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Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others

By: Sara Ahmed
Binding: Paperback
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 0822339145
ISBN-13: 9780822339144
Released: 17 Jan 2007
RRP: £12.99
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Customer Reviews

awesome - By: outlaw, 13 Feb 2007
This is a beautifully written book that makes you look at the world differently. Ahmed offers a meditation on how we get oriented or directed by objects - especiallly tables - in a way that makes sexual orientation continuous with other forms of spatial orientation. Her readings of phenomenology are quirky & intriguing. She talks about secrecy - what we miss when we view an object from a specific point - in order to think about how genealogy (the question of how objects arrive) might be interwoven with phenomenology. So we cannot 'see' how things arrive, even when we do things with things. She shows how norms become part of the background, affecting how objects are arranged, as well as what does & does not come into view. She interrogates whiteness as well as heterosexuality in these terms. I loved how tables are part of this book (the writing tables that are philosophy's domesticated objects, as well as other kinds of tables, including kitchen tables & dining tables, which she describes as 'kinship objects'). I never thought tables could be so interesting, but once you read this book, you will keep noticing them! And of course, the table becomes queer - it becomes wonky, when it supports queer action, or even simply when we notice the table as something we do something on. This book makes furniture something to think about. Wow!