Queer phenomenology and literature: emotions, orientations and narratives in Sara Ahmed

Abstract

Sara Ahmed thinks about emotions, objects, spaces and orientations from their effects. Emotions are public realities that stick and separate us from others and that acquire their political meaning in social contact. The idea of stickiness and contact presupposes a subject which is inseparable from alterity. Ahmed makes use of phenomenology to explain this relationship between the self and the world. A queer phenomenology will consist in bringing to light the background of histories, norms and signs that normative spaces and familiar objects conceal by presenting themselves as timeless and natural.

In this paper I propose that Ahmed's philosophy allows us to read orientations, subjectivity and emotions in their narrative dimension. The importance that stories acquire in Ahmed's queer theory is useful to think the link between literature and politics from the reception and circulation of works. Feminist narratives contribute to generate estrangement from the normative world and to dislocate the familiar order. These dislocations open cracks from which to imagine, through literature, non-normative ways of desiring and perceiving the world.