In my forthcoming The Feminist Killjoy Handbook, I suggest that the feminist killjoy is a queer figure with a queer history. When you reclaim the term feminist killjoy you end up in conversation with other people who, like you, find a potential or promise in that term, how its negativity can be redirected. In this lecture, I explore the queerness of the project of killing joy as a project of redirecting negativity. I develop some of my arguments about "the unhappy queer" from The Promise of Happiness (2010) as well as "queer use" from What’s the Use? On the Uses of Use (2019). By giving the feminist killjoy a queer history, I also explain how and why killing joy is a world making project. 

Sara Ahmed is an independent feminist scholar. Her work is concerned with how power is experienced and challenged in everyday life and institutional cultures. She has recently completed The Feminist Killjoy Handbook, her first trade publication, and is currently writing a follow up text, The Complainer's Handbook. She has begun a new research project on common sense. Her 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), Queer Phenomenology: Objects, Orientations, Others (2006), The Cultural Politics of Emotion (2014, 2004), Strange Encounters: Embodied Others in Post-Coloniality (2000) and Differences that Matter: Feminist Theory and Postmodernism (1998). 
Instagram: @saranoahmed | Twitter: @SaraNAhmed 

After Dr. Ahmed's lecture, she will join in conversation with Zahra Noorbakhsh, the San Francisco Bay Area comedian, writer, actor and co-host of the #GoodMuslimBadMuslim podcast. Instagram: @zahracomedy

This program is part of the Queer Conversations on Culture and the Arts series (a partnership between CCA and the Queer Cultural Center of San Francisco).