What’s the Use? is a subtle and forceful inquiry into the politics of use. Sara Ahmed begins from an apparently ordinary word and shows how deeply it organises institutions, bodies, habits and worlds. To ask what something is “for” is never innocent: usefulness can become a way of disciplining people, objects and spaces into expected functions. Ahmed is interested in how paths are made by repetition, how bodies are directed by what has already been used, and how institutions preserve themselves through ordinary procedures. The book’s intelligence lies in its attention to wear, habit, orientation and deviation. A door, a path, a chair, a policy or a category can all reveal how worlds are built for some bodies and not for others. Ahmed does not simply reject use; she asks how use can be redirected, misused, inhabited otherwise or turned against the structures that claim to define its proper function. The text matters because it transforms utility from a neutral value into a political field. It shows that to be judged useless may also become a beginning of refusal, invention and feminist disobedience.
