Sara Ahmed Quotes on Knowledge
Sara Ahmed’s The Cultural Politics of Emotion (2004), Queer Phenomenology (2006), and Living a Feminist Life (2017) give contemporary feminist phenomenology one of its most influential extensions to the philosophical analysis of how knowledge is produced and contested across racialized, gendered, and sexual lines. The central project develops a phenomenology of orientation through which the differential availability of philosophical and institutional spaces to differently embodied subjects is rendered the proper object of philosophical analysis — with the corresponding diagnosis of the institutional mechanisms (complaints, diversity work, the willful subject) through which feminist and antiracist knowledge is alternately heard and silenced framing the practical-political work the framework supports. The framework, drawing on Husserl, Merleau-Ponty, and the broader feminist phenomenological tradition through Iris Marion Young, shaped contemporary feminist analytic-continental crossover scholarship and the broader engagement with the institutional politics of knowledge.
Quotes
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Attributed to Sara Ahmed:
“Citation is a feminist memory.”
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“We learn about worlds when they do not accommodate us. Not being accommodated can be pedagogy. We generate ideas through the struggles we have to be in the world; we come to question worlds when we are in question. When a question becomes a place you reside in, everything can be thrown into question: explanations you might have handy that allow you to make sense or navigate your way through unfamiliar as well as familiar landscapes no longer work.”
p. 22 -
“The exposure of violence is perceived by the privileged as the origin of violence.”
p. 28 -
“To point out harassment is to be viewed as the harasser; to point out oppression is to be viewed as oppressive.”
p. 28 -
“Jokiness allows a constant trivializing: as if by joking someone is suspending judgment on what is being said. She didn’t mean anything by it; lighten up. A killjoy knows from experience: when people keep making light of something, something heavy is going on”
p. 29