María Lugones, Isabel Jiménez – Lucena, Madina Tlostanova, Walter Mignolo

El desprendimiento del pensamiento descolonial es la confianza en que otros mundos son posibles. “Otros mundos”: no uno nuevo y único que creamos de antemano que será el mejor, sino muchos, que están en proceso de construcción, planetariamente. El pensamiento descolonial piensa de variadas formas semióticas paralelas que son, a su vez, complementarias de los movimientos sociales que se mueven en los bordes y márgenes de estructuras políticas como el estado, los partidos. Y de las estructuras económicas (expuestas en las categorías de explotación, acumulación, opresión). ¿De que se desprende si no de la imagen de una totalidad que, desde el poder se confunde con el acontecer, las personas, las relaciones, los objetos -con “la realidad” como se dice comúnmente- y que nos hace creer que no hay afuera del todo global, no hay exterior, no hay salida? Bien, no hay exterior pero hay exterioridad, fracturas: hay la diferencia colonial e imperial, que abre puertas a otros futuros posibles.

by Sara Ahmed

In this groundbreaking work, Sara Ahmed demonstrates how queer studies can put phenomenology to productive use. Focusing on the “orientation” aspect of “sexual orientation” and the “orient” in “orientalism,” Ahmed examines what it means for bodies to be situated in space and time. Bodies take shape as they move through the world directing themselves toward or away from objects and others. Being “orientated” means feeling at home, knowing where one stands, or having certain objects within reach. Orientations affect what is proximate to the body or what can be reached. A queer phenomenology, Ahmed contends, reveals how social relations are arranged spatially, how queerness disrupts and reorders these relations by not following the accepted paths, and how a politics of disorientation puts other objects within reach, those that might, at first glance, seem awry.Ahmed proposes that a queer phenomenology might investigate not only how the concept of orientation is informed by phenomenology but also the orientation of phenomenology itself. Thus she reflects on the significance of the objects that appear—and those that do not—as signs of orientation in classic phenomenological texts such as Husserl’s Ideas. In developing a queer model of orientations, she combines readings of phenomenological texts—by Husserl, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, and Fanon—with insights drawn from queer studies, feminist theory, critical race theory, Marxism, and psychoanalysis. Queer Phenomenology points queer theory in bold new directions.