the link between everyday experience and larger institutional structures or discursive formations. Feelings are social; domination gets under the skin and leaves marks on bodies. She refuses to write these scratches away as they testify to political atmospheres of sexism, racism, neoliberalism, and other unjust systems. Her writing offers a phenomenology of power. It illuminates how institutional mechanisms work. Complaint can be a queer phenomenology: disorienting, nonconforming and misaligned with “straight” social expectations. In Living a Feminist Life (2017), she defines queer as “the moment you realize what you did not have to be” (265). Queerness, for Ahmed, refuses a hegemony of happiness that disciplines subjects into conformity. Not fitting into this happy world can be a possibility. Misfitting opens other ways of being in the face of “[d]ominant systems [that] make so much and so many impossible”, as she phrases it in The Feminist Killjoy Handbook (2023). Her work has generated a distinctive lexicon – willfulness, happiness, killjoy, affective aliens, feminist ears, complaint, queer use, queer vandalism, door stories, and more. Happiness, in her view, is not a viable political option. Remaining with unhappiness, as one of her “killjoy maxims,” is not pessimism but a starting point for social change. Despite the broad reception of Ahmed’s concepts across the humanities, few attempts have been made to systematize her contributions and engage them collectively. We invite proposals from scholars at all career stages that explore the possibilities of working with her theories in literary studies, film and media, cultural studies, political theory, and related fields. We welcome both theory-driven papers and case studies. Participants must have a genuine interest in engaging deeply with Ahmed’s philosophy.
Schedule
Papers
Speaker Bio
Alrik Daldrup is a Schröder PhD student at Jesus College, Cambridge University, UK. He holds a BA and MA in German Literature and Political Science at Kiel University, Germany. His research centres on affects, violence and resistance in Contemporary German Literature. His work has been published in multiple peer-reviewed journals and edited volumes.
Speaker Bio
Shoshana Schwebel is a PhD Candidate in Germanic Studies at the University of British Columbia. Her research interests are chronic trauma and the affective ways that undisclosed trauma becomes legible in literary and visual texts. Her dissertation is on the German writer Emmy Hennings (1885-1948). In Hennings's work, Shoshana is focusing on the affect of Hennings's characters longing for their lost childhood selves.
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Tammy Birk is a Professor of English and Director of the Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies program at Otterbein University outside of Columbus, Ohio. She has written on topics as various as critical cosmopolitan pedagogy, graphic trauma narrative, and the anxiety of elsewhere. This is her second season hosting a nationally syndicated podcast, Feminist Professor, that has devoted two episodes to the work and thought of Sara Ahmed.
Papers
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Lara Mazurski teaches and researches at the Faculty of Humanities at AUC (Amsterdam University College). Mazurski has written numerous articles on migration and ethnic studies, queer theory, literary theory, and art. Mazurski is currently working on a book on Ocean Vuong.
Speaker Bio
Zoulikha Saidi is a third-year PhD candidate in Comparative Literature at the University of Montreal (Canada). Her thesis explores contemporary rape-revenge cinema in the post-MeToo era, with a particular interest to the representation of the female vigilante as a response to rape culture. She holds a Bachelor's and a Master's degree in English Studies from the University of Algiers 2.
Speaker Bio
Ervin Malakaj is associate professor of German studies and head of the Department of Central, Eastern, and Northern European Studies at the University of British Columbia. His work broadly concerns the intersection of queer studies and German media history. Next to a book on queer melodrama, he has co-edited special issues of journals, edited volumes, and has written numerous articles on topics ranging from slapstick, nineteenth century German literature, and critical university studies.