Queer Phenomenology Quotes

“These ways we have to settle. Moving house. I hate packing: collecting myself up, pulling myself apart. Stripping the body of the house: the walls, the floors, the shelves. Then I arrive, an empty house. It looks like a shell. How I love unpacking. Taking things out, putting things around, arranging myself all over the walls. I move around, trying to distribute myself evenly around the rooms. I concentrate on the kitchen. The familiar smell of spices fills the air. I allow the cumin to spill, and then gather it up again. I feel flung back somewhere else. I am never sure where the smell of spices takes me, as it had followed me everywhere. Each smell that gathers returns me somewhere; I am not always sure where that somewhere is. Sometimes the return is welcome, sometimes not. Sometimes it is tears or laughter that makes me realize that I have been pulled to another place and another time. Such memories can involve a recognition of how one's body already feels, coming after the event. The surprise when we find ourselves moved in this way or that. So we ask the question, later, and it often seems too late: what is it that has led me away from the present, to another place and another time? How is it that I have arrived here or there?”
― Sara Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others

“Away from home, my partner and I are on holiday on a resort on an island. Mealtimes bring everyone together. We enter the dining room, where we face many tables places alongside each other… I face what seems like a shocking image. In front of me, on the tables, couples are seated. Table after table, couple after couple, taking the same form: one many sitting by one woman around a ‘round table,’ facing each other 'over’ the table… I am shocked by the sheer force of the regularity of that which is familiar: how each table presents the same form of sociality as the form of the heterosexual couple. How is it possible, with all that is possible, that the same form is repeated again and again? How does the openness of the future get closed down into so little in the present?”
― Sara Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others

“If orientation is a matter of how we reside in space, then sexual orientation might also be a matter of residence; of how we inhabit spaces as well as “who” or “what” we inhabit spaces with.”
― Sara Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others

“As I have suggested, phenomenology reminds us that spaces are not exterior to bodies; instead, spaces are like a second skin that unfolds in the folds of the body.”
― Sara Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others

“If orientations are as much about feeling at home as they are about finding our way, then it becomes important to consider how “finding our way” involves what we could call “homing devices.”
― Sara Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others

“The “here” of the body does not simply refer to the body, but to “where” the body dwells. The “here” of bodily dwelling is thus what takes the body outside of itself, as it is affected and shaped by its surroundings: the skin that seems to contain the body is also where the atmosphere creates an impression; just think of goose bumps, textures on the skin surface, as body traces of the coldness of the air.”
― Sara Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others

“Orientations, then, are about the intimacy of bodies and their dwelling places.”
― Sara Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others

“each Ego has its own domain of perceptual things and necessarily perceives the things in a certain orientation.”
― Sara Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others

“But “getting lost” still takes us somewhere; and being lost is a way of inhabiting space by registering what is not familiar: being lost can in its turn become a familiar feeling.”
― Sara Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others

“Orientation involves aligning body and space: we only know which way to turn once we know which way we are facing. If we are in a strange room, one whose contours are not part of our memory map, then the situation is not so easy.”
― Sara Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others

“The question of orientation becomes, then, a question not only about how we “find our way” but how we come to “feel at home.”
― Sara Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others

“The concept of “orientation” allows us then to rethink the phenomenality of space—that is, how space is dependent on bodily inhabitance.”
― Sara Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others

“Kant argues that to become orientated in this situation depends on knowing the difference between the left and right side of the body. Such a difference, in its turn, shows that orientation is not so much about the relation between objects that extend into space (say, the relation between the chair and the table); rather, orientation depends on the bodily inhabitance of that space. We can only find our way in a dark room if we know the difference between the sides of the body: “Only by reference to these sides, can you know which way you are turning” (cited in Casey 1997: 20; see also Kant 1992: 367).”
― Sara Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others

“Feminist, queer, and critical race philosophers have shown us how social differences are the effects of how bodies inhabit spaces with others, and they have emphasized the intercorporeal aspects of bodily dwelling.”
― Sara Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others

“To queer phenomenology is also to offer a queer phenomenology. In other words, queer does not have a relation of exteriority to that with which it comes into contact. A queer phenomenology might find what is queer within phenomenology and use that queerness to make some rather different points.”
― Sara Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others

“In this book, I bring the table to “the front” of the writing in part to show how “what” we think “from” is an orientation device.”
― Sara Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others

“As Ann Banfield observes in her wonderful book The Phantom Table: “Tables and chairs, things nearest to hand for the sedentary philosopher, who comes to occupy chairs of philosophy, are the furniture of ‘that room of one’s own’ from which the real world is observed” (2000: 66). Tables are “near to hand,” along with chairs, as the furniture that secures the very “place” of philosophy.”
― Sara Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others

“This book thus considers how objects that appear in phenomenological writing function as “orientation devices.” If we start with Husserl’s first volume of Ideas, for instance, then we start with the writing table. The table appears, we could say, because the table is the object nearest the body of the philosopher. That the writing table appears, and not another kind of table, might reveal something about the “orientation” of phenomenology, or even of philosophy itself. After”
― Sara Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others

“This point can be made quite simply: orientations involve different ways of registering the proximity of objects and others. Orientations shape not only how we inhabit space, but how we apprehend this world of shared inhabitance, as well as “who” or “what” we direct our energy and attention toward. A queer phenomenology, perhaps, might start by redirecting our attention toward different objects, those that are “less proximate” or even those that deviate or are deviant. And yet, I would not say that a queer phenomenology would simply be a matter of generating queer objects. A queer phenomenology might turn to phenomenology by asking not only about the concept of orientation in phenomenology, but also about the orientation of phenomenology.”
― Sara Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others

“The timing of this apprehension matters. For an object to make this impression is dependent on past histories, which surface as impressions on the skin. At the same time, emotions shape what bodies do in the present, or how they are moved by the objects they approach.”
― Sara Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others

“Phenomenology can offer a resource for queer studies insofar as it emphasizes the importance of lived experience, the intentionality of consciousness, the significance of nearness or what is ready-tohand, and the role of repeated and habitual actions in shaping bodies and worlds. I”
― Sara Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others

“I start here because phenomenology makes “orientation” central in the very argument that consciousness is always directed “toward” an object, and given its emphasis on the lived experience of inhabiting a body, or what Edmund Husserl calls the “living body”
― Sara Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others

“I suspect that a queer phenomenology might rather enjoy this failure to be proper.”
― Sara Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others

“What would it mean for queer studies if we were to pose the question of “the orientation” of “sexual orientation” as a phenomenological question?”
― Sara Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others