Description: Cultural theorist Sara Ahmed demonstrates how queer studies can put phenomenology to productive use by analyzing what it means for bodies to be "oriented" in space and time.
Review Quotes: "Finally, a theorist who takes sexual 'orientation' at its word. In this moving meditation on directionality, Sara Ahmed takes phenomenology for a turn through queer theory, postcolonial studies, feminism, critical race theory, geometry, and labor politics. In the world Ahmed encourages us to reinhabit, as bodies come to matter, bodily action materializes space, children inherit proximities rather than attributes, privileged bodies sink into familiarity, and politics is at its best when it involves a measure of disorientation. Follow her 'lines' of reasoning and you'll never again reach for an explanation, a book, or a lover without wondering how your grasp extended so far in the first place."--Kath Weston, author of Gender in Real Time: Power and Transience in a Visual Age