Queer Phenomenology at 20
Description
In her 2006 book Queer Phenomenology: Objects, Orientations, Others, Sara Ahmed asks how we are oriented and how we come to find our way. Ahmed thus thinks across queer feminist theories of sexuality and traditional phenomenology, evaluating the latter’s efforts to bring what is commonplace or taken-for-granted into focus, and doing so through matrices of gender, race, and sexuality. Thus, Ahmed considers the ways in which we become familiar with and habituated to spaces, and how we are socialized to follow certain lines more than others, experiencing disorientation when one makes a 'detour' from the normative path, or meeting the normative at a disorderly angle ('oblique,' she reminds us, is etymologically central to the term 'queer' itself). Knowing this, how do we open up to new worlds? How do we embrace disorientation as a practice and/or theory of queer politics without romanticizing its frequent groundlessness and disruption?
Queer Phenomenology’s path-breaking interventions have provided a framework for thinking through the orientations of individual bodies, as well as the orientations of queer theory, feminist theory, postcolonial theory, and critical race theory more broadly. On the occasion of its 20th anniversary, this panel invites papers that engage with Ahmed’s text in new ways, expanding on its notions of queerness, relation, phenomenology, orientation, space, embodiment, and/or belonging. Inspired by writers spanning Adania Shibli, Négar Djavadi, Virginia Woolf, Etel Adnan, Dionne Brand, Elif Batuman, and limitless others, paper topics may engage the applications of Ahmed’s theories to texts—literary or otherwise—concerned with networks of bodies who experience the world in a 'queer' fashion, understood capaciously. Papers may also take an interest in the trajectory of queer feminist theory over the past 20 years and the role of Ahmed and Queer Phenomenology in this development, opening up new horizons for thinking, working, and writing.
Schedule
Papers
Speaker Bio
Timothy Pantoja is a Stanford Mellon Post-Doctoral Fellow in the Humanities whose research is invested in exploring the ways Black art and literature render the social conditions upon which theories and performances of art rely. He previously was the Medical Humanities Post-Doctoral Fellow in the English Department at New York University where he taught courses exploring the ways art, literature, and humanistic inquiry offer resources to engage the hidden aspects of health and illness.
Speaker Bio
Autumn Banks is an M.A. student in the department of Religions and Cultures at Concordia University, where she also completed a B.A. in Linguistics in 2024. Her research examines reappropriations of the biblical Book of Ruth in 20th and 21st century lesbian literature in order to explore what a continuous return to Ruth reveals about the construction of lesbian identities in religious contexts. Autumn is from Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island and currently lives in Montréal.
Speaker Bio
Victoria (Tia) Glista is a 4th year PhD candidate in English and Sexual Diversity Studies at the University of Toronto. Her scholarship has appeared in Camera Obscura and Contemporary Women's Writing, while her writing for the public is regularly published in The Guardian, Los Angeles Review of Books, Cleveland Review of Books, and elsewhere. Her dissertation unearths the undervalued import of bodily comportment (gesture, posture, pose) in American feminist cultural production of the 70s/80s.
Speaker Bio
Audrey Lane Ellis is an interdisciplinary philosopher trained in the traditions of phenomenology, ethics, and aesthetics, in addition to women’s, gender, and sexuality studies. She is currently the Associate Director and Professor in Residence for the PhD in Creativity at Rowan University. Before entering academia, she worked extensively as a performance artist and choreographer. Her research is focused on contemporary philosophies of embodied knowledge and corporeal ethics, with an emphasis on how these theories materialize in dance practices and improvisational art practices more generally. Her forthcoming manuscript is titled Improvisation and The Curious Body and will be published in 2026.
Papers
Speaker Bio
Ziwei Jiang is an MA student in the Department of East Asian Studies at McGill University, where she also completed her BA. Her MA thesis, titled “When Below Met Above: Hand-Copied Novels of the Chinese Cultural Revolution,” examines hand-copied novels from the Chinese Cultural Revolution (1966–1976) with a focus on the relationship between underground and official realms in socialist China. Her research interests include comparative literature, postcolonial criticism, and gender studies.
Speaker Bio
Alejandra Mena is a PhD student in the department of French Literature, Thought and Culture at NYU. Her research interests revolve around ecological thought, philosophies of difference, mode, work, and technics, as well as materialist feminism and queer theories of relationality.
Speaker Bio
Eden Kinkaid is a postdoctoral researcher in Human Geography at the University of Toronto, Scarborough. Their work connects human geography, philosophy, gender studies, and art and focuses on themes of transgender embodiment, queer space, and institutional critique. They are the author of Disorienting Phenomenology: Queer Space and Trans Life (forthcoming with University of Minnesota Press).