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Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others

Margrit Shildrick

To cite this article: Margrit Shildrick (2009) Queer�Phenomenology:�Orientations,�Objects,�Others

, , 17:4, 632-635, DOI: 10.1080/09672550903165787

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Published online: 24 Sep 2009.

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 INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHICAL STUDIES

to ceasing to exist. To make theoretical sense of this evaluative standpoint

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

University of Leeds Mikel Burley

© 2009, Mikel Burley

Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others

By Sara Ahmed
Duke University Press, 2006. Pp. x + 224. ISBN 978–0–822–33914–4.

In recent years, phenomenology has taken up a privileged place in critical

cultural and feminist discourse that has reflected back with positive effect on
the way in which philosophy itself has returned to the question of embodi-
ment. Sara Ahmed’s strategy in offering Queer Phenomenology takes the
process a stage further by rethinking what it means for some very specific
bodies 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 – which
involves 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 can
either enhance or obstruct future relationships. What marks – but does not
make – some things as queer is the way in which the usual dimensions of
orientation, as involving some sense of familiarity, stability and above all
straight trajectory, are bent out of shape. Ahmed’s approach is to investigate
the phenomenon in the context initially of objects, within which she engages
the putative solidity of the table (which reappears in both a metaphorical and
an actual role in subsequent sections), then of variant sexuality, and finally
the production of racial otherness. In each she shows how ‘(b)odies as well
as objects take shape through being oriented towards each other’ (p. 54) and
in doing so exposes the inherent queerness of phenomenology itself.
Ahmed is certainly not the first scholar to excavate the etymology of
the 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 the

world in the first place. What she does in a particularly engaging way is to
seize on very familiar words and ideas – like ‘straight’, ‘turn’, ‘line’ or
‘family’ – and make us think about them afresh. When she explores the
meaning of sexual orientation or the concept of the Orient, particularly as it
was developed by Said, we are left wondering why it had never occurred to
us to take up those notions in a phenomenological sense. In the case of both
sexualization and racialization, what is at stake is the way in which bodies
come to inhabit space, which in turn makes possible certain choices while
limiting others. As she puts it: ‘Orientations are about the direction we take
that puts some things and not others in our reach’ (p. 56), and she insists that
the amplified effect of orientation is to regulate ‘what we can do, where we
can go, how we are perceived, and so on’ (p. 101). This is scarcely a startling
observation in its own terms for those already identified as queer by reason
of either sexuality or skin colour, but it leads Ahmed to characterize
Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology at least as masculinist, racialist and
heterosexist. The trope of ‘I can’ – the very thing that anchors phenomenol-
ogy’s current popularity – is limited in applicability to the white male
heterosexual body. By exploring the divergent trajectories of lesbianism (a
focus that productively varies the usual attention to male forms of queer
orientation), and by taking up Fanon’s reflections on the restrictions, uncer-
tainty and blockages that constrain the black body, Ahmed makes the point
that such bodies are always in question, always pushed off course and
unable 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 be
easy to counter her reading of Husserl in particular. In part the approach
seems almost whimsical, albeit there are serious issues to raise. One area in
which 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 to
account 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 most
likely to use the book are probably more familiar with the phenomenology
of Merleau-Ponty, which has its own rich resources to offer. Nonetheless,
despite acknowledging the risk of pushing one’s own reading strategy into
areas with a very different intellectual history, Ahmed is unapologetic about
her preference. Her claim – and it’s one that will surely find strong assent
from all those who cross boundaries – meets any potential criticism head on:
‘The promise of interdisciplinary scholarship is that the failure to return texts
to their histories will do something’ (p. 27, my italics). As with her previous
work, Ahmed is confident and secure in her own intellectual trajectory, and
she wants to show both how to queer the usual reception of phenomenology
and at the same time how phenomenology is already queer. Her method, as
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she acknowledges, criss-crosses between conceptual analysis and personal

digression, before adding: ‘(b)ut why call the personal a digression?’ (p. 22).
And it never really is. There are for sure some discrete personal anecdotes
that helpfully work on the basis of pause-illustrate in relation to the particular
abstract, and sometimes complex, point that she is making, but in general
Ahmed incorporates her reflections seamlessly in her exposition. When she
speaks of her own history as a child of mixed-race parents, of intra-family
disavowal, and of emigration to a third country, and of her own emergence
as a lesbian in adulthood, she traces out the dimensions of a dis-orientation
that 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. Her
reflection on the significance of family and on the spaces they habitually
occupy is a highly unusual move that takes an element of personal history
and turns it into a pleasingly creative deliberation on issues of proximity and
inheritance, a conjunction that she names ‘the condition of our arrival into
the world’ (p. 124). It is a beautifully judged and indisputably innovative
unfolding 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 with
Ahmed’s characteristically repetitive mode of address. At points I wished
that she would just get on with it rather than yet again multiplying the
perspectives from which to say very much the same thing. When a text is
particularly 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 phenomenological
notion of the chiasmus, but which sometimes seemed unnecessarily tricksy.
A particularly clear example comes in the following: ‘To re-encounter
objects as strange things is hence not to lose sight of their history but to
refuse to make them history by losing sight’ (p. 164). The occasional
construction of this type clearly serves a purpose, but a plethora begins, for
me at least, to seem overly self-conscious. Thinking through whether such
modes are merely stylistic tics or possibly have a more serious justification,
I recall that this is a highly performative text. The oblique or off-course
nature of queer is perhaps reflected in the ‘failure’ of the text to definitively
claim 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 whether
being thrown off-centre as a reader is conducive to a deeper understanding
of what is at stake, or simply becomes distracting.
Interestingly, the question of ‘failure’ and its status as a far from obvious
negativity runs through the text. Early on she writes: ‘For a life to count as
a good life, then it must return the debt of its life by taking on the direction
promised as a social good. … A queer life might be one that fails to make
such 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 turned
aside – can be seen precisely as a creative failure. As she understands it,
what happens when bodies occupy unintended spaces is that something new
and positive happens that makes us rethink ‘the facts of the matter’. In
short, 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 desire
for conservative retrenchment on the other, Ahmed’s more significant claim
is that such moments are vital. Given that the shattering of our familiar
engagement with the world has both negative and positive dimensions,
however, Ahmed is careful to make clear that although queer politics
encompasses disorientation, ‘it is important not to make disorientation an
obligation 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 of
queer phenomenology – is ‘to trace the lines for a different genealogy … as
the condition of possibility for another way of dwelling in the world’
(p. 178).
Few academic writers working in the UK context today can match Sara
Ahmed in her prolific output, and fewer still can maintain the consistently
high level of her theoretical explorations. Each new article or book is certain
to 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 significant
reservations about its specific impact, I know that its insights will continue
to 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 a
demanding and not always comfortable course to pursue, but there is much
to gain for the attentive reader.

Queen’s University Belfast Margrit Shildrick

© 2009, Margrit Shildrick

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