Queer Phenomenology

“Even when things are within reach, we still have to reach for those things for them to be reached,” Sarah Ahmed wrote in this incredible investigation of what it means to be situated. Part conceptual analysis and part personal digression, Ahmed describes in three chapters that consciousness is intentional, embodied, sensitive, and situated. That our bodies are directed in some ways and not others, as a way of inhabiting or dwelling in the world, and she demonstrates how history is made with the very repetition of gestures. This does bring our subjectivity into perspective and in order to overcome it, one must make oneself subject, voluntarily, I want to say wholeheartedly. That there can be no orientation without dwelling. Phenomenology is at the heart of this study, a very potent testament to our own agency in the myriad individual lived experience we incarnate in the world. One of the best books I have ever read.