Affective Economies

by Sara Ahmed

Unknown Binding

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

[learnedHamster]

“I am interested in the way emotions involve subjects and objects, but without residing positively within them. Indeed, emotions may only seem like a form of residence as an effect of a certain history, a history that may operate by concealing its own traces.(…)
“This difficulty is what makes emotions such as hate work the way that they do; it is not the impossibility of hate as such, but the mode of its operation, whereby it surfaces in the world made up of other bodies. In other words, it is the failure of emotions to be located in a body, object, or figures that allows emotions to (re)produce or generate the effects that they do.”