Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others
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"This is an original and refreshing use of phenomenological theory to address the kinds of questions--about orientations and about how bodies and objects become oriented through their interrelations--that help link it more directly to political and social questions--about gender, sexuality, and race, for example--that have tended to be treated as outside or beyond phenomenological frameworks. This extension and development of phenomenology is a major contribution."--Elizabeth Grosz, author of The Nick of Time: Politics, Evolution, and the Untimely "In this dazzling new book, Sara Ahmed has begun a much needed dialogue between queer studies and phenomenology. Focusing on the directionality, spatiality, and inclination of desires in time and space, Ahmed explains the straightness of heterosexuality and the digressions made by those queer desires that incline away from the norm, and, in her chapter on racialization, she puts the orient back into orientation. Ahmed's book has no telos, no moral purpose for queer life, but what it brings to the table instead is an original and inspiring meditation on the necessarily disorienting, disconcerting, and disjointed experience of queerness."--Judith Halberstam, author of In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives "Finally, a theorist who takes sexual 'orientation' at its word. In this moving meditation on directionality, Sara Ahmed takes phenomenology for a turn through queer theory, postcolonial studies, feminism, critical race theory, geometry, and labor politics. In the world Ahmed encourages us to reinhabit, as bodies come to matter, bodily action materializes space, children inherit proximities rather than attributes, privileged bodies sink into familiarity, and politics is at its best when it involves a measure of disorientation. Follow her 'lines' of reasoning and you'll never again reach for an explanation, a book, or a lover without wondering how your grasp extended so far in the first place."--Kath Weston, author of Gender in Real Time: Power and Transience in a Visual Age
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In this groundbreaking work, Sara Ahmed demonstrates how queer studies can put phenomenology to productive use. Focusing on the 'orientation' aspect of 'sexual orientation' and the 'orient' in 'orientalism', Ahmed examines what it means for bodies to be situated in space and time. Bodies take shape as they move through the world directing themselves toward or away from objects and others. Being 'orientated' means feeling at home, knowing where one stands, or having certain objects within reach. Orientations affect what is proximate to the body or what can be reached. A queer phenomenology, Ahmed contends, reveals how social relations are arranged spatially, how queerness disrupts and reorders these relations by not following the accepted paths, and how a politics of disorientation puts other objects within reach, those that might, at first glance, seem awry.Ahmed proposes that a queer phenomenology might investigate not only how the concept of orientation is informed by phenomenology but also the orientation of phenomenology itself. Thus she reflects on the significance of the objects that appear - and those that do not - as signs of orientation in classic phenomenological texts such as Husserl's Ideas. In developing a queer model of orientations, she combines readings of phenomenological texts - by Husserl, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, and Fanon - with insights drawn from queer studies, feminist theory, critical race theory, Marxism, and psychoanalysis. "Queer Phenomenology" points queer theory in bold new directions.
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Phenomenology is often characterized as a "turn toward" objects, which appear in their perceptual "thereness" as objects given to consciousness. Read the first page
Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Index
Phenomenology is often characterized as a "turn toward" objects, which appear in their perceptual "thereness" as objects given to consciousness. Read the first page
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Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Index
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6 of 6 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
This is a beautifully written book that makes you look at the world differently. Ahmed offers a meditation on how we get oriented or directed by objects - especially tables - in a way that makes sexual orientation continuous with other forms of spatial orientation. Her readings of phenomenology are quirky and intriguing. She talks about secrecy - what we miss when we view an object from a specific point - in order to think about how genealogy (the question of how objects arrive) might be interwoven with phenomenology. So we cannot 'see' how things arrive, even when we do things with things. She shows how norms become part of the background, affecting how objects are arranged, as well as what does and does not come into view. She interrogates whiteness as well as heterosexuality in these terms. I loved how tables are part of this book (the writing tables that are philosophy's domesticated objects, as well as other kinds of tables, including kitchen tables and dining tables, which she describes as 'kinship objects'). I never thought tables could be so interesting, but once you read this book, you will keep noticing them! And of course, the table becomes queer - it becomes wonky, when it supports queer action, or even simply when we notice the table as something we do something on. This book makes furniture something to think about. Wow!
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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
Life-changer
26 Mar 2012
Format:Paperback
Sara Ahmed is my hero. This book shaped the way that i view the world. she beautifully lays out phenomenology, and then takes it to the next level. Her description of 'queering'lines of perception bring into question what we know, and challenge the reader to appreciate and understand discomfort. I think everyone, queer or straight, should read this. By far the best book i read in college
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