Ahmed begins by questioning what it is to be oriented. Simply by existing in a space, we are oriented, that is to say we have an understanding of what we can see, where we are in relation to other things and where these things lead us. We are oriented around objects in a space; objects on their part ask to be used in a particular manner, they “create a ground” (543). Orientation then, implies a kind of starting point from which we proceed. Ahmed posits the question of sexual orientation, specifically, the sexualization of spaces based upon the objects (people) within those spaces and the direction of our desires towards objects. Further, Ahmed will re evaluate the kind of ground objects create and what objects are made “reachable” through social straightness and the urge for familial inheritance. Through a phenomenological understanding of orientation, Ahmed seeks to provide a way of reorienting the body within a space towards a queer, or what Merleau-Ponty describes as an “oblique” moment.
In the next section of the essay, Ahmed provides a reading of Husserl’s discussion of orientations. What she finds most pertinent in Husserl, is the sense that the Body has a position from which it proceeds. For Ahmed, “orientations are about starting points” (545) which create a sense of the around, the familiar. Familiar refers to the environment that is already known, once perceived but in the immediate, unengaged with the senses. Husserl’s example of the writing table provides a location from which “the world unfolds” (246). What is behind the table or beyond Husserl’s immediate perception creates the relegated background, that which is “put out of action” (548) in order to focus on the table and the “flux” of consciousness from the table. The background, thus, is both spatial and temporal. It is not only the physical space the writing table inhabits, but also its circumstances, the “historicity” (549) of its orientation in the world. How the table came to be, and what the writing table requires are concerns that Ahmed brings in using Heidegger’s conception of the table. Heidegger’s table “in order to write” (69, 551) creating an “intimate co-dwelling of bodies and objects” (551). The experience of the philosopher sitting at his table is one that is beyond perception. It evokes something additional to its originally perceivable purpose through its physical intimacy with the body. What is outside the body, then, are horizons made available as actions, labors that are historicized along with the body as ways of being oriented. Implicit in actions then, is the aspiration “for identity” (553), for our actions to give us meaning through occupations, positions in society.
Next, Ahmed discusses specifically sexual orientations with the idea of “becoming straight” (553). Within a space, we dwell, not just in the spatial sense of Heidegger’s “making room” (554) but also temporally. Orientations are not just about the immediate, they guide us in directions; towards what is ahead, based on genealogical and historical tendencies. Straightness, in that sense, is a direction, a line on which we can walk that is both historied and performative. According to Ahmed, the common equation of a child to a smaller version of his father creates a kind of “alignment: the utterance positions the child as the not-yet adult, by aligning sex (the male body) and gender (the masculine character) with sexual orientation (the heterosexual future)” (557). The child is asked to inherit the genealogy in order to continue the horizontal and then vertical straight lines of the family tree. Additionally, Ahmed cites the nearness of objects of love or of heterosexuality in the “conventional family home” as significant to a kind of field of objects from which we are oriented.
Finally, Ahmed addresses the queer subject, and the “queer slants” (560) of a reorientation of perception. She examines Merleau-Ponty’s discussion of the queering effect of a “slantwise” view or entering of a space. She objects to Ponty’s ultimate stance that the body should be a certain way (straight). Rather, she maintains that to enter a queer space is, ultimately, to be oriented towards a strange body. “This contact involves following rather different lines of connection, association, even exchange, as these lines are often invisible to others.” (564). Queer lines, rather than having distinct “points” which form a straight line, are by nature fleeting. Queerness connotes spaces that are in a field, that allow for different lines and varied orientations. It is, fundamentally, disorientation, the disturbance of the order of things and the confusion of familiar and strange that create a queer “oblique” line or object.
Ahmed closes with some postulations towards the politics of a queer phenomenological approach and the problems of “homonormativity”. Ultimately she arrives at the hope that “the table becomes queer when it provides support…to those whose lives and loves make them appear oblique, strange, and out of place.” (570)
Ahmed, Sara, Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006.
Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson Oxford: Blackwell, 1973.
Martin Heidegger, Ontology — the Hermeneutics of Facticity, trans. John van Buren , Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999.
Edmund Husserl, The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, trans. David Carr , Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1970
Edmund Husserl, Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy, Second Book, trans. Richard Rojcewicz and André Schuwer Dor- drecht: Kluwer Academic, 1989.
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith, London: Routledge, 2002.
it is a starting point dwelling with queerness as phenomen, but i like to do it as anthropological veiw point in living interaction of queer sobjects, among who are queer. it may be a phenomenology of queer rather than queer phenomenology.