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Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others

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We could say that history "happens" in the very repetition of gestures, which is what gives bodies their tendencies. We might note here that the labour of such repetition disappears through labour: if we work hard at something, then it seems "effortless." This paradox---with effort it becomes effortless---is precisely what makes history disappear in the moment of its enactment. (56) Scott, L. (2017). Disrupting Johannesburg Pride: Gender, race, and class in the LGBTI movement in South Africa. Agenda, 31(1), 42–49.

As such, the book is divided into three parts: the first part is a general discussion of orientation and phenomenology, the second specifically a queer female phenomenology, and the third, phenomenology as an issue of race. The figure of the table plays a major part of the book, as Ahmed gives a very thorough exploration of how past philosophers have used the table as a metaphor for the project of philosophy, and how their orientation to that table reveals or hides aspects of their larger orientation. I'm always impressed when scholars manage to meaningfully draw on their own experiences, and Sara Ahmed's life as a queer PoC absolutely plays a major role in discussion. She also does another thing that I always appreciate in a scholarly book: the conclusion is not something that's a tossed off summary, almost afterthought on what came before, but a true culmination and extension of her ideas into the future. (Adrienne Shaw's Gaming at the Edge is another exemplar of the well-written academic book conclusion.) Amin, A. (2004). Regulating economic globalization. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 29(2), 217–233.The second chapter focuses on queerness, and points out that the world is typically prepared for people so that they are straight. Just as, for the philosopher Husserl, a lot had to be in place for him to start writing philosophy (someone taking care of the children, a table made by someone else, etc), so does a queer person enter a world prepared for them to be straight. The orientation of this world is towards straightness. Borrowing from Chinese philosophy, there is a dao that you are being inducted into, and it's a dao of straightness. In her book, Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others, Sara Ahmed offers a thorough and at times playful analysis of what it means to be oriented—oriented toward objects, ideas, cultures, and sexes. . . . This book is . . . inspiring, stimulating, and a pleasure to read.” — Elizabeth Simon Ruchti, College Literature

Halberstam, Judith. 1994. F2M: The making of male masculinity. In The lesbian postmodern, ed. Laura Doan, 210–228. New York: Columbia University Press.

Table of Contents

Salamon, Gayle. 2009. Justification and queer method, or leaving philosophy. Hypatia 24 (1): 225–230. (Oppression and Moral Agency: Essays in Honor of Claudia Card). Marnell, J. (in press). Radical Imaginings: Queering the Politics and Praxis of Participatory Arts-Based Research. In S. Kindon, R. Pain, & M. Kesby (Eds.), Critically Engaging Participatory Action Research: Praxis. Routledge.

Akrich, M. (1992). The description of technical objects. In W. E. Bijker & J. Law (Eds.), Shaping technology/building society (pp. 205–224). MIT Press. In the context of recent literary and critical theories that have often favored impatience over patience, a hermeneutics of suspicion over a sense of wonder, extremity over everydayness, one of Ahmed’s singular achievements is to reorient our affective stances and intellectual idioms toward a less punitive engagement with the ordinary.” — Rita Felski, Contemporary Women's Writing Käll, Lisa Folkmarson. 2015. A path between voluntarism and determinism: Tracing elements of phenomenology in Judith Butler’s account of performativity. lambda Nordica 20 (2–3): 23–48. For example, thinking about Husserl thinking about tables, Ahmed thinks about the labour involved in keeping the table and the space around it clear and available for Husserl to sit and think and write at, labour performed by others, presumably women. Ahmed asks: what's going on behind Husserl while he's thinking and writing at his writing table? She asks and suggests lots of other things too related to the way people are facing, what they are able, thereby, to notice, what effect spaces and objects and work have on bodies, how these effects depend on those bodies, whether they are read as bodies of colour, female bodies, queer bodies.this sister of my father never married, lived with her mother as an old maid, and I had always been saddened whenever I thought of her dreary life)” (53)

Rarely does philosophical writing successfully manage to make its reader embrace the abstraction that comes along with such writing and bridge this abstraction with everyday, lived experience. Sara Ahmed’s Queer Phenomenology astoundingly does both. . . . Queer Phenomenology impressively emerges as a text that is reachable to its readers.” — Yetta Howard, Women's Studies Moreland, Iain. 2013. What can queer theory do for intersex? In The Routledge queer studies reader, ed. Donald E. Hall, and Annamarie Jagose, 445–463. London and New York: Routledge. Ahmed’s most valuable contribution in Queer Phenomenology is her reorienting of the language of queer theory. The phenomenological understanding of orientation and its attendant geometric metaphors usefully reframes queer discourse, showing disorientation as a moment not of desperation but of radical possibility, of getting it twisted in a productive and revolutionary way.” — Zachary Lamm, GLQ Sara Ahmed, when she is really on, is one of those rare thinkers who can explore a topic like a comet, casually dropping these fascinating gems of insight on everything and anything that comes to mind along the way. I feel this way about Beauvoir’s Ethics of Ambiguity, Annemarie Mol’s writing, and a few others. While the text is rich and dense in its theoretical discussion, Ahmed’s language is surprisingly accessible and cautiously intimate. Drawing on the works of a wide range of thinkers, Ahmed establishes multiple connections and points of conversation between the theories and does so with an astute clarity. Students of both phenomenology and queer studies, or anyone in search of a new theoretical framework for non-normative bodies and subjects, are guaranteed to benefit from reading this truly novel work.” — Dai Kojima, Phenomenology and Practice

In this Book

Salamon, Gayle. 2010. Assuming a body: Transgender and rhetorics of materiality. New York: Columbia University Press. Nethery, H.A. 2013. Husserl and Foucault on the subject: The companions. Published dissertation, Duquesne University.

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