Sexuality and Phenomenology: Reading Sara Ahmed’s Queer Phenomenology
Wednesday 21 and Thursday 22 May 2008
University College Dublin, Ireland
This two-day intensive, interdisciplinary seminar is devoted to reading the renowned feminist and postcolonial theorist Sara Ahmed’s important recent book, Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others (Duke University Press), which opens up a sustained dialogue between queer theory and phenomenology. The book engages critical questions about orientation, materiality and temporality and draws on queer theory, postcolonial theory, Marxism, feminism, critical race theory, psychoanalysis, as well as the phenomenology of Edmund Husserl, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Martin Heidegger and Frantz Fanon to ask crucial questions about how our bodies inhabit space and time.
Professor Ahmed will lecture on her related current work on day one of the seminar, which is a project on happiness, feeling and directionality. On day two specialists from the fields of queer theory, feminism and philosophy will offer short responses to Queer Phenomenology, in an effort to open the book up tofurther discussion with attendees of the seminar more generally. Professor Ahmed will participate in this discussion of her book.
Description of Queer Phenomenology (dust jacket) In this groundbreaking work, Sara Ahmed demonstrates how queer studies can put phenomenology to productive use. Focusing on the ‚orientation‘ aspect of ’sexual orientation‘ and the ‚orient‘ in ‚orientalism‘, Ahmed examines what it means for bodies to be situated in space and time. Bodies take shape as they move through the world directing themselves toward or away from objects and others. Being ‚orientated‘ means feeling at home, knowing where one stands, or having certain objects within reach. Orientations affect what is proximate to the body or what can be reached. A queer phenomenology, Ahmed contends, reveals how social relations are arranged spatially, how queerness disrupts and reorders these relations by not following the accepted paths, and how a politics of disorientation puts other objects within reach, those that might, at first glance, seem awry.
Ahmed proposes that a queer phenomenology might investigate not only how the concept of orientation is informed by phenomenology but also the orientation of phenomenology itself. Thus she reflects on the significance of the objects that appear-and those that do not-as signs of orientation in classic phenomenological texts such as Husserl’s Ideas. In developing a queer model of orientations, she combines readings of phenomenological texts-by Husserl, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, and Fanon-with insights drawn from queer studies, feminist theory, critical race theory, Marxism, and psychoanalysis. Queer Phenomenology points queer theory in bold new directions.
Sara Ahmed is Professor of Race and Cultural Studies at Goldsmiths College, University of London and works at the intersection between feminist theory, critical race and postcolonial theory and queer studies. She is the author of Differences that Matter: Feminist Theory and Postmodernism (Cambridge University Press, 1998); Strange Encounters: Embodied Others in Post-Coloniality (Routledge, 2000); The Cultural Politics of Emotion (Edinburgh University Press, 2004); and Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others (Duke University Press). She is the co-editor of Uprootings/Regroundings: Questions of Home and Migration (Berg, 2003); Thinking Through the Skin (Routledge, 2001) and Transformations: Thinking Through Feminism (Routledge, 2000), and the author of many articles and book chapters. She is currently writing a book on happiness which explores how happiness works as a promise that directs us towards certain objects by analysing the ‚conversion points‘ between bad and good feeling within a range of narratives.
Further Information & Registration:
Everyone is welcome however pre-registration is required. We suggest registering early as places are limited to 30 people to facilitate an informal atmosphere. There is a nominal registration fee of 15e (academics/professionals) and 10e (students/dependent on circumstances) to cover costs. For further details
contact: noreen.giffney[at]ucd.ie, michael.orourke[at]ucd.ie
Website: www.theeories.com
aus: http://www.sibeal.ie/news–events-page.html