What is Queer Phenomenology? | Sara Ahmed | Keyword

hey everyone back again today is actually the first time i'm recording in my new apartment in montreal or montreal for anyone who might not know what mahayan means uh and yeah today i want to talk about sarah ahmed's queer phenomenology and the lighting might not be so good because i don't have all my stuff i wasn't actually planning on doing this one but i decided to anyways because i have to go back to london it's it's all very chaotic now before jumping into that if you want to follow me anywhere than here you can find me on instagram theory underscore and underscore philosophy or on twitter at david gino gyg and ion if you're new here welcome i'm david i try to explain philosophical text ideas in a way to make them accessible to you so if you're new like share subscribe tell your friends who knows they might get a kick out of it if you haven't done those things already and want to help me out do them you can help me out monetarily via patreon or paypal if you're into that at all links in the description or not no pressure of course if you found this on youtube you're going to be able to find it in podcast form so there shouldn't be any ads which is like so many people are like the ads find it in podcast form then you can download it listen to it however many times you like without any ads or if you found this in podcast form you're gonna be able to find it on youtube but there is also a video so if you're into that you can go and find that there and yeah don't waste any more of your time with that stuff let's talk about sarah ahmed's queer phenomenology now i've covered this text in its entirety so you can go and find episodes on that and i've also done i think one other ahmed text i think i've done the cultural politics of emotion maybe which you can go and listen to i'm obviously a big fan of ahmed's work but i i just want to talk today about this term queer phenomenology and in order to do that it's important to really begin with the term phenomenology which is where ahmed says that she begins now she aligns her version of phenomenology at least it's history with edmund hussrill now edmund hussarl is kind of a forgotten figure and i'm saying that with a big asterisk uh kind of really emphasizing that that term kind of because he was writing at the time similarly to the time similarly to heidegger so he kind of fell under heidiger's shadow a little bit but he was a pretty notable phenomenologist and he had some pretty uh strong political leanings that given them what was going on in europe at the time he was obviously trying to understand these political movements uh through his own philosophical work through phenomenology now the history of phenomenology is one that is difficult to really pin down so you have phenomenology from husserol from kant to hysterial heidegger phenom you have all of these kinds of merlot ponties south you have all of these different branches that can different figures that can fit into the camp of phenomenology and they are hardly congruent they are hardly the same so in order to really understand how ahmet is approaching this i think it's important or i'm going to give you some basic points that i think will get us off the ground and that is that phenomenology is in its simplest form the study of appearances and how people humans interact with things in the world as they come in contact with us through our senses through our ability to touch them see them smell them how they appear to us through all of these different senses and phenomenology is the study of those interactions how we interact with things in their immediacy and how we think about them reflect upon them how things become meaningful to us so in this way phenomenology is kind of a it claims to be a kind of neutral enterprise one that is just describing the experiences that all humans undergo and that is the experience of experience the very capacity to have engagement with things and and others in the world and this sets up the possibility of consciousness to some extent it sets up the ability the ability of emotions now phenomenology claims itself to be a pretty neutral enterprise as i've just said but there are moments where it challenges that neutrality to some extent going as far back as kant for example who in the third critique when discussing the sublime and discussing versus the beautiful he lays out the potential that is afforded by certain phenomena like being confronted with a mountain for example or a great storm that has the capacity to elicit a response within humans that is different if you were to just come into contact with a wall or with a cupboard door that doesn't have the same kind of emotional baggage or doesn't elicit the same kind of emotional response so we are as humans seems seems that we are oriented towards different objects in different ways we just have different responses to them but while in no way focused on kant ahmed performs a similar function in that she interrogates how some objects seem to draw us in more than others why are we oriented towards some objects in certain ways versus others in other ways so to go back to whose role who had much more of an influence on her in this text there's a moment in whoso role when husserl is meditating on the existence of his writing table where he sits to write and think now he meditates on this writing table to say that you know he has a phenomenal phenomenological engagement with this table he views the table it gives that table an appearance which then has some kind of effect on him and induces some kind of emotion and he says that he knows that while he's not necessarily looking at other things he knows that there are things around him too so it isn't just what you are immediately attuned to that you are aware of so i'm looking right now at the camera does not mean that i'm not aware of the fact that there are other things around me and you have to attune yourself to spaces in order to be comfortable to feel at home to feel at ease so there is that capacity there this capacity to see things that are kind of out of your purview but ahmed asks well how do we choose what these things are that we see so she says that in order for husserl to have this writing table in order for him to even engage in phenomenology depends upon largely the labor of his wife cleaning his table preparing his meals getting things ready for him or servants or or whoever to get things ready for him in order for him to even have this phenomenological experience and to even meditate upon that phenomenological experience to put forward his whole philosophy so ahmed asks what is forgotten here in our experiencing the world and certainly in the phenomenological tradition in our meditating on it what objects can enter into the phenomenological arena and what objects get pushed away or get disavowed so she says that in so far as phenomenology despite its claim to just study neutrally phenomena in the world things that humans come in contact with engage with and sense ahmed says that phenomenology is always to some extent kind of queer in that it doesn't only point in a single neutral direction it instead picks and chooses some things to understand to grasp over others it is quite skewed in that way it doesn't just assume a single linear form it drawing upon certain histories be it histories of colonization of patriarchy of racism all of these histories are going to influence what phenomenology is even capable of recognizing and what it is not capable of recognizing now it's been so effective effective that it has erased this fact that the very phenomenological project is one that is going to be culturally historically socially determined so ahmed says well why don't we just really embrace the fact that it is not we know full well that phenomenology is going to be biased it is going to be skewed so let us now consider instead how we can integrate those different perspectives how can we expand the category of phenomenology to actually account for its own skewedness its own queerness but do it to undo the very specific skewedness that we have one that favors largely in the case that she's describing uh white hetero men how can we expand this to include differing perspectives so in the case of for example race she says that spaces are organized in such a way as to favor certain races over others or same can apply to gender or disability versus able-bodied people who have an easier time moving through the world ahmed's vision is to rethink phenomenology to such an extent as to consider the ways that the world is not organized to actually accommodate all people in a neutral way but in fact only reflects the interests of those who are in power and that world is then that world then conforms to them and they feel comfortable in it they're able to move freely and easily through it and because of that it is all the more difficult for them to recognize that there is anything wrong at all especially in the case of disability where something like the height of doorknobs just feels totally normal for able-bodied people of a certain height but for people that might have difficulty actually using doorknobs suddenly what just appears to be a thing in the world that we don't even think about we don't even meditate on is suddenly a huge hindrance it's a huge barrier to one's moving through the world and so the operation of queering phenomenology is to actually be able to break out of this neutral mindscape in order to enter into the possibility in order to consider the possibility that some spaces some experiences some appearances aren't really so neat as to just lend themselves to our senses and can actually be huge hindrances they can actually be huge limitations for certain people and the phenomenological engagement that they'll have with it is not a neutral one it's actually one that is quite difficult one that is one that presents a barrier to circumvent so queer phenomenology is the practice then of considering how certain spaces certain objects have been given the status of neutrality of objectivity but then on doing that just by following through with what phenomenology has always done it has always been about certain perspectives certain orientations certain objects and having them be neutral having to be accessible versus others being unaccessible being uncomfortable and she describes how those people who are enjoy comfort in the world just sit in a chair they're just like they're sitting in a chair that conforms perfectly to them while for others whose bodies aren't so privileged just to be able to as to have the world conform to them sit in this seemingly comfortable chair for those privileged people but then find it to be quite uncomfortable because it does not match their actual needs it doesn't match their actual phenomenological engagement with the world in a neutral clear way and yeah that's pretty well it pretty short-ish thing if you want more on it like i said i've covered the whole text you can go check that out if you like what i did like share subscribe tell your friends um if you want to see more of my apartment you probably will time i haven't found an actual place to record yet uh hence my sitting on my bed with the weird background but i'll figure that all out with time uh and yeah take care

Channel: Theory & Philosophy

Views: 12,460

Keywords: sara ahmed, queer phenomenology

Id: Z4F2S1Oekms

Length: 12min 18sec (738 seconds)

Published: Thu Nov 04 2021