Social Theory: Sara Ahmed

6th Dec 2022 by Simon Mabon

By Konstantin Rintelmann

In 2009, Margrit Shildrick panegyrically wrote: “Few academic writers working in the UK context today can match Sara Ahmed in her prolific output, and fewer still can maintain the consistently high level of her theoretical explorations” (Shildrick, 2009). Yet, in mid-2016, after twenty years in academia and more than a hundred publications—of which ten are single-authored books—Sara Ahmed resigned from all of her academic posts when various students at Goldsmiths reported incidents of sexual harassment: “Resigning was speaking out. It was saying: this is serious enough that I have had enough. Resigning was also a feminist hearing. […] A feminist ear can be how you hear what is not being heard” (Ahmed, 2022).

Intellectual Context

“We need to recognize sexual harassment as an institutional problem as well as a means through which the academy itself becomes available only to some. Sexual harassment is an access issue; it is a social justice issue”(Feministkilljoys, 2022). While one cannot do justice to Ahmed’s rich and incredibly diverse work by attempting to distill it into a single essence, the last sentence might be exemplary: Intersectionality is pivotal to the self-professed ‘feminist killjoy’, who often blurs the line between scholarship and activism (Ibid). “I am not a lesbian one moment and a person of color the next and a feminist at another. I am all of these at every moment. And lesbian feminism of color brings this all into existence, with insistence, with persistence” (Ahmed, 2017: 230). Born in Salford, England, to a Pakistani father and an English mother, young Ahmed relocated with her parents to Adelaide, Australia, in the early 1970s. Central themes in her work—such as migration, (dis)orientation, otherness, and hybrid identities—echo her experiences of being framed as ‘strange’ or ‘different’ growing up as a biracial woman in the West (Radics, 2016). 

Autobiographic anecdotes featured prominently in her first book entitled “Differences that Matter: Feminist Theory and Postmodernism”, which was published after she completed her doctoral research at the Centre for Critical and Cultural Theory at Cardiff University. Delving into the works of Derrida, Deleuze, Foucault, Lacan, and Lyotard and reviewing disciplines such as film theory, semiotics, ethics, legal discourses, and body rights, Ahmed expounds that postmodern and feminist theory must be approached as doing something rather than merely being something (Ahmed, 1998). In “Strange Encounters: Embodied Others in Post-Coloniality”, Ahmed bares the roots of globalization and mobility as new formative constituents of subjectivity and communality, identifying materiality, discursive histories, and power relations as enablers and preventers for global encounters (2000a). Drawing on Marx’s commodity fetishism, she introduces the concept of stranger fetishism—the subtle modes through which various forms of racialization and othering socially construct strangers: “The stranger here is not somebody we do not recognize, but somebody that we recognize as a stranger, somebody we know as not knowing, rather than somebody we simply do not know. The stranger is produced as an object of knowledge, rather than coming into being in an absence of knowledge” (Ahmed, 2000b).

Theoretical Contributions

Ahmed’s magnum opus, “The Cultural Politics of Emotion”, explores the social realm and circulation of emotions and is recognized as a landmark text in the field of affect theory—a discipline that attempts to ontologize affects; that is, to bring outward expressions of feelings, emotions and other nonlinguistic forces into categories to typify their socio-biological function. Created by psychologist Silvan Tomkins, the concept of affectivity initially denoted the “biological portion of emotion”, defined as the “hard-wired, preprogrammed, genetically transmitted mechanisms that exist in each of us”which, when stimulated, actuate a “known pattern of biological events” (Nathanson, 1992). Ahmed, like other critical theorists, contends that affects and emotions are internalized cultural practices rather than universal categories of primordial bio-psychological states (Riedner, 2014). As practices, emotions are material rhetoric; they hold agentic power, command modes of living, and act as gateways into the socio-material world. Drawing on Marxist theory, critical affect theory thus holds that emotions are embedded in a more extensive and emissive material and discursive substrate of disciplinary structures that reflect the hegemonic imprints of modernity, coloniality, the nation-state, and capitalist modes of production (Quintana, 2022; Da Costa, 2016; Berlant, 2011).

Naturally, this hegemony operates within a spatial environment whereby “the strangers come to be seen as figures (with linguistic and bodily integrity) when they have entered the spaces we call home” (Ahmed, 2000b). Here, ‘our homes’ can take the shape of various forms and levels of spatiality in which social relations unfold, such as a neighborhood (as we will see later), a sports club, or a state. It is against the backdrop of these ‘disciplinary homes’ that Ahmed’s attention to the intersection of feminist, queer, race, and postcolonial studies finds traction. Drawing on these disciplines, as well as Marxist cultural studies and poststructuralist theories of language, Ahmed's inquiry traces how emotions bestow bodies with value and ideologies. The cultural politics of emotion operate on the surfaces of bodies and fashion social relationships that designate the rhetorical terrain and their “boundaries that are lived as worlds” (Ahmed, 2000a). In other words, affects act as sorting procedures that either align bodies with communities or exile them—a process that negatively affects minoritized groups disproportionally. In short, Ahmed focuses her inquiry on the questions of what it means to be a body in society, how different bodies are interpreted, and how bodily traits are used to structure society. 

In Practice

As insinuated at the outset, there is no way to do justice to the cornucopia of stimulating and seminal contributions Sara Ahmed has contributed. As such, this concluding part focuses on key areas of SEPAD’s scholarly inquiry.

To begin with, affect theory can help us to push back against primordialist readings of confessional identities. For example, in popular discourse—if not anti-Muslim speech and Islamist auto-Orientalizing agendas—certain notions still equate ‘Islam’ with an agentic institution, a computer program executed by the digital code of the Qurʾān at which end we find ‘homo islamicus’ (Tibi, 1984). Needless to say, these myopic ‘analyses’ blatantly overlook the multiplicity of modes through which living bodies extrapolate meaning from sacred scriptures; that is, in conversation with other traditions, other histories, other localities, and simply other priorities and emotions—a rather obvious reality that is summarized by Andrew Rippin, who described tafsīr—that is Qurʾānic hermeneutics—as “the humanization of the divine word and the divinization of the human spirit” (1998: 177). To some extent, these misperceptions might be rooted in western Protestant traditions of sola scriptura, the notion of the primacy of text, and that scripture charters institutions and legislates bodies. As Donovan Schaefer aptly condenses it: “Bodies do things with texts; texts do not dictate to bodies” (2013). Nevertheless, ill-informed analyses continue to plague scholarship on sectarian relations in more subtle ways, often when they take ‘sect’ as a fait accompli unit of analysis (Majed, 2020).

There are certainly more critical approaches to mark out where Ahmed’s deliberations offer food for thought: Adumbrating the silhouettes of Heideggerian phenomenology, Ahmed reasons that emotions are relational; we do not have emotions, but emotions are formed through contact with the outside world, other beings, and things such as images and representations, their past histories, and their future directionality (Horrigan-Kelly, Millar and Dowling, 2016). It is the contingency of interaction and the interplay of sociality, spatiality, and temporality that allows affect to become an object and, in turn, to produce meaning. These realms have to be taken into the equation of sectarian relations, too. For example, Fanar Haddad pointed out how sectarian competition cannot properly be understood without the advent of the nation-state, as this new political framework raised political, social, and economic questions of ownership, entitlement, and belonging—issues that synergized with preexisting sectarian identities that previously were confined to community-centric religious praxis or neighborhood rivalries (2019). These questions of ‘national truths’, as Haddad termed it, played a vital role in the sectarianization process of Iraq, as Shīʿa-centric state building disenfranchised large segments of the Sunni population, setting in motion a downward spiral of contestation (2018). Here, the state became the ‘home’ for some that claimed to own exclusive ownership rights, enforcing homogenizing disciplining measures. 

But how can we turn the study of sectarian relations to one of Ahmed's main objects of interest, that is, bodies? Drawing on my own fieldwork, an activist from Baghdad made these comments regarding the demographic changes occurring in his neighborhood al-Shaʿab following the 2003 invasion: 

“I could feel the demographic change in my neighborhood; it was like a day-and-night difference. I could see that people were forced to migrate, and it was obvious that the new arrivals were all Shī’a. Not only because of how they dressed or spoke but also because of the flags and portraits of Imams that suddenly appeared everywhere.”

When I inquired about his first remark, he elaborated further: 

“You could tell that most arrivals came from the Marshlands. When you hear them talk, you wonder: ‘Is this even Arabic or what?’ [laughs] These people have stayed in the same place for thousands of years; they have never migrated to other cities within Iraq, so you can quickly spot them in Baghdad; their accent, their clothes, their hair, their skin, and the food they eat—this is all very distinct.” 

When I asked him about his sectarian affiliation, he responded: 

“You hear the name of our tribe and think we are Shīʿa from the south, but we are mainly Sunnis with a Baghdadi lifestyle—because of my grandfather, who converted to Sunnism when he moved to Baghdad sometime during the 1930s or 40s. Naturally, people feel confused about our family, but so was I. There are pictures of my mom and aunts wearing short skirts above the knees, but in the same photos is my grandmother wearing a traditional southern outfit, a Chādor—which is so weird, like: ‘Okay guys, what are we? Are we progressive? Are we conservative? Are we Sunnah? Are we Shī’a?’ But if you are still in a position where you are confused about your own family, you confuse everyone else—and that means that people will avoid you because they can’t read you. They need to know if you are Arab or Kurdish, Sunni or Shī’a and which tribe you are from. So, when you are confusing everybody, you are not secure—because people around you feel not secure. It is a bizarre and uncomfortable feeling; you don’t feel safe.”

Regarding the study of sectarian relations, ample attention has been given to semiotics, institutions, conflicting rituality, eschatologies, symbolisms, and mythologies. However, experiences like the one above demonstrate that sectarian relations, at least at the micro-level, are often negotiated and regulated through interactions of nonverbal, cognitive assessments of bodies. It is the importance of the immediacy and intimacy of these encounters Sara Ahmed sensitizes us for: “The ‘moment of contact’ is shaped by past histories of contact, which allows the proximity of a racial other to be perceived as threatening, at the same time as it re-shapes the bodies in the contact zone of the encounter” (2004: 25). Although sectarian affiliation does not strictly entail phenotypic features, the ‘reading of the other’ without asking direct questions was a common practice lamented by many interviewees. In fact, many stressed how asking about someone's confessional identity or even talking about ‘sectarianism’ has been a strict societal taboo in Iraq for years. Besides well-reported incidents such as the growing or shaving beards, changing names, or being sanctioned for expressing emotions on sect-specific holidays, one can only speculate about the reshaping of bodies in these ‘sectarian encounters’—leaving room for much-needed research (Tawji, 2022; Bassem, 2022; Shafaqna,2019).

The interviewee's experience hints at ontological insecurity. Popularized by sociologist Anthony Giddens, the term refers to a sense of order and continuity in regard to an individual's experiences; it is sustained by crafting narratives that ground a sense of identity and impart a sense of temporal continuity and internal unity. Meaning is thus found in experiencing positive and stable emotions while avoiding disorder and anxiety (Giddens, 1991). A substantial amount of scholarship that deals with ontological security, or rather insecurity, involves homelessness (Rosenberg, et al, 2021; Stonehouse, Threlkeld and Theobald, 2021; Padgett, 2007). In a fascinating terminological overlap with Ahmed’s conceptualization of ‘home’, one of the most haunting slogans of the Iraqi Tishrīn movement has been ‘nurīd waṭan!’—‘we want a homeland!’ (Ali, 2019). One could thus hypothesize that the inner tensions that accrue from a sect-centric environment that systematically exposes bodies to ‘disciplining insecurity’—not only ontologically but also quite physically (Nadeem, 2022)—is the driving force behind a bottom-up form of de-sectarianization: Iraqis feel estranged from their own home but are therefore now more determined than ever to reclaim ownership—to find shelter, that is, security. Cynically, however, as sectarian rhetoric has lost its mobilization potential in Iraq, the bodies of other minoritized groups appear to have become targeted: What should be read as a publicity stunt to stimulate and monopolize trans-sectarian mobilization from across the conservative Islamist spectrum, Muqtadā al-Ṣadr recently announced to “combat the LGBTQ community” (Sewell and Khalil, 2022). The self-proclaimed ‘house owner’ intends to harmonize and homogenize the ‘occupants’ by disciplining, silencing, or expelling ‘the stranger’. As a queer university student from Najaf told the Independent: Despite not being openly LGBTQ, they have been frequently harassed in the street for wearing clothes in colors and styles that do not fit local conservative norms (Ibid).

Concluding Remarks

Our bodies are the closest and most intimate substrate for our emotions and identities. Through Sara Ahmed’s work, we ought to ask ourselves: What are emotions and identities worth—or are they even ‘real’—if we cannot express and parade them through our bodies? Our focus should then be on who or what regulates, suppresses, or negates bodies and why—whether these are disciplinary regimes or mainstream societies. Since we are all part of the latter in one form or another, we should, therefore, critically reflect on our own positionality—continuously. We owe it to the people around us who, for too long, have been either silenced or rendered invisible. 

Sources

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———. Strange Encounters: Embodied Others in Post-Coloniality. London: Routledge, 2000 (A).

———. "Who Knows? Knowing Strangers and Strangerness." Australian Feminist Studies 15, no. 31 (2000): 49-68. (B)

———. "On Collective Feelings, or the Impressions Left by Others." Theory, Culture and Society 21, no. 2 (2004): 25-42.

———. "Sexual Harassment". Feministkilljoys, https://feministkilljoys.com/2015/12/03/sexual-harassment/.

———. "About". Feministkilljoys, https://feministkilljoys.com/about/.

———. "Resignation is a Feminist Issue". Feministkilljoys, https://feministkilljoys.com/2016/08/27/resignation-is-a-feminist-issue/.

———. Living a Feminist Life. Durham: Duke University Press, 2017.

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 Interview with one of the founding members of the Baghdad-based group ‘Workers against Sectarianism’, 2022.