queer phenomenology: orientations, objects, others

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This article was downloaded by: [University of Connecticut] On: 08 October 2014, At: 18:58 Publisher: Routledge Informa Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registered office: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK International Journal of Philosophical Studies Publication details, including instructions for authors and subscription information: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/riph20 Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others Margrit Shildrick a a Queen’s University Belfast Published online: 24 Sep 2009. To cite this article: Margrit Shildrick (2009) Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others , International Journal of Philosophical Studies, 17:4, 632-635, DOI: 10.1080/09672550903165787 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09672550903165787 PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE Taylor & Francis makes every effort to ensure the accuracy of all the information (the “Content”) contained in the publications on our platform. However, Taylor & Francis, our agents, and our licensors make no representations or warranties whatsoever as to the accuracy, completeness, or suitability for any purpose of the Content. Any opinions and views expressed in this publication are the opinions and views of the authors, and are not the views of or endorsed by Taylor & Francis. The accuracy of the Content should not be relied upon and should be independently verified with primary sources of information. Taylor and Francis shall not be liable for any losses, actions, claims, proceedings, demands, costs, expenses, damages, and other liabilities whatsoever or howsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connection with, in relation to or arising out of the use of the Content. This article may be used for research, teaching, and private study purposes. Any substantial or systematic reproduction, redistribution, reselling, loan, sub- licensing, systematic supply, or distribution in any form to anyone is expressly

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Page 1: Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others

This article was downloaded by: [University of Connecticut]On: 08 October 2014, At: 18:58Publisher: RoutledgeInforma Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954Registered office: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH,UK

International Journal ofPhilosophical StudiesPublication details, including instructions for authorsand subscription information:http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/riph20

Queer Phenomenology:Orientations, Objects, OthersMargrit Shildrick aa Queen’s University BelfastPublished online: 24 Sep 2009.

To cite this article: Margrit Shildrick (2009) Queer Phenomenology: Orientations,Objects, Others , International Journal of Philosophical Studies, 17:4, 632-635, DOI:10.1080/09672550903165787

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09672550903165787

PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE

Taylor & Francis makes every effort to ensure the accuracy of all theinformation (the “Content”) contained in the publications on our platform.However, Taylor & Francis, our agents, and our licensors make norepresentations or warranties whatsoever as to the accuracy, completeness, orsuitability for any purpose of the Content. Any opinions and views expressedin this publication are the opinions and views of the authors, and are not theviews of or endorsed by Taylor & Francis. The accuracy of the Content shouldnot be relied upon and should be independently verified with primary sourcesof information. Taylor and Francis shall not be liable for any losses, actions,claims, proceedings, demands, costs, expenses, damages, and other liabilitieswhatsoever or howsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connectionwith, in relation to or arising out of the use of the Content.

This article may be used for research, teaching, and private study purposes.Any substantial or systematic reproduction, redistribution, reselling, loan, sub-licensing, systematic supply, or distribution in any form to anyone is expressly

Page 2: Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others

forbidden. Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at http://www.tandfonline.com/page/terms-and-conditions

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to ceasing to exist. To make theoretical sense of this evaluative standpointmay be problematic; my suspicion is that, ultimately, we come to a point atwhich our evaluative judgements elude rational vindication. But it is farfrom clear that Epicurean hedonism is better placed to make sense of thisjudgement than is an objectivist position such as Nagel’s. It strikes me that,when it comes to contemplating our own mortality, the considerations ofEpicurus that Carel canvasses can certainly provide therapeutic benefits;contentment with each moment as it arises is indeed worthy of cultivation inthe pursuit of anything approximating a happy life. Yet it is unclear that ahedonic account of value – with its apparent fixation on momentary experi-ence – can accommodate plausible judgements about the value of a lifeconsidered as a whole.

University of Leeds Mikel Burley© 2009, Mikel Burley

Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, OthersBy Sara AhmedDuke University Press, 2006. Pp. x + 224. ISBN 978–0–822–33914–4.

In recent years, phenomenology has taken up a privileged place in criticalcultural and feminist discourse that has reflected back with positive effect onthe way in which philosophy itself has returned to the question of embodi-ment. Sara Ahmed’s strategy in offering Queer Phenomenology takes theprocess a stage further by rethinking what it means for some very specificbodies to be out-of-line in terms of their spatial and temporal orientation.In looking at both the conditions of arrival at a particular location – whichinvolves a genealogy – and at the possible paths that extend into a future,Ahmed examines how the embodied individual is shaped both by her ‘inher-itance’ and by the configuration of objects and others around her that caneither enhance or obstruct future relationships. What marks – but does notmake – some things as queer is the way in which the usual dimensions oforientation, as involving some sense of familiarity, stability and above allstraight trajectory, are bent out of shape. Ahmed’s approach is to investigatethe phenomenon in the context initially of objects, within which she engagesthe putative solidity of the table (which reappears in both a metaphorical andan actual role in subsequent sections), then of variant sexuality, and finallythe production of racial otherness. In each she shows how ‘(b)odies as wellas objects take shape through being oriented towards each other’ (p. 54) andin doing so exposes the inherent queerness of phenomenology itself.

Ahmed is certainly not the first scholar to excavate the etymology ofthe word ‘queer’, which means bent or twisted, but her unique contribu-tion is to bring the notion together with a sustained reflection on the

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phenomenological understanding of how bodies come to be oriented in theworld in the first place. What she does in a particularly engaging way is toseize on very familiar words and ideas – like ‘straight’, ‘turn’, ‘line’ or‘family’ – and make us think about them afresh. When she explores themeaning of sexual orientation or the concept of the Orient, particularly as itwas developed by Said, we are left wondering why it had never occurred tous to take up those notions in a phenomenological sense. In the case of bothsexualization and racialization, what is at stake is the way in which bodiescome to inhabit space, which in turn makes possible certain choices whilelimiting others. As she puts it: ‘Orientations are about the direction we takethat puts some things and not others in our reach’ (p. 56), and she insists thatthe amplified effect of orientation is to regulate ‘what we can do, where wecan go, how we are perceived, and so on’ (p. 101). This is scarcely a startlingobservation in its own terms for those already identified as queer by reasonof either sexuality or skin colour, but it leads Ahmed to characterizeMerleau-Ponty’s phenomenology at least as masculinist, racialist andheterosexist. The trope of ‘I can’ – the very thing that anchors phenomenol-ogy’s current popularity – is limited in applicability to the white maleheterosexual body. By exploring the divergent trajectories of lesbianism (afocus that productively varies the usual attention to male forms of queerorientation), and by taking up Fanon’s reflections on the restrictions, uncer-tainty and blockages that constrain the black body, Ahmed makes the pointthat such bodies are always in question, always pushed off course andunable to occupy normative space fully. To use her own privileged meta-phor, they do not have a place at the table.

There will undoubtedly be those who complain that Ahmed has twisted,bent and disoriented the phenomenological canon too far, and it would beeasy to counter her reading of Husserl in particular. In part the approachseems almost whimsical, albeit there are serious issues to raise. One area inwhich Husserl matters to Ahmed is in relation to the question of bracketing,which she returns to on several occasions in order to critique its failure toaccount for the conditions of arrival. But in any case, Husserl seems a some-what curious choice of focus, given that the cultural theorists who are mostlikely to use the book are probably more familiar with the phenomenologyof Merleau-Ponty, which has its own rich resources to offer. Nonetheless,despite acknowledging the risk of pushing one’s own reading strategy intoareas with a very different intellectual history, Ahmed is unapologetic abouther preference. Her claim – and it’s one that will surely find strong assentfrom all those who cross boundaries – meets any potential criticism head on:‘The promise of interdisciplinary scholarship is that the failure to return textsto their histories will do something’ (p. 27, my italics). As with her previouswork, Ahmed is confident and secure in her own intellectual trajectory, andshe wants to show both how to queer the usual reception of phenomenologyand at the same time how phenomenology is already queer. Her method, as

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she acknowledges, criss-crosses between conceptual analysis and personaldigression, before adding: ‘(b)ut why call the personal a digression?’ (p. 22).And it never really is. There are for sure some discrete personal anecdotesthat helpfully work on the basis of pause-illustrate in relation to the particularabstract, and sometimes complex, point that she is making, but in generalAhmed incorporates her reflections seamlessly in her exposition. When shespeaks of her own history as a child of mixed-race parents, of intra-familydisavowal, and of emigration to a third country, and of her own emergenceas a lesbian in adulthood, she traces out the dimensions of a dis-orientationthat is both queer in itself – even uncanny she implies at one point – and shat-ters normative expectations of which paths will or can be followed. Herreflection on the significance of family and on the spaces they habituallyoccupy is a highly unusual move that takes an element of personal historyand turns it into a pleasingly creative deliberation on issues of proximity andinheritance, a conjunction that she names ‘the condition of our arrival intothe world’ (p. 124). It is a beautifully judged and indisputably innovativeunfolding of her argument.

The personalized slant of the theoretical development works to advan-tage, then, but that doesn’t mean that I am always entirely on side withAhmed’s characteristically repetitive mode of address. At points I wishedthat she would just get on with it rather than yet again multiplying theperspectives from which to say very much the same thing. When a text isparticularly difficult this kind of repeated unpacking may be very welcome,but on many occasions I wished that I had been trusted to find my own way.Another rhetorical strategy that she has developed is a curiously ‘double-reverse’ style that might, I suppose, be justified by the phenomenologicalnotion of the chiasmus, but which sometimes seemed unnecessarily tricksy.A particularly clear example comes in the following: ‘To re-encounterobjects as strange things is hence not to lose sight of their history but torefuse to make them history by losing sight’ (p. 164). The occasionalconstruction of this type clearly serves a purpose, but a plethora begins, forme at least, to seem overly self-conscious. Thinking through whether suchmodes are merely stylistic tics or possibly have a more serious justification,I recall that this is a highly performative text. The oblique or off-coursenature of queer is perhaps reflected in the ‘failure’ of the text to definitivelyclaim a stable space of explication. Ahmed is a consistently careful scholar,so it is hard to imagine that the effect is unintended; the problem is whetherbeing thrown off-centre as a reader is conducive to a deeper understandingof what is at stake, or simply becomes distracting.

Interestingly, the question of ‘failure’ and its status as a far from obviousnegativity runs through the text. Early on she writes: ‘For a life to count asa good life, then it must return the debt of its life by taking on the directionpromised as a social good. … A queer life might be one that fails to makesuch gestures of return’ (p. 21). Nonetheless, the issue that Ahmed wants to

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address is the extent to which queer orientation – the sense of bodies turnedaside – can be seen precisely as a creative failure. As she understands it,what happens when bodies occupy unintended spaces is that something newand positive happens that makes us rethink ‘the facts of the matter’. Inshort, those who do not, or cannot, reproduce the convention enact an alter-native form of unfolding that ‘can even put other worlds within reach’(p. 153). Although she sensibly acknowledges that not all forms of disorien-tation are positive, and may figure violation on the one hand or the desirefor conservative retrenchment on the other, Ahmed’s more significant claimis that such moments are vital. Given that the shattering of our familiarengagement with the world has both negative and positive dimensions,however, Ahmed is careful to make clear that although queer politicsencompasses disorientation, ‘it is important not to make disorientation anobligation or a responsibility of those who identify as queer’ (p. 177).Instead, the task – and I take this to signal an ethics rather than a politics ofqueer phenomenology – is ‘to trace the lines for a different genealogy … asthe condition of possibility for another way of dwelling in the world’(p. 178).

Few academic writers working in the UK context today can match SaraAhmed in her prolific output, and fewer still can maintain the consistentlyhigh level of her theoretical explorations. Each new article or book is certainto throw up a host of provocative and intriguing ideas that seemingly effort-lessly expand the range of Ahmed’s scholarship. As the latest of her books,Queer Phenomenology is no exception, and while I have some significantreservations about its specific impact, I know that its insights will continueto nag at me until they have found a place in my own intellectual schema.To put it another way, the text performs the very process of queering exist-ing lines (of thought, action or production) that it sets out to explore. It is ademanding and not always comfortable course to pursue, but there is muchto gain for the attentive reader.

Queen’s University Belfast Margrit Shildrick© 2009, Margrit Shildrick

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