Strange Encounters

by Sara Ahmed

Examining the relationship between strangers, embodiment and community, Strange Encounters challenges the assumptions that the stranger is simply anybody we do not recognize and instead proposes that he or she is socially constructued as somebody we already know. Using feminist and postcolonial theory this book examines the impact of multiculturalism and globalization on embodiment and community whilst considering the ethical and political implication of its critique for post-colonial feminism.

A diverse range of texts are analyzed which produce the figure of 'the stranger', showing that it has alternatively been expelled as the origin of danger - such as in neighbourhood watch, or celebrated as the origin of difference - as in multiculturalism. The author argues that both of these standpoints are problematic as they involve 'stranger fetishism'; they assume that the stranger 'has a life of its own'.

Genres: Nonfiction, Feminism, Theory, Philosophy, Essays, Post Colonial, History

228 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2000

About the author

Sara Ahmed is an independent queer feminist scholar of colour. Her work is concerned with how power is experienced and challenged in everyday life and institutional cultures. Her most recent book is No is Not a Lonely Utterance: The Art and Activism of Complaining which came out with Allen Lane in September 2025, and which is a companion text to The Feminist Killjoy Handbook which was published by Allen Lane in 2023. Previous books include Complaint! (2021), What's The Use? On the Uses of Use (2019), Living a Feminist Life (2017), Willful Subjects (2014), On Being Included: Racism and Diversity in Institutional Life (2012), The Promise of Happiness (2010) and Queer Phenomenology: Orientations Objects, Others all published by Duke University Press. She blogs at feministkilljoys.com and has a newsletter https://feministkilljoys.substack.com/.

Reviews

[Tara Brabazon · Rating 5 out of 5]

A fine book. Ahmed probes the stranger, as configured through skin, through bodies, through research ethics and - powerfully - through theory.

This is a meat and potatoes book. It is filling. It is nutritious and there is a hell of a lot of chewing through the knowledge presented... Published in the year 2000, the gift of this time is that the monograph was published before September 11. Therefore, 'the stranger' could be probed without the undertheorized shadows of terrorism that would emerge the following year.

I also enjoyed - deeply - the intricate weaving that conceptualized multiculturalism. While I am profoundly influenced by Robert Young and Benedict Anderson in my theorizing of race and nation, I found this discussion both provocative and convincing.

A book to chew on. A book to chew with. Strong. Clear. Engaging.

[Alycia · Rating 5 out of 5]

"The stranger is always approaching..."

In encountering others, how do you know the stranger? Ahmed reminds us throughout the book that strangers are not merely those who we do not know, but those who are already recognised as not belonging, as more different than other bodies. Strange Encounters is a fascinating read that delves into how "we" recognise strangers, whether as a figure of danger, an object to fetishise/a commodity (to consume, to refine), or a subject of "celebrated" difference. This book emphasises that the stranger is the thing which makes the body, the neighbourhood, the nation itself. Ahmed also argues that the act of "welcoming," as much as expulsion, also produces the figure of the stranger - but a kind of foreignness that must be translated into terms "we" understand. There is so much more in here, so much about migration (as being felt on the skin), estranged encounters between strangers, and the unassimilable stranger. This was my second read through this book, and I truly feel, in a way, transformed by it.

[Akim Aalou]

Quite a strange encounter indeed: an author whom I familiar with but is embedded in quite a distant discipline, who discusses themes close to my heart and mind from a perspective I can never really take, by drawing from my beloved existential phenomenology to make alien arguments about social activism.

Ahmed discusses political encounters as if they were existential. Suddenly, the sociological seeps into the the encounter in the most unexpected way, imposing collectivities on individual encounters, not as something to adhere by, but to criticize, to rework into collectivities that are yet to come. What I didn't grasp, in fact misunderstood until the last page is that Strange Encounters is a social critique in which the existential encounter of individuals paves the way and then makes way for the social activism of a more inclusive form of identity politics -- which is apparently possible after all.

It was strange to see existential phenomenology used in such a way, but I am glad that I encountered it. Funny enough, I'll probably use this social critique to rethink how we encounter each other and how we could encounter each other differently. Perhaps, I encountered this book in the wrong way, but for now, it was right. I am curious to see if I will be able to encounter it again, in a different way.

[Michelle · Rating 4 out of 5]

Strange Encounters was a difficult read, with layers of insight of how we understand ourselves in context to strangers or the 'other-others'. Using a feminist and post-colonial lens, Ahmed traces how we center ourselves and create a hierarchy of otherness and strangers using different means; some of which are more and less strange and more or less threatening. A fascinating and complex read - meant to be re-examined and re-read many times over.

[Fflur Jones · Rating 4 out of 5]

Really insightful look at the way the 'stranger' as a figure is socially and historically constructed. The idea that the 'stranger' is not the unknown but rather all that we have cast as dangerous about the unknown was thought provoking. Makes you rethink the way we relate to one another daily and the narratives around crime etc.

[Anna Coopey · Rating 3 out of 5]

An interesting one, brought to my attention by Esther Meijer in a coffee shop. I've always heard good things about Sara Ahmed, and this book is certainly a good thing. I won't get too into it, though.
This was particularly useful for concepts of stranger fetishism, knowing the self through the stranger, and consuming the stranger. All of these will be used for my thesis. So, thank you, Sara.

[Melvin]

Read the introduction and the chapters in Part I. I think this book is useful for problematizing the concept of 'strange(r)ness,' particularly with respect to how bodies interact with each other.

[Javier Ponce · Rating 4 out of 5]

A pleasure to read this text, and although it felt short at times, it was easy to follow. Just wasnt too sure about the chapter on multiculturalism.

[Boka]

not an easy read, but often wonderfully insightful

[xenia · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ahmed posits that before either the self or other, there is the encounter.

Both self and other arise in the after image of its initiation.

The self then, can be nothing more than its embodied interactions, and the other, its counter image, its double.

--

Ahmed also looks into the phenomenon of "stranger danger," positing that to recognise a stranger, is to already have captured (a false) Otherness into discourse.

The stranger, rather than being utterly unknown, is in fact, always-already predicated on recognisable attributes (e.g. the gendered and racialised depictions of "terrorists" since the end of the Cold War, into 9/11).

The stranger then, is kept at distance by its very proximity--our ability to discern strangeness.

They are included but utterly alienated.

[Marta · Rating 5 out of 5]

q dedique un capítulo entero a relacionar la ética de la hospitalidad de derrida y levinas y la otredad con el concepto de the stranger pfff te amo sara ahmed

[Ayanna Dozier · Rating 4 out of 5]

In Strange Encounters Sara Ahmed posits a critique against ontology's relationship between subject and other, or in this case the stranger. Ahmed rightfully asserts that some bodies are already inherently marked as "strangers" because of this flawed phenomenon of seeing the "strangeness" in an individual (p. 4) as oppose to seeing individuals as potential "friends" (p. 155). Viewing a stranger or other as a friend is what Ahmed calls an "ethical encounter," a concept that she derives from the work of Levinas and Derrida. For this "ethical encounter" to be effective, Ahmed turns to affect theory in an effort to state that if we can feel each other's pain and feel, or empathize, with each others desires we may be able to face each other in a manner that allows room for differences to flourish and not diminish in an effort to assimilate the "other."

In addition, Ahmed is careful to acknowledge that space and or spatio-temporal environments affect one's subject positionality in the world. This, for me, is a crucial concept to understand when dealing with any literature on subject-formation. Race, gender, class, and sexuality all play a role in forming identity, addressing the space in which an individual exists in is just as important. I would argue this is particularly true amongst minoritarian subjects who navigate whose identity is affected by their environment. This is to state that an individual may have one identity amongst similar identity-affirming friends (be that race, gender, etc. constructed) and may have a different identity or outlook of their identity in a non identity-affirming environment. This phenomenon is what Harvey Young states as "habitus." Ahmed's book, in this case, works in a nice dialogue with other critical race theory texts to expand upon this issue. While there is much that I agree with in Ahmed's argument, her book would have benefitted greatly from a more in depth critique of ontology and or a deeper use of scholars who have critiqued ontology, but I suppose that is what her book Queer Phenomenology is for though.

[Frank Cernik · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is the first of four books in what Ahmed refers to as her “Affect Decade.” Strange Encounters deals primarily with, as the title implies, encounters between strangers and ‘strange others,’ and its motivating inquiry is an attempt to understand the relationship between identity and strangerness in life without assuming that the stranger has a specific ontology. Her central premise in this inquiry is that encounters are ontologically prior to ontology, and that aspects of being thus do not emerge until entities come together with other entities. Identity, then, has a fundamental ‘more-than-one-ness’ to it. She also treats the encounter as a kind of text, which allows her to focus on it as a site where certain meanings are produced. The encounter is a socially mediated site: the because of the contingent nature of each encounter (and of the reading of each encounter, which is itself an encounter between reader and text), certain kinds of meaning are generated and others foreclosed.
Her concern with this argument is a thoroughly political one, and her arguments surround such things as globalisation, multiculturalism, and migration. As modes of proximity, the discourses surrounding these phenomena re-produce the figure of the stranger and the enforcement of boundaries. These discourses also put to work and make to work the figures of the stranger and border, while simultaneously hiding how the stranger and the border are each created. Also hidden is that the very creation of differentiated spaces (e.g. drawing the border) constitutes and maintains the permeability of those spaces: one can’t have a border without imagining someone getting across.

[Britt · Rating 4 out of 5]

On point.