“Disrupting Can Be a Form of Joy”: A Correspondence with Sara Ahmed

As a child, I was a troublemaker—or at least, that’s what everyone seemed to decide. Language teachers would flinch at the sudden, sharp questions I tossed into the middle of class, questions that landed like pebbles in a pond, rippling in ways they hadn’t expected. I can almost hear my mother, muttering in the quiet corners of our home: “I wish she were… more ordinary.” And in the heart of my family, my neighborhood, my school, I was always too much—too loud, too curious, too uncontainable. I carried that excess like a secret burden, a reminder that the world preferred you polished down, muted, civilized. Then, one day, I came across Sara Ahmed’s idea of the “feminist killjoy,” and something shifted.

Ahmed has never been the kind of academic who peers down from above, ready to correct or straighten me out. Her voice feels like a companion, a guide for my instincts, a subtle, steady source of courage. In those moments when I begin to doubt myself, when I try to trim the sharp edges of who I am, her voice appears in my mind, gentle but firm: “Stop. Don’t dumb yourself down.”

When I learned she was coming to Istanbul, I allowed myself a quiet hope, a trust in the strange intimacy of a long-growing, one-sided friendship. I reached out, asking if I could write to her. And so began our correspondence: I typing from my little apartment, she writing between flights and trains, sometimes apologizing for hasty responses. Yet every sentence carried care, weight, thought—an attentiveness that belied the rush of her travels.

This piece reads less like an interview and more like a trail of thought. Ahmed’s replies arrive sometimes brisk, sometimes measured with polite distance—perhaps she found some of my questions too formulaic—but always with sincerity. It is for those whose voices are too loud, who refuse to trim themselves down, who seek to turn solitude into a shared story, who recognize joy amid frowns and raised voices… for the killjoys.

One of the most Googled questions about feminism is: “Why is feminism so misunderstood?” Perhaps that’s the place to begin: why is feminism still so widely misread? What started as a search for justice, a demand for equality, is accused in turn of misandry, overreaction, personal grievance dressed as ideology—or, in the present moment, of simply being unnecessary.

Any project which is about challenging conventions about to live – changing what it means to be a family, for instance, or what it is to life a good life – is going to be contested. Misinformation about feminism often has a purpose – to try and dissuade us from becoming feminists! The feminist killjoy is herself a kind of misinformation: she begins as a stereotype of feminists – that to be a feminist is just to be miserable or to deprive yourselves of what should or would make us happy. Sometimes the best way of responding to misinformation is with a yes: well, if that is what you think feminism is, that’s why we need feminism.

For the full interview https://aposto.com/s/sara-ahmed-ile-bir-yazisma-oyunu-bozmak-da-bir-nese-bicimidir

Photo of Sara Ahmed by Sarah Franklin