Disability, Queer Phenomenology, and the Politics of Personhood

Thomas Abrams

doi:10.51897/interalia/hhyl6349

Abstract

This paper explores Sara Ahmed’s Queer Phenomenology from a disability studies perspective. In addition to her emphasis on race and desire, I ask how we might use Ahmed’s queer, cultural phenomenology to ask about the sociomaterial basis of disablement, reflecting on the interactive emergence of these subjectivities more generally. In the first section of this paper, I examine¬¬ the three main chapters in Ahmed’s important book. I then ask what Ahmed might have asked, if she had explored disability therein. Next, I turn to some phenomenological disability studies, interrogating how subjectivity is put to work in the shared world, rather than universally accorded to all persons at all times. In the final section of this paper, I return to the basis of the phenomenological project itself, and ask what this revised version of subjectivity means for the phenomenology of Heidegger and Husserl, with an eye to future work.

Highlights

This paper explores Sara Ahmed’s Queer Phenomenology from a disability studies perspective
Sara Ahmed’s Queer Phenomenology has little to say about disabled personhood
To point this out is hardly a biting critique: most phenomenological work in disability studies has had little to say about race or sexual orientation

Summary

Introduction

This paper explores Sara Ahmed’s Queer Phenomenology from a disability studies perspective. It does so both through lay explanations of the body-gone-wrong propped up with reference to the medical dispositif, coupling a truth regime and associated set of practices, and the problem-solution trajectory demanded by that coupling in the clinical space.[3] This form of life is not without its own modes of orientation, available to personally-informed phenomenological

Results

Conclusion