Autotheory as Alienation: Situated Knowledges and Defamiliarization in Sara Ahmed’s Living a Feminist Life
Speaker : Sarah Mahajan
PhD Scholar, School of Humanities, NIAS
@ : sarah.mahajan@nias.res.in
Chairperson : Nitin Rawat
PhD Scholar, School of Conflict and Security Studies, NIAS
@ : nitinrawatkothi@nias.res.in
Date : 14th October 2026
Time : 9.30 AM
Venue : Lecture Hall
Abstract: The talk engages with academic discussions around feminist epistemology, critically contributing to debates on the intersection of the personal, political, and theoretical in feminist scholarship. Using Sara Ahmed’s autotheoretical book Living a Feminist Life as a case study, it explores how experimental narratives can function as analytical sites of intervention. The presentation specifically highlights literary performance as a means of epistemological resistance by focusing on narrative techniques that underline the constructedness of language and means of documentation. Using concepts of defamiliarization and autotheory as anchors, it identifies the techniques Ahmed uses to subvert academic writing through an interrogation of the personal. It also contextualizes the book in the broader theoretical orientation of situated knowledges. By foregrounding subjectivity and affect, politics of pronoun-use and citations, the textual form is revealed to be a discursive act capable of creating epistemological ruptures.
About the speaker: Sarah is a PhD scholar at NIAS. Her research focuses on experimental life-narratives, especially those that challenge restricted textual spaces and dominant structures of knowledge and representation. She is a recipient of the UGC Junior Research Fellowship.