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Fall 2007
Volume 07, Number 1

Newsletter on Feminism and Philosophy

Book Reviews

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Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others
Sara Ahmed. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2006. 223 pages. $21.95/$74.95. 0-8223-3914-5/0-8223-3861-0

Reviewed by Shannon Winnubst

Southwestern University, winnubss@southwestern.edu

Tables, lines, points, directions, orientations—not the first things that come to mind when considering the word “queer.” And yet these are the stuff of Sara Ahmed’s excellent book, Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others. Writing out of the intersections of several academic fields, Ahmed’s book should speak to several audiences: feminist phenomenologists, phenomenologists of race, theorists of geography and space, and queer theory. And it may even speak to philosophers, if they can find their ways out of the deep habitual ruts of the discipline to engage this provocative offering of new paths.

Claiming that “attention involves a political economy,” (32) Ahmed takes our bodily and unconscious habits as the point of departure for the politics of heternormativity, hegemonic whiteness, and Orientalism. The tools of classical Husserlian phenomenology—background, bracketing, intention, horizons—become her weapons of choice, using them to expose the sleights of hand that constitute normative orientations and also turning them against themselves to show how the projects of phenomenology were always already queer. Ahmed’s book strikes in many registers and encourages us to strike out in new directions precisely by looking “behind” what appears as the given.

She begins with her favorite protagonist, the table—and, more specifically, Husserl’s writing table. Stepping “behind” the phenomenologist’s table, Ahmed reorients us toward that which Husserl never sees: “what must have already taken place for the table to arrive” (37). Because the very act of being oriented toward the writing table is precisely what allows its arrival to disappear, this necessarily unnoted slipping into the background allows the orientation to appear as if it were the only possible orientation.

Drawing on Marx’s critiques of idealism through commodity fetishism, Ahmed argues that paying attention to these erased histories of arrivals radically reorients our fields of perception. It places us at an oblique angle towards the horizon of the familiar. Approaching objects through their myriad histories of arrivals, we enter into a vertiginous regress: we begin to grasp how “objects are objects insofar as they are within my horizon; it is in the act of reaching ‘toward them’ that makes them available as objects for me” (55); and yet to reach toward some objects is necessarily not to reach toward others. Consequently, as Ahmed deftly shows, “what is reachable [i.e., what counts as a meaningful object worth perceiving and pursuing,] is determined precisely by orientations that we have already taken” (55). This sedimentation of orientations shapes the body into repetitive social patterns that create our tendencies—or what we call, desire. But because, as Husserl teaches us, the field of action necessarily also defines the field of inaction (58), some desires become more meaningful and more socially valued, while others fade from possibility altogether.

From this detailed argument about the unspoken histories and erasures that constitute bodily habits, Ahmed turns to two of the primary objects that shape the horizon of western culture: heterosexuality and whiteness. Turning first to the “obvious” object of queer theory, sexual orientation, Ahmed extends queer theorists’ arguments that sexuality is not aptly understood as being about object-choice. Rather, drawing on Merleau-Ponty’s model of sexuality as a form of bodily projection, Ahmed develops how “orientations ‘exceed’ the objects they are directed toward, becoming ways of inhabiting and coexisting in the world” (67). Ahmed insists that “bodies are sexualized through how they inhabit space” (67) and, more specifically, how they inhabit the normative horizon of the heterosexual family.

Offering a fascinating reading of Freud’s cases on female homosexuality, Ahmed shows how the patriarchal family creates normative lines that, while parading as a “gift” to the child, demand the return of perpetuating the family’s line of descent. This focus on the demand for reproduction allows Ahmed to break from the veritable orthodoxy of gender and queer theory to argue that, because the ego-ideal is the family and not the father, “identification would not necessarily be determined by the axis of gender, but would be about values and qualities that are attributed to the figure of the father and, through him, the family form (the social good)” (74). This opens a fascinating array of fresh lines to pursue beyond the sex-gender-desire matrix that has dominated gender and queer theory, as does her related insistence that theorists develop a “fundamental critique of the idea that difference only takes a morphological form (race/sex)” (99).

Moreover, it puts Ahmed in direct conversation with a dominant strain of contemporary debates in queer theory—namely, the repudiation of the future as the temporal horizon for queer politics. As she makes explicit towards the end of the book, while she is sympathetic to the impulse (most cogently represented by Lee Edelman’s recent No Future[1]) to disavow the pernicious “hope” that righteously demands its inheritance of the earth, she implores us not to disavow hope altogether. Rather, the act of looking “behind” the given, normative orientation allows a queer politics to “look back to the conditions of arrival” (178) and find “other ways of gathering in time and space” (179). The task is to “embrace the failure to inherit the family line as the condition of possibility for another way of dwelling in the world” (178).

Returning to this loaded word “orientation,” Ahmed draws out its racializing connotations through a simple etymology: it “refers both to the practice of finding one’s way, by establishing one’s direction…and to the east itself as one direction privileged over others” (113). Drawing a careful distinction between being oriented “around” and “toward” objects, Ahmed extends postcolonial theorists’ insights about the essential dependency of the Occident upon the Orient: “the Occident coheres as that which we are organized around through the very direction of our gaze toward the Orient” (116). We know from Fanon the violence that ensues when one is the object upon whom the Occident gazes. But, writing as a mixed race woman, Ahmed asks: What happens if one is both gazing toward the Orient and is oriented toward whiteness?

After taking us through her melancholic process of disidentification with her Pakistani father—a desire that she describes as wanting “to give up proximity to that which is given through the background” (145)—Ahmed describes how objects from Pakistan began to create “wrinkles in the whiteness of the objects” (151) in her familial home. Bringing “histories of contact” (151) to the surface, all the objects in her horizon began to shift, move, even dance. And in so doing, they began to “acquire new forms as they register different proximities” (152). As Ahmed explains once more in this political register of temporality, “the magic of unanticipated arrivals points not just to the future but to the past, which also cannot simply be reached in the present” (152). Because she finds “lifelines” from her Pakistani family that are gifts that do not demand any return, Ahmed develops “an orientation that unfolds from the gap between reception and possession” (154). Out of her struggles as a mixed race person excluded from inhabiting the world of hegemonic whiteness, Ahmed creates a fresh orientation that no longer gazes upon whiteness as an object of desire; rather, it is “the backward glance” (155) that allows her to move on.

To read Sara Ahmed’s Queer Phenomenology is to be challenged out of our habitual ruts of reading, writing, and thinking as trained philosophers. Given how clearly she understands the politics at stake in this, she is perfectly aware of how unlikely it is that trained philosophers will read her book: the repetition of particular lines (of reading, of writing, of living) lead to well-trodden paths, which lead to momentum, which leads to recognition, which leads to commitments, which lead to normalizations, which lead to backgrounds, which lead to unconscious and bodily habits. As she explains, “the lines of disciplines are certainly a form of inheritance. …Disciplines have lines in the sense that they have a specific ‘take’ on the world, a way of ordering time and space through the very decisions about what counts as within the discipline” (22).

This is how trained philosophers continue to remain unaware of the work done by feminist, black, queer, and postcolonial scholars on questions relevant to their general debates: “not knowing about certain things is an effect of the lines people have already taken, which means they ‘attend’ to some things only by giving up proximity to others, which is at the same time giving up on certain futures. Such a “giving up” is not conscious or even a loss that can be made present. We do not know what follows from the lines that we have not followed as an effect of the decisions we have taken” (183, note 8). In the name of breaking from a constricting and possibly pernicious family line of inheritance, I thereby challenge trained philosophers, of whatever stripe or school or politics, to read this book: “we don’t know, as yet, what shape such a world might take…when we no longer reproduce the lines we follow” (156).

Endnote

1. Lee Edelman. No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive ( Durham: Duke University Press, 2004).

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