1
A Phenomenology of Objectification
R.E.H. Gordon
May 2008
Queer is a strange term, multiple and meaning and widely variable in its
interpretations. It is easy to argue, as people often do, that such a term is unnecessary,
that it closes meaning down just as we are trying to create space for more possible
configurations of non-normative identity. It is true that to name something is to draw a
circle around it, to define it as an ‘it’ that can be given a name, but insofar as this is true it
also means that a name is necessary for an object, or object of inquiry, to exist in public
discourse, as well as academic institutions. I believe that though a term is not always
necessary, it will at certain junctures be crucial, and as such, at the current moment, I find
“queer” to be rather generous one. However, my fondness for this term, and more
specifically its theoretical exploration and academic manifestation, ‘queer theory,’ lies in
a particular definition of it that will be important to enunciate. My hope is that queer
theory can delineate a field of inquiry that is concerned with the conceptualization and
articulation of possibilities for subjectivity, identity, gender, sexuality, and becoming that
takes as its point of departure the rejection of naturalized heteronormativity, without
limiting itself to addressing only “queer” identities as they have been understood—gay,
lesbian, transgender etc. My hope is that queer can be a term that encompasses a wide
range of identities, bodies, and sexualities, while queer theory can position itself as more
than a niche theoretical area and instead serve as a destabilizing force for the cultural and
academic world at large. The central tenets of queer theory of course originate in gay,
2
lesbian, and transgender subcultures, and the term itself is a reference to the history of
hatred directed toward those practicing non-normative sexualities or genders. As such,
queer theory’s alliance with these subcultures will be perpetual. However, as much as
queer theory serves as a mode of expression and resource for these communities, queer
theory is also in a position to be able to participate in a rethinking of subjectivity that is as
crucial for those living as their assigned gender and sexually oriented to the “opposite”
gender. Just as feminism cannot concern only women, queer theory and queer politics
cannot concern only those defined by a very limited definition of queerness.1 In order for
queer theory to effect the change that I believe it can and needs to, it cannot define itself
purely in reference to sexual orientation—rather, it needs to address itself more generally
to the rich and varied questions raised by orientation. How, as bodies, do we orient
ourselves in the world, towards objects and towards one another?
I enunciate this understanding of the term queer in part because it explains my
great excitement about Sara Ahmed’s project in Queer Phenomenology. Despite
numerous points of critique of the way that she goes about exploring the object of inquiry
she defines, I find her aims to be highly promising in terms of how they might allow us to
theorize queerness in relation to orientations in ways that are more complex than a focus
on sexual orientation alone. By putting queer theory in conversation with
phenomenology, Ahmed is able to pose questions regarding the ways in which everyday
experience in relation to objects and environments is capable of defining or being defined
by heteronormative imperatives or—conversely, how queerness could be seen as a way
1
Furthermore, as gay, lesbian, and to an extent, transgender lifestyles become increasingly accepted in the public
sphere and increasingly visible in public life, it is contestable how “queer” (non-normative, radical) these identities
continue to be, making it arguable that the gap between queerness as a theoretical approach and queerness as a sexual
orientation is widening. See Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology (book) pp. 172-173. For illustrative examples see also the
MTV show that aired in the Fall of 2007 and Spring of 2008 A Shot at Love with Tila Tequila or “Young Gay Rights,”
New York Times Magazine, April 27, 2008.
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of being in the world of objects, as a body, in a fashion that resists these imperatives. In
the spirit of the “reparative” reading defined by Eve Kososky Sedgewick,2 I am not in
this essay going to elucidate my disappointments with Ahmed’s text, though this would
be a viable project. I am instead going to draw on some of her most compelling points in
an effort to attempt to theorize different possibilities for what might comprise a “queer
phenomenology.” I will draw on texts by Elizabeth Grosz, Michel Foucault, and Maurice
Merleau-Ponty in order to take her aims and put them to use for my own theoretical
project. In short, I will suggest that a queer phenomenology might involve a unique
embrace of the objectivity of the body, as well as a refashioning of the relationship
between insides and outsides, subjectivity and objectivity, surface and depth—in the
hopes of elaborating the potential for the existence of an objectivity that does not have a
relation of opposition to subjectivity, but can stand alone as a full account of lived
experience.
In her text, Ahmed poses the question of what it means for sexuality to be lived as
oriented. By orientation, she is referring to the repeated and habitual ways in which a
subjectivity develops through the proximity and visibility of certain objects, persons, and
identities. She looks to think of the question of sexual orientation as having to do with the
way in which we inhabit space and relate to objects, rather than solely through the chosen
object of sexual desire. She offers a way of thinking about how bodies take shape
“through tending toward objects that are reachable, which are available within the bodily
2
Kosofsky Sedgewick, Eve. “Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading, or, You’re So Paranoid, You Probably Think
This Essay is About You.” Touching Feeling: Affect Pedagogy, Performativity. Durham/London: Duke University
Press, 2003. pp. 123-151.
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horizon.”3 Her application of phenomenology to queer theory is based in the way in
which
phenomenology makes orientation central in the very argument that
consciousness is always directed toward objects and hence is always
worldly, situated, and embodied…Phenomenology can offer a resource for
queer studies insofar as phenomenology emphasizes the importance of
lived experience, the intentionality of consciousness, the significance of
nearness or what is ready to hand, and the role of repeated and habitual
actions in shaping bodies and worlds.4
In this sense, Ahmed sees phenomenology to take as given these elements of
everyday experience that are crucial to theorizing the operations of heteronormativity,
in addition to normativity more generally and the operations of racism. Tendencies
toward this or that are the products of repeated actions involving the objects that are
available, and she aims to denaturalize “straightness” through the analysis of how
these objects/options come to be “tended toward.”
This means that for Ahmed, it is possible for certain spaces or objects to fail to
provide a means of extension for certain types of bodies or identities, to produce what she
calls as “failed orientation.” If subjectivity occurs out a reciprocal relationship between
bodies and spaces that takes place in the context of repeated habitual actions, certain
spaces will have the effect of making some bodies and orientations look and feel out of
place, strange, and incapable of extending into space. These moments of disorientation
are where she points to as a place to begin to elaborate a queer phenomenology:
The question then becomes not so much what is a queer orientation, but
how we are oriented toward queer moments when objects slip. Do we
retain our hold of these objects by bringing them back “in line”? Or do we
let them go, allowing them to acquire new shapes and directions? A queer
3
Ahmed, Sara. “Orientations: Toward a Queer Phenomenology.” GLQ. Issue 12, Volume 4, 2006. pp. 553-574. (544)
For the purpose of this paper I draw on the book version of this article as well as the article itself, as they provide
slightly different enunciations of her ideas.
4
(ibid, 544)
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phenomenology might involve an orientation towards what slips, which
allows what slips to pass through, in the unknowable length of its duration.
In other words, a queer phenomenology would function as a disorientation
device; it would not overcome the “disalignment” of the horizontal and
vertical axes, allowing the oblique to open up another angle on the world.5
So, though Ahmed is vehement that disorientation should not be prescribed as a queer
politics, she concludes her text with this suggestion that we focus on an embracing of
these moments of slippage—moments in which bodies do not or cannot gracefully extend
into space—in the formulation of a queer phenomenology.
I am interested in the way that Ahmed locates this disorientation in a moment
when the body becomes “an object alongside other objects.”6 She elaborates this overobjectivity of the body throughout the text both in relation to Merleau-Ponty’s work in
The Phenomenology of Perception as well as in Franz Fanon’s account of the racialized
gaze in Black Skin White Masks. Fanon describes the way in which racism causes one’s
“corporeal schema” to be overshadowed by a “racial-epidermal schema,”7 in which the
racist gaze calls the black body’s embodied involvement in the world into crisis by the
force of its attention paid to the body from without, destroying one’s ability to extend
one’s body into the world. The objectification of the white gaze causes the black subject
to objectify himself, to return the racist gaze to himself—a kind of self objectification
that has profoundly disorienting effects.
This is possible, Ahmed shows, because whiteness operates phenomenologically
in the following way: Spaces and objects that are coded as white are invisibly coded as
such to those white bodies that inhabit them. The experience of whiteness is defined by
5
Ahmed, Sara. Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others. Durham/London: Duke University Press, 2006.
(172)
6
Ibid, 159.
7
Ibid, 110.
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the absence or invisibility of the sense that one is white or possesses whiteness as long as
the space that one occupies is also coded as white. So, for the white person occupying a
“white space”—he or she will not have an experience of his or her whiteness—will not
“be white” and instead will just “be.” Ahmed likens this to they way in which an object
of habitual use disappears as an object of consideration when it is integrated into the
habitual action, only becoming visible as an object when this habitual use is disrupted in
some way, causing the objectivity of the object to come into focus in a moment of
disorientation. As Richard Dyer puts it, white domination operated as a result of the way
that white people “colonize the definition of the normal,”8 such that whiteness remains
invisible while signs of racial difference deviate from this invisible norm. So, whiteness
operates such that white subjects are able to extend their bodies into space in a way that
does not involve a particular focus on the objectivity of their body as seen from without,
and this is made possible via the invisible definition of the space as white—a definition
that only becomes visible to those non-white bodies that find themselves disoriented
through an overbearing sense of the objectivity of their body (the historico-epidermal
schema.)
This logic of the invisible operation of norms is not just applicable to racial
difference. A similar dynamic is at play regarding the operation of norms of gender and
sexuality as well. The common refrain that to be “a woman in a man’s world” involves
endless moments of “objectification” evidences the way in which the bodies of those who
do not embody the invisible norm experience a hyper-awareness of their physical
objectivity, directed towards this body from the public as well as towards oneself through
the taking up of their objectifying gaze. Similarly, our cultural imaginary is learning to be
8
Dyer, Richard. “White.” Screen. Issue 29, Volume 4, Autumn 1988. (45)
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comfortable with gayness only in the form an archetypal gay man who is over-defined by
the materiality of his sexual practices, his particular affinity for material objects, and his
aesthetic “over-sensitivity.” For any of us who have entered a space the norm of which
we do not embody, I imagine that the disorienting experience of one’s body-as-object is
recognizable. Norms operate materially by structuring the relationships between spaces
and bodies such that it is on the level of the materiality of the body that deviance is made
publicly identifiable.
I articulate this well-worn logic of objectification because I am interested in
engaging in a possible rethinking of the conceptual strategies that aim to counter the
objectifying effect of norms. The ideological opposition between objectivity and
subjectivity would indicate that moments of objectification must be countered with the
subjectification of those objectified—the logic being that if the objectified person were
recognized as a subject the power self-perpetuating invisible norms could be tempered.
The forms taken by this “subjectification of the objectified” include practices such as
self-expression, personal narrative, dialogue, cultural education, outreach—all forms that
are based on the promise that objectification will be reconsidered when the objectified
can be transformed into a subject through access to his or her depth, intellect, emotion,
narrative, individuality, or soul. In terms of the racialized gaze, this subjectification is
often articulated in terms of “the gaze returned”9—the resistance implicit in the
possibility finding agency in engaging in individual subjective expression articulated
through the eyes (the windows to the soul.)
9
See Fatimah Tobing Rony’s work on early ethnographic cinema for an example of the positioning of resistance in the
returned gaze. Rony, Fatimah Tobing. The Third Eye: Race, Cinema, and Ethnographic Spectacle. Durham/London:
Duke University Press, 1996. There are numerous popular examples of this logic of subjectivity found in the returning
of the colonial gaze such as photography in magazine such as National Geographic or enthnographers who aim to
counter colonialism by providing cameras and allowing cultures to document themselves.
8
While I do not aim to pose a direct criticism of the discourse of subjectification of
the objectified through a claim to narrative personhood—“everyone has a story”—I do
think that it comes at an expense. This tactic exists within the framework of an opposition
between the subject and the object such that it is through passing over from the realm of
materiality and the body to that of a disembodied or less embodied mode of personal
expression that subjectivity can be claimed. If the privilege that comes from embodying a
norm is the freedom to not experience oneself to be a body—to be a subject and not an
object—then this logic of interior personhood operates by “raising” the deviant up to the
level of the normative. It does this by giving the objectified access to the normative
subject’s privileged mode of disembodied expressiveness, or an embodiment that is
optional as a luxury rather than overpoweringly activated by the normative gaze. In other
words, this dominant strategy of subject making for the non-normative is effective insofar
as it operates within the accepted subject/object dichotomy. I do not mean to say that I
disapprove of the valuable work accomplished by this type of subject-attainment through
de-objectification—it is surely crucial, especially because it is exists within a the
dichotomous framework that is culturally dominant. Just as all the equality-driven work
accomplished by early feminists made is possible for women to have the voices they need
in order to question the discourse of male-female equality,10 the access to personhood of
the objectified and oppressed is urgently necessary.
However, I aim to identify an alternative approach to objectification that could
potentially coexist with the strategy outlined above, while existing on a different register.
I locate this investigation within the communities and individual experiences of those
10
…insofar as it does not theorize a mode of subjectivity that is unique to women and instead attempts only to clear the
way for women to be able to do everything men can do.
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who have been objectified, rather than in the circulation of knowledge and identity
politics that marks the discourse of subjective expression. Is it possible to theorize a
mode of subjectivity that is not in opposition to objectivity, or a re-working of
objectification so that it is not antithetical to a dignified subjectivity? If norms such as
whiteness and heterosexuality operate on the level of the material—in spaces and on
bodies—is there a way to engage with them on the level of materiality, to use this
objectification as the starting point for a phenomenology of objectivity?
Merleau-Ponty’s late phenomenological work outlines the notion of the flesh—a
term that refers to the intertwining of the objective and the subjective within the human
subject, as well as the intertwining of the objective (what he calls the visible) and the
subjective (what he calls the invisible) in the material world—as well as the intertwining
of these two intertwinings with one another, hence “the chiasm.”11 For Merleau-Ponty,
the body is an object amidst a world of objects, a unique kind of object, but an object
nonetheless. The body’s extension into the world is, for him, possible by virtue of the fact
that the physical world and the body possess the same fundamental structure of
interrelation between the corporeal and non-corporeal elements.
The body unites us directly with the things through its own ontogenesis,
by welding to one another the two outlines of which it is made, its two
laps: the sensible mass it is and the mass of the sensible wherein it is born
by segregation and upon which, as seer, it remains open. It is the body and
it alone, because of its two dimensional being, that can bring us to the
things themselves, which are themselves not flat beings but beings in
depth, inaccessible to a subject that would survey them from above, open
to him alone that, if it be possible, would coexist with them in the same
world.12
11
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. “The Intertwining—The Chiasm”. In The Visible and the Invisible. Translated by Alphonso
Lingis. Northwestern University Press. Illinois: 1968. Originally published in the French 1964. pp. 130-155.
12
Ibid, 136.
10
The way in Merleau-Ponty theorizes an irreducible interrelationship between the
subjective and the objective presents a model of the subject which is embodied to the
degree that the two terms could no longer be said to be in opposition to one another. “The
flesh” refers not to either the flesh of the body of the flesh of the world, but defines the
general principle of the materiality of lived experience, in spaces and regarding objects,
that can account for the material processes by which norms self-perpetuate. As Judith
Butler put it “the flesh, understood as a relation of tactility that precedes and informs
intersubjective relations, necessarily disorient[s] a subject-centered account. The flesh is
not something one has, but, rather, the web in which one lives.”13
In this way, Merleau-Ponty’s concept of the flesh could be useful in imagining an
approach to experience that takes seriously the material register on which identity and
normativity operate. If the key to the functioning of a norm is its invisibility—the
immateriality of the white male heteronormative body—than a queer phenomenology
might involve an embrace and elaboration of objectivity rather than (or in addition to) a
striving for disembodied expressive agency. In thinking about contemporary cultural
practices through this lens, it seems as if this logic has long been in practice in
subcultures of all kinds—from the hyperbole of drag queens, to the punk’s Mohawk, to
the highly styled presentation of a butch-femme pairing, to the dance-club as a mecca of
alternative subjectivities and sexual practices, to the excessive self adornment of much of
hip-hop fashion.14
13
Butler, Judith. “Merleau-Ponty and the Touch of Malebranche”. In: The Cambridge Companion to Merleau-Ponty.
Taylor Carman and Mark B.N. Hansen, ed. Cambridge University Press. Cambridge: 2005. (181)
14
As Cassidy rhymes in the remix of “Hustler” “Stones clear in the necklace, I wear so much plat on my neck
It put bruises on the back of my neck, that's why cats is upset.” Or, Jay Z in “Upgrade U” by Beyonce: “cuz that rock
on your finger is like a tumor, you can’t fit your hand in your new purse.”
11
Elizabeth Grosz’s conception of “architectures of excess” could be useful as a
way of thinking about a refusal to forgo the excesses of the objective body in favor of the
invisibility of the normative body.15 In discussing architecture, she is not involved in
providing usable design strategies, nor does she discuss actual buildings or design
projects. As such, I take her term “architectures of excess” to refer less to particular
buildings or ways to design buildings and more to a way of theorizing the ways we do or
could inhabit them. Excess, in this sense, could be theorized as an approach to spatiality
that could “queer” an experience of a normatively coded space, allowing it to function
differently.
The concept of excess, or more, enables the question of the
superabundant—that which is excluded or contained because of its
superabundance—to be raised as political, as much as an economic and an
aesthetic, concept. This excess, that which the sovereign, clean, proper,
functional, and self-identical subject has expelled from itself, provides the
conditions of all that both constitutes and undermines system, order,
exchange, and production...Is it possible to actively strive to produce an
architecture of excess, in which the “more” is not cast off but made
central, in which expenditure is sought out, in which instability, fluidity,
the return of space to the bodies whose morphologies it upholds and
conforms, in which the monstrous and the extrafunctional, consumption as
much as production, act as powerful forces?16
In the context of this work, I interpret Grosz’s excess to refer to the excessive objectivity
that is pinned on queer subjects when they enter spaces that do not accommodate them, as
well as to the excesses of this objectivity: the body and its functions, parts, and
adornments. Understood in this way, Ahmed’s interest in disorientation as a queer
political strategy begins to make sense, if I carry her logic forward and in a different
direction: if moments of disorientation are moments in which the body is an object, then
15
Grosz, Elizabeth. “Architectures of Excess” Architecture from the Outside. Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 2001. pp.
151-156.
16
Ibid, 162-163.
12
this objectification could be seen as both a mechanism of the power of normativity as
being potentially flipped and wielded as a mode of embodiment or an approach to
spatiality. A phenomenology of objectification would be a mode of subjective becoming
that refuses to enter into a dialogue that is structured on the opposition between the
subject and the object. Instead, the material becomes the single domain in which
experience and expressiveness occur.
Grosz provides an interesting model that could be used in theorizing this singular
material register, this objectivity that is unopposed to subjectivity, when she discusses
Gilles Deleuze’s writing on Michel Foucault and presents the model of the fold.17 The
fold, in this conversation, would refer to an exterior surface that, when folded, creates an
interior space that is not dichotomous with the outside because the two are co-extensive.
The result would be an inside that is a product of an outside; an inside that is an outside
in a different form—“a contortion of the exterior surface.”18 This rethought relationship
between the binaries of inside and outside, subject and object, mind and body, could be
integral to elaborating upon the understanding of embodied experience which Ahmed
identified in phenomenology. It is my hope that new possibilities can be found less in
disproving the logic of objectification and more in harnessing it toward the creation of
new modes of experience in all their material excess. Perhaps this is what Foucault meant
when he wrote that we might “counter the grips of power with the claims of bodies,
pleasures, and knowledges, in their multiplicity and their possibility of resistance.”19
17
Grosz, Elizabeth. “Architectures from the Outside” Architecture from the Outside. Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 2001.
pp. 57-73.
18
Ibid, 68.
19
Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality: An Introduction, Volume 1. New York: Vintage Books, 1990. (Original
translation by Robert Hurley, 1978.) (157)