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25OrientationsMultitudes 82 (1): 197-203. 2021.Quel est l’étrange point commun qui réunit l’orientation spatiale, l’orientation sexuelle et l’orientalisme? Comment notre expérience intime de l’espace comme orienté et nos peurs de désorientation jouent-ils sur nos manières d’appréhender les dissidences de genre et de sexualité? Autant de questions que la phénoménologie de Sara Ahmed explore dans ce texte en s’interrogeant sur la manière dont les espaces que nous habitons redressent nos comportements et comment celleux qui désobéissent à cette…Read more
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Institutional HabitsIn Emmanuel Alloa, Rajiv Kaushik & Frank Chouraqui (eds.), Merleau-Ponty and Contemporary Philosophy, Suny Press. pp. 197-217. 2019.
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37Erratum to “Creating a rehabilitation living lab to optimize participation and inclusion for persons with physical disabilities” [Alter 8 (2014) 151–157] (review)Alter - European Journal of Disability Research / Revue Européenne de Recherche Sur le Handicap 8 (4): 303. 2014.
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14Erratum to “Creating a rehabilitation living lab to optimize participation and inclusion for persons with physical disabilities” [Alter 8 (2014) 151–157] (review)Alter - European Journal of Disability Research / Revue Européenne de Recherche Sur le Handicap 8 (4): 303. 2014.
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97Beyond Humanism and Postmodernism: Theorizing a Feminist PracticeHypatia 11 (2). 1996.The model of feminism as humanist in practice and postmodern in theory is inadequate. Feminist practice and theory directly inform each other to displace both humanist and postmodern conceptions of the subject. An examination of feminism's use of rights discourse suggests that feminist practice questions the humanist conception of the subject as a self-identity. Likewise, feminist theory undermines the postmodern emphasis on the constitutive instability and indeterminacy of the subject
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108Whiteness and the General Will: Diversity Work as Willful WorkphiloSOPHIA: A Journal of Continental Feminism 2 (1): 1-20. 2012.In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Whiteness and the General WillDiversity Work as Willful WorkSara AhmedIn this essay I explore whiteness in relation to the general will. My starting point is that the idea of “the general will” offers us a vocabulary for thinking through the materiality of race. In his keynote address to the 40th Annual Philosophy Symposium in 2010, Charles Mills argues that race is material: it becomes part of the living human body. Mills draws on r…Read more
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189Queer phenomenology: orientations, objects, othersDuke University Press. 2006.Introduction: find your way -- Orientations toward objects -- Sexual orientation -- The orient and other others -- Conclusion: disorientation and queer objects.
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266A phenomenology of whitenessFeminist Theory 8 (2): 149-168. 2007.The paper suggests that we can usefully approach whiteness through the lens of phenomenology. Whiteness could be described as an ongoing and unfinished history, which orientates bodies in specific directions, affecting how they `take up' space, and what they `can do'. The paper considers how whiteness functions as a habit, even a bad habit, which becomes a background to social action. The paper draws on experiences of inhabiting a white world as a non-white body, and explores how whiteness becom…Read more
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1Transformations: Thinking Through FeminismPsychology Press. 2000.This text is a thorough reassessment of feminism's place in contemporary life. The book traces both the shifts that have allowed feminism to arrive at its present point, and the way that feminist agendas have progressed.
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153Differences that matter: feminist theory and postmodernismCambridge University Press. 1998.Differences That Matter challenges existing ways of theorising the relationship between feminism and postmodernism which ask 'is or should feminism be modern or postmodern?' Sara Ahmed suggests that postmodernism has been allowed to dictate feminist debates and calls instead for feminist theorists to speak (back) to postmodernism, rather than simply speak on (their relationship to) it. Such a 'speaking back' involves a refusal to position postmodernism as a generalisable condition of the world a…Read more
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46The Organisation of HateLaw and Critique 12 (3): 345-365. 2001.In this paper, it is argued that we need to understand the role of ‘hate’ in the organisation of bodies and spaces before we ask the question of the limits of ‘hate crime’ as a legal category. Rather than assuming hate is a psychological disposition - that it comes from within a psyche and then moves out to others - the paper suggests that hate works to align individual and collective bodies through the very intensity of its attachments. Such alignments are unstable precisely given the fact that…Read more
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23Living a feminist lifeDuke University Press. 2017.Feminism is sensational -- On being directed -- Willfulness and feminist subjectivity -- Trying to transform -- Being in question -- Brick walls -- Fragile connections -- Feminist snap -- Lesbian feminism -- Conclusion 1: A killjoy survival kit -- Conclusion 2: A killjoy manifesto.
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18Willful SubjectsDuke University Press. 2014.In _Willful Subjects_ Sara Ahmed explores willfulness as a charge often made by some against others. One history of will is a history of attempts to eliminate willfulness from the will. Delving into philosophical and literary texts, Ahmed examines the relation between will and willfulness, ill will and good will, and the particular will and general will. Her reflections shed light on how will is embedded in a political and cultural landscape, how it is embodied, and how will and willfulness are …Read more
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3The Skin of the Community: Affect and Boundary FormationIn Tina Chanter & Ewa PŁonowska Ziarek (eds.), Revolt, Affect, Collectivity: The Unstable Boundaries of Kristeva’s Polis, Suny Press. pp. 95-111. 2012.
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132Problematic Proximities: Or Why Critiques of Gay Imperialism Matter (review)Feminist Legal Studies 19 (2): 119-132. 2011.This article examines the issues of censorship, language and racism through a critical reflection on Peter Tatchell’s response to the critique of gay imperialism offered by Jin Haritaworn, Tamsila Tauqir and Esra Erdem. In ‘Academics smear Peter Tatchell’, we are invited to find evidence of ‘Islamophobia, racism or support for imperialist wars’ in the writings that can be downloaded from Tatchell’s website. The article shows how islamophobia and racism operate in Tatchell’s writings not necessar…Read more
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68Doing Diversity Work in Higher Education in AustraliaEducational Philosophy and Theory 38 (6): 745-768. 2006.This paper explores how diversity is used as a key term to describe the social and educational mission of universities in Australia. The paper suggests that we need to explore what diversity ‘does’ in specific contexts. Drawing on interviews with diversity and equal opportunities practitioners, the paper suggests that ‘diversity’ is used in the face of what has been called ‘equity fatigue’. Diversity is associated with what is new, and allows practitioners to align themselves and their units wit…Read more
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13What's the use?: on the uses of useDuke University Press. 2019.In What's the Use? Sara Ahmed continues the work she began in The Promise of Happiness and Willful Subjects by taking up a single word--in this case, use--and following it around. She shows how use became associated with life and strength in nineteenth century biological and social thought and considers how utilitarianism offered a set of educational techniques for shaping individuals by directing them toward useful ends. Ahmed also explores how spaces become restricted to some uses and users wi…Read more
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78''`She 'll Wake Up One of These Days and Find She's Turned into a Nigger': Passing through HybridityTheory, Culture and Society 16 (2): 87-106. 1999.In this article, I examine racial narratives of passing and their relationship to discourses of hybridity. Rather than defining passing as inherently transgressive, or as one side of identity politics or the other, I suggest that passing must be understood in relationship to forms of social antagonism. I ask the following questions: how are differences that threaten the system recuperated? How do ambiguous or hybrid bodies get read in a way which further supports the enunciative power of those w…Read more
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119Open Forum Imaginary Prohibitions: Some Preliminary Remarks on the Founding Gestures of the `New Materialism'European Journal of Women's Studies 15 (1): 23-39. 2008.We have no interest whatever in minimizing the continuing history of racist, sexist, homophobic, or otherwise abusive biologisms, or the urgency of their exposure, that has made the gravamen of so many contemporary projects of critique. At the same time, we fear — with installation of an automatic antibiologism as the unshifting tenet of `theory' — the loss of conceptual access to an entire thought-realm. I was left wondering what danger had been averted by the exclusion of biology. What does th…Read more
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24Creating a rehabilitation living lab to optimize participation and inclusion for persons with physical disabilitiesAlter - European Journal of Disability Research / Revue Européenne de Recherche Sur le Handicap 8 (3): 151-157. 2014.
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177The Promise of HappinessDuke University Press. 2010._The Promise of Happiness_ is a provocative cultural critique of the imperative to be happy. It asks what follows when we make our desires and even our own happiness conditional on the happiness of others: “I just want you to be happy”; “I’m happy if you’re happy.” Combining philosophy and feminist cultural studies, Sara Ahmed reveals the affective and moral work performed by the “happiness duty,” the expectation that we will be made happy by taking part in that which is deemed good, and that by…Read more