Voice Post: Sara Ahmed of Feminist Killjoys

In the 1970s, the activist collective Radicalesbians began their manifesto “The Woman-Identified Woman” with this striking line: “A lesbian is the rage of all women condensed to the point of explosion.”

Throw in Third-World feminism and intersectionality, and you get Sara Ahmed.

The Pakistani-by-way-of-England professor runs a blog titled Feminist Killjoys, where she posts her musings and ruminations on “killing joy” as a subversive queer feminist of color. When she’s not posting excerpts from her upcoming book or transcripts of various lectures, she explores concepts like safe spaces, diversity and self-care in dense thickets of text that will leave readers begging for a machete.

The idiosyncrasies in Ahmed’s writing style make her unmistakable, from one post to the next. I’ll be taking a closer look at two in particular: Feminist Aunties, where she lays out the origin story of her family’s feminist kinship, and White Men, which breaks down the institutionalized power structure of whiteness and maleness, and encourages self-identification and the undoing of internalized misogyny. I will highlight qualities of Ahmed’s voice that contribute to her message and the embodiment of the so-called feminist killjoy she hopes to project.

The first element of Ahmed’s style that readers can pick up on— even through a cursory glance— is the shape and arrangement of her paragraphs. She breaks up longer paragraphs (ones filled with academic references and the occasional anecdote) with short interjections, either one-liners or single words. In “Feminist Aunties,” she makes heavy use of the word “snap,” throwing in phrases like “Snap, snap: the end of the line,” and “Snap, snap: begin again.” Here, snap is not only an allusion to the defiant “snappy” women she praises in the article, but is also a brusque wake-up call to the reader, signaling that he or she should have been paying attention. Similarly, she intersperses single words like “blink,” “point,” and “flinch” between paragraphs in the post “White Men,” as a sort of Greek chorus of men reacting with aversion to the radical claims Ahmed makes. “White men” is an institution? Blink. Philosophy needs feminist help? Flinch. The short, clipped nature of these textual interruptions only add to Ahmed’s profile as an unapologetic feminist killjoy.

Ahmed’s text is often colored with metaphor. In “Feminist Aunties,” she juggles two separate conceits that tie in directly with feminist scholarship. She entertains the idea of semantics, of how identification with pronouns and linguistic empowerment help sow the seeds of feminism within her kin group. She asks the reader, “When did feminism become a word that spoke not just to you, but spoke you, spoke of your existence, spoke you into existence?” Her own story is as follows: “To make an impression I had to dislodge that ‘he.’ To become ‘she’ is to become part of a feminist movement.” Her own inspiration was her aunt, who “was a poet, too. Her words were sharp like weapons.” Secondly, she weaves in body-related metaphors, perhaps to create a physical parallel against the abstract power of words. Her empowered upbringing helped her to realize that “patriarchal reasoning goes all the way down; to the letter; to the bone” (with a bonus near-rhyme) when she made “visits to Pakistan that open up new worlds, new tastes, and sounds and sensations on the skin.” She also includes skin color and race in her corporeal conceit: “Color wasn’t just something added, like a tan adorning a white skin, as it redirected my attention to the skin, to how the surfaces of bodies as well as objects are shaped by histories of contact.” These two strings of metaphors within “Feminist Aunties” further her multi-pronged feminist approach, dealing with the politics of abstract language as well as the lived bodily experience of women and women of color.

There is a hint of the body that carries over into “White Men,” in Ahmed’s mixed use of personification and synecdoche. She characterizes things as feminist: she writes, “I much prefer to curl my hands into feminist fists,” “we need more feminist explosions,” “feminist fingers: pointed” and “We can rebuild our houses with feminist tools,” in an apparent nod to Audre Lorde. Her emotive language here comes off as militant, feeding back into the “feminist killjoy” message. Through this mixed device, Ahmed extends feminism to the inanimate realm, and conveys her belief that even the most mundane acts can be politicized— forming a fist, pointing fingers, building a house, although figurative. Besides synecdoche, she also uses metonymy for figurative effect. In “Feminist Aunties,” she zooms out to the global perspective, writing, “It might be assumed that feminism travels from the West to East. It might be assumed that feminism is what the West gives to the East.” Examining her own family structure, she comments, “My sister talks of her daughter as having Ahmed genes, and I know exactly what she means; she means she is another point on a line of snappy women.” The metonymy in Ahmed’s work gives her feminist scholarship a broader network implying family, country, humanity even.

A final tool Ahmed uses is a shift in cadence, flow and syntax that may be a result of her being a non-native English speaker. Here, she starts off sentences with single words, followed by a colon, and finally a descriptive phrase. Some examples from “White Men” include “Laughter: peals of it,” Patriarchy: it’s quite a system,” “Whiteness too: it works,” and “Error: to err is to stray. It is not to go the right way.” Ahmed’s curious syntax is an effective attention-grabber and makes for apt headlines and much-needed mid-paragraph breaks for the reader.

As an academic, Sara Ahmed must make a significant stylistic leap from her usual writing habits to readily reach an audience on her blogging platform. Certain elements of her scholarship show through, but not before they’re peppered with bits of her literary arsenal, making for engaging and polemical reads.