I started reading Queer Phenomenology because it occurred to me that the philosophy of phenomenology could do a lot to explain elements of queerness. Phenomenology seeks to ground the practice of philosophy in everyday life by showing that all our abstractions start in the world as we live it day-to-day. At the same time it's a philosophical investigation into what our everyday experiences are really like. I realized that this approach could say a lot of productive things about queerness. How do you know who you're attracted to? What's the difference between that and "being" queer? How do you know what your gender is---what your gender isn't? A phenomenologist could investigate what goes on inside you while you try to figure these questions out. Ch. 3 moves to the question of what bodies are not extended or at home in the given world with its available lines...themes are racialization, orientalism, whiteness, habit, drawing on Fanon and again Merleau-Ponty, but never losing sight of that table. This long chapter concludes with a notion of mixed orientations that can be productively read alongside Anzaldúa’s nepantlera and Mestiza consciousness.

G]round shaking. The book is disorienting in a good way. It invites the reader to be shaken, disoriented, to question our selves and our position and it evokes the power and necessity of disorientation as a source of movement and challenge. Ahmed doesn’t seem to insist that we deny the positions we currently occupy, or to move on, but to reorient ourselves. Like earthly tremors, queer phenomenology facilitates the formation of lines and fissures along the spaces of our existence, as events that open up new connections, rather than points in lines that bind us to existing structures and spaces in which living obliquely is made uncomfortable, if not impossible.” — Margaret Mayhew, Cultural Studies Review Foucault, Michel, Colin Gordon, and Paul Patton. 2012. Considerations on marxism, phenomenology and power. Interview with Michel Foucault; recorded on April 3rd, 1978. Foucault Studies 14: 98–114. I'm going to say up front that what follows is my interpretation of Sara Ahmed's book, as it stands now. This a book that rewards multiple readings and I feel already that my understanding is going to change and grow as I return to it; as far as I'm considered, that openness to re-reading is the pinnacle of what a good philosophical discussion should strive for, and she nails it.

At the library

Hall, Donald E., Annamarie Jagose., Andrea Bebell, and Susan Potte (eds.). 2013. The Routledge queer studies reader, London and New York: Routledge. Rarely does philosophical writing successfully manage to make its reader embrace the abstraction that comes along with such writing and bridge this abstraction with everyday, lived experience. Sara Ahmed’s Queer Phenomenology astoundingly does both. . . . Queer Phenomenology impressively emerges as a text that is reachable to its readers.” — Yetta Howard, Women's Studies In the context of recent literary and critical theories that have often favored impatience over patience, a hermeneutics of suspicion over a sense of wonder, extremity over everydayness, one of Ahmed’s singular achievements is to reorient our affective stances and intellectual idioms toward a less punitive engagement with the ordinary.” — Rita Felski, Contemporary Women's Writing

Those are the book's three chapters. The conclusion includes a discussion of moments of disorientation (which I didn't especially like or dislike) and a political upshot to the book, namely that there is a way of being queer which is too straight and she doesn't like that. Ahmed, S. (2006). Orientations: Toward a queer phenomenology. GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, 12(4), 543–574.Marnell, J. (in press). Radical Imaginings: Queering the Politics and Praxis of Participatory Arts-Based Research. In S. Kindon, R. Pain, & M. Kesby (Eds.), Critically Engaging Participatory Action Research: Praxis. Routledge. Scott, L. (2017). Disrupting Johannesburg Pride: Gender, race, and class in the LGBTI movement in South Africa. Agenda, 31(1), 42–49.