From The Cultural Politics of Emotion

Abstract

Sara Ahmed is a British-Australian feminist theorist. She taught at Lancaster University from 1994–2004 and at Goldsmiths University of London from 2004–2016 where she directed the Centre for Feminist Research from 2013–2016. Ahmed resigned in 2016 from her academic position in protest of the university’s failure to deal with the problem of sexual harassment and is now an independent scholar. She is the author of a dozen monographs, including The Cultural Politics of Emotion (2004), Queer Phenomenology (2006), Living a Feminist Life (2017), and others. Her work operates at the nexus among feminism, diversity, affect, and phenomenology. In this excerpt from chapter 5 of The Cultural Politics of Emotion , Ahmed considers the public or national apology as a speech act that does something in an Austinian sense. Sometimes, she writes, the public apology goes too far for the state and gets downgraded to “regret,” a word with “less power,” or “shame,” producing an economy of affect that “does not require responsible action” (PAGES).