Sara Ahmed : The Feminist Killjoy Handbook

That long awaited day has finally come: We're welcoming to Edinburgh the feminist giant, Queer icon, academic, campaigner and author Sara Ahmed!

'Not only a dazzling analysis of the workings of sexism, but a balm for the soul. [The Feminist Killjoy Handbook] will teach you how to survive and how to transform the world' - Hannah Dawson

We have to keep saying it because they keep doing it.

Do colleagues roll their eyes in a meeting when you use words like sexism or racism? Do you refuse to laugh at jokes that aren't funny? Have you been called divisive for pointing out a division? Then you are a feminist killjoy, and this handbook is for you.

The term killjoy has been used to dismiss feminism by claiming that it causes misery. But by naming ourselves feminist killjoys, we recover a feminist history, turning it into a source of strength as well as an inspiration.

Drawing on her own stories and those of others, especially Black and brown feminists and queer thinkers, Sara Ahmed combines depth of thought with honesty and intimacy. The Feminist Killjoy Handbook unpicks the lies our culture tells us and provides a form of solidarity and companionship that can be returned to over a lifetime.

*Please note masks are required at all indoor events run by Lighthouse.

Our chair: Dr Katucha Bento is a Lecturer in Race and Decolonial Studies, Co-Director of Race.ED Network at the University of Edinburgh, and the co-founder of the Free Afro-Brazilian University (UNAFRO). Her main inspirations are in quilombo and samba communities’ epistemologies and praxis, reaching out to Black feminists and Queer subversive language to promote ethics of caring and power to the people. She understands decoloniality within and beyond the anti-colonial, as a daring tool to imagine fugitive-liberation-futures disrupting binaries grounded in coloniality. Guide-mother/auntie of Chizara, Jaxon and Chibueze.