Living a Feminist Life

Sara Ahmed is a critical theorist and feminist scholar who has written many books of critical theory and feminist theory, including Strange Encounters: Embodied Others in Post-Coloniality; Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others; The Promise of Happiness; and Willful Subjects. Her work focuses on intersectionality and makes use of critical theory, queer theory, feminist theory, affect theory, critical race theory, and postcolonialism.

She was born in England to a white English mother and a Pakistani father. She emigrated with her family to Australia in the 1970s, where she attended college at Adelaide University, before returning to England for her doctorate at Cardiff University. She held several teaching positions and was the director for the Centre for Feminist Research at Goldsmiths College at University of London. She resigned from that post in 2016 in protest over several allegations of sexual harassment of students by the staff, and the college’s lack of response (Ahmed, Sara. “Bio.” Sara Ahmed).

She now resides in Cambridge with her partner, Sarah Franklin, an American anthropologist and scholar at Cambridge. Her background as a queer woman of color influences her writing, theory, and activism. This is especially true in Living a Feminist Life, which combines the genres of feminist theory and scholarly work, with the more personal details of