What moves you: An invitation to reflect with Sara Ahmed’s Affective Economies

Many Canadians will recognise the Proust Questionnaire, a set of reflective prompts that began as a parlour game, gained literary gravity through Marcel Proust’s poetic answers, and later became a cultural artefact through Bernard Pivot and Vanity Fair. Though Proust did not create the format, his emotionally precise responses gave it an enduring legacy.

This post offers a new kind of questionnaire. It is designed for those who have been shaped by institutional harm. It is an invitation to notice how power circulates through feeling, and how feeling itself can become a source of clarity, connection, and repair. You may already know these truths in your bones. You may have lived them before you had words. This structure offers a way to gather those fragments, to name what has shaped you, and to recognise your emotional knowledge as a form of rigour.

These prompts draw on concepts from Sara Ahmed’s 2004 essay Affective Economies, which argues that emotions are not internal possessions or fleeting states, but social forces that move, attach, and accumulate meaning. They shape how we are read, received, and regulated. For those navigating institutional harm—especially in schools—these concepts offer a way to name the political life of feelings.

Based on this exercise, I wrote this essay:

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Reflective prompts based on Affective Economies by Sara Ahmed

Each concept is paired with a reflective question designed to support emotional integration, narrative clarity, and a deepened sense of what your feelings know.

1. Stickiness

Concept: Emotions do not reside neatly within individuals; instead, they “stick” to certain bodies, words, or images, shaping how those are received regardless of intention or content.

Prompt: Can you describe a moment when an emotion—grief, rage, worry, or protectiveness—seemed to stick to you in a school meeting or advocacy exchange, even when you were speaking calmly or clearly? What did that stickiness do?

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2. The figure of the angry subject

Concept: Some subjects are pre-positioned as angry before they speak; their anger is expected, discounted, or exaggerated regardless of tone.

Prompt: When have you felt that your emotional expression—especially anger or frustration—was read before you even opened your mouth? How did others prepare for or respond to your supposed “anger,” and what truth did that reaction obscure?

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3. Circulation of affect

Concept: Emotions move through spaces, attaching to objects, bodies, and memories. They are not private but relational—passed, felt, and shaped in contact.

Prompt: How have you felt another person’s discomfort or fear travel through a room before you spoke? Have you ever walked into a space—like a school meeting—and known that your name or presence had already circulated?

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4. Repetition and the accumulation of emotion

Concept: Certain bodies accumulate affective history; each new interaction is shaped by the emotional weight of what came before.

Prompt: What emotional history do you feel school staff attach to you or your child? Are there phrases, expressions, or reactions that suggest you are being treated not as you are that day, but as the sum of previous meetings?

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5. The conversion of pain into threat

Concept: Expressions of pain or injury become interpreted as threats to others—especially when voiced by feminised, racialised, or disabled subjects.

Prompt: Has there been a time when your attempt to name harm—your own or your child’s—was treated as dangerous, destabilising, or aggressive? What did that feel like in your body?

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6. Economies of emotion

Concept: Institutions often decide which emotions are appropriate, whose feelings matter, and how those emotions are allowed to be expressed.

Prompt: Can you recall a time when your feelings were deemed inappropriate, excessive, or disruptive in a school setting? How was emotion managed or policed in that moment—and by whom?

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7. The proximity of pain

Concept: Pain is often seen as contaminating when it gets too close; institutions want to acknowledge suffering only at a safe distance.

Prompt: When has your proximity—the nearness of your suffering, your child’s distress, or your advocacy—felt like something people flinched from or avoided? What kind of distance did they try to create?

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As you move through these prompts—whether you write, speak, reflect inwardly, or simply let them echo in your body—please take care. This process may stir grief you have long held at a distance, or reveal patterns you have sensed but never fully named. It may bring a sharp clarity that feels empowering, or it may unsettle the ground beneath you, because to see your experience as part of a system—rather than as a personal failure, a unique betrayal, or a story of private misfortune—is to reckon with the scale of harm and the depth of your knowing.

There is no rush. There is no performance required. There is only the gentle, steady work of reinhabiting your experience with truth. You have survived what should have protected you. You have noticed what others refused to name. You are allowed to feel, to rest, to grieve, to become sharper. You are allowed to refuse their version of events.

Let your answers belong fully to you. Let them be messy or beautiful or cracked open with rage.