Abstract
Phenomenology is an often-used form of inquiry within education and the social sciences more broadly. As scholars have employed its methods to answer complex social and political questions, new modes of inquiry have emerged. One such mode is queer phenomenology, which has sought to engage queer theory with phenomenology for an enriched form of inquiry. In this chapter, queer phenomenology will be explored, including its origins in the 21st century and the kinds of questions it can answer. A discussion of queer phenomenology's relation to the field of critical phenomenology is also included. Current research in both the social sciences and education that use this method is covered in depth.
TopIntroduction
Since Willis’ (1991) exploration of phenomenological inquiry in Short’s Forms of Curriculum Inquiry, much has changed not only in curriculum studies but in phenomenology more generally. Of particular interest is the introduction of critical phenomenology, and queer phenomenology specifically, as a distinct method for social and cultural inquiry within the framework of phenomenology. Phenomenology itself is a philosophical methodology introduced in the early-twentieth century by German philosopher Edmund Husserl (Luft & Overgaard, 2011). While Husserl focused mainly on idealistic phenomenology, which sought transcendental understandings of lived experiences, his student, Heidegger, focused on reflections of the life-world in the cultural manifestations all around us (Luft & Overgaard, 2011). Many of Europe’s most important thinkers of the twentieth century were influenced either directly or indirectly by Husserl and Heidegger, including Hannah Arendt and the Frankfurt School critical theorists in Germany. In France, phenomenology was taken up by public intellectuals such as Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Albert Camus, and, most importantly, by Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Emmanuel Levinas.
As Luft and Overgaard (2011) describe, phenomenology as a methodology includes three overarching paradigms: the first-person perspective, description, and intentionality. First, phenomenology is involved with a form of subjectivity; that is, how a person experiences the world from their first-person point-of-view. It does not seek to understand any kind of objective truth, but to understand the experiences of subjects as they encounter objects in the world (Crotty, 2015; Luft & Overgaard, 2011). Second, phenomenology as a methodology is concerned primarily with description of these experiences. However, people are formed by what is around us — the cultural baggage that informs how one understands their position in the world. Phenomenologists tend to “bracket” this baggage—called the natural attitude—in order to see the world with fresh eyes (Crotty, 2015; Luft & Overgaard, 2011). As Crotty (2015) describes, “Phenomenology is about saying ‘No!’ to the meaning system bequeathed to us. It is about setting that meaning system aside” (p. 82). Finally, intentionality describes how when one experiences life: consciously, as to be conscious is to be conscious of something (Crotty, 2015; Luft & Overgaard, 2011). Thus, phenomenology requires the confrontation with the objective world and one’s perceptions of those confrontations. Phenomenology is interested in the lived experiences of subjects encountering objects in the world from their first-person perspectives.
Key Terms in this Chapter
Critical Phenomenology: An approach to phenomenology which deals with not just the experience of reality itself, but the social, political, and cultural milieu in which these experiences occur.
Orientation: The ways in which one’s body, and thus embodied experience, is positioned in time and space toward certain objects and away from others.
Critical Theory: A theoretical framework which deals with the economic and political oppression of certain people by others; first associated with the Frankfurt School.
Disorientation: When one’s body, and thus embodied experience, is positioned away from the normative path and against hegemonic convention.
Queer Phenomenology: An approach to phenomenology explicated by Sara Ahmed which deals with how people have embodied experiences which are physically oriented in certain directions, down certain paths, and toward certain objects by hegemonic conventions.
Queer Theory: A theoretical framework which deals with challenging normative structures of gender and sexuality; first associated with post-structural and feminist philosophies.
Subjectivity: The point-of-view of the person-in-the-world; their thoughts, feelings, and understanding based on their lived experiences.
Intersubjectivity: The collective thoughts, feelings, and understandings of objects and other subjects shared between two or more people-in-the-world.