She is the daughter of a Pakistani father and an English mother, and she emigrated from England to Adelaide, Australia with her family in the early 1970s.

[5] Key themes in her work, such as migration, orientation, difference, strangerness, and mixed identities, relate directly to some of these early experiences.

'[9] In spring 2009 Ahmed was the Laurie New Jersey Chair in Women's Studies at Rutgers University[10] and in Lent 2013 she was the Diane Middlebrook and Carl Djerassi Professor in Gender Studies at Cambridge University, where she conducted research on "Willful Women: Feminism and a History of Will".

[12] In 2016 Ahmed resigned from her post at Goldsmiths in protest over the alleged sexual harassment of students by staff there.

"[18] She agrees with Bell Hooks, stating that if we aim to end sexism etc., we must also look at the other things attached, like racism and colonial power which molded our current society.

"[20] Intersectionality is important to Ahmed, as it defines her own feminism and sense of self: “I am not a lesbian one moment and a person of color the next and a feminist at another.

And lesbian feminism of color brings this all into existence, with insistence, with persistence.” [19] Diversity work is one of Ahmed's common topics.

She draws upon her experiences as a woman of color in academia and the works of others, including Chandra Talpade Mohanty, M. Jacqui Alexander, and Heidi Mirza.

"[19] She draws upon the work of other lesbian feminists of color, like Cherie Moraga, Gloria Anzaldua, and Audre Lorde.

[citation needed] 2017, Ahmed received the Kessler Award for contributions to the field of LGBTQ studies from CLAGS, CUNY.

[30] Ahmed discusses a contact zone, where objects and bodies that could create different affects are joined.

[34] This work was awarded the FWSA book prize in 2011 for "ingenuity and scholarship in the fields of feminism, gender or women’s studies".

[35] In this book, Ahmed focuses on what it means to be worthy of happiness and how specific acts of deviation work with particular identities to cause unhappiness.

[43] In 2020, Duke University Press confirmed that Living a Feminist Life was their best-selling book of the previous decade.

[45] Ahmed gives the historical idea on the association of use with life and strength in the 19th century and how utilitarianism helped shape individuals through useful ends.

She highlights how killing joy is a world-making project, chronicling moves from asking questions to the power of the eye roll.

Feminist scholar Judith Butler has reviewed Ahmed’s book in her article titled The Snap for the monthly magazine The Nation in 2024.