What contribution can philosophy make to queer and anticolonial politics? While answers are myriad, a significant number of philosophers have responded to this question by pointing to the potential of phenomenological philosophy in helping to describe the world and subsequently to transform it. In what follows, I seek to explicate briefly the nature of that potential through a sketch of queer phenomenology, decolonial phenomenology, and their possible interrelations, read through the unifying framework of understanding phenomenology first and foremost as a form of ontological suspension.
Ontological Suspension in Queer and Decolonial Theory
Phenomenology can be understood as an effort to assess how reality appears to consciousness such that assumptions about what is are put to the side. Phenomenology involves what many such as Lewis Gordon have termed an “ontological suspension.” In the second edition of Is God a White Racist?, William R. Jones offers an illuminating example:
Take an object such as the common household toilet-tissue holder and ask: “What is this?” This open-ended question allows the other person to select the angle of interpretation. Invariably, the most frequent response will be “A toilet-tissue holder.” This indicates that the person has chosen a particular angle of interpretation—a definition of the object that gives preeminence to one of its functions rather than choosing another of its significant attributes, e.g., its geometric configuration, composition or other functions. Note that the object, per se, never prespecifies which of its properties or multiple angles of interpretation should define it. (217)
The phenomenologist is interested in how and why what appears appears, as well as in the matter of how else it could appear, rather than in reducing the “object” in question to what it is initially assumed to be.
Sara Ahmed’s reflections on “orientation” in Queer Phenomenology are highly salient. “To be orientated,” Ahmed writes, “is also to be turned toward certain objects, those that help us find our way” (1). Whatever object is under discussion will be under discussion via orientations through which it appears. Different orientations facilitate different modes of appearing, so any rigorous claim about what is would require acts of reorientation through which other modes of appearance could be realized. To see the “toilet-tissue holder” as cardboard, as cylinder, as carbon, etc. requires reorienting such that it is not only a toilet-tissue holder. The phenomenologist, then, orients oneself toward an ongoing project of successive reorientations, a process described by Edmund Husserl as “free variation.”
Queer phenomenology might thus be broadly understood as beginning with an ontological suspension of the heteronormative assumptions that might otherwise structure everyday modes of appearing. From a heteronormative, homophobic, and/or transphobic perspective, many people have long appeared to some consciousness as if they were no more than deviance, as if they were reducible to a failure to comply with or manifest social ideals.
A queer consciousness thus involves something like the description of queerness Eve Sedgwick arrives at by likening heteronormativity to Christmas. In “the Christmas season,” Sedgwick writes, “all the institutions are speaking with one voice,” a voice whose function is to orient us all toward Christmas (5–6). Heteronormativity has a history of similarly speaking with one voice, seeking to orient all toward the (hetero)normative in the way that all the institutions in Sedgwick’s description seek to orient people toward Christmas. “What if instead,” Sedgwick asks, “the richest junctures weren’t the ones where everything means the same thing? . . . That’s one of the things that ‘queer’ can refer to: the open mesh of possibilities . . . and excesses of meaning when the constituent elements of anyone’s gender, of anyone’s sexuality, aren’t made (or can’t be made) to signify monolithically” (6–8).
In the context of decolonial thought, a similar move has been made. The classic exemplar is Frantz Fanon, who conceived of colonialism as producing a world structured by colonial consciousness, for which the colonized appear by definition as bad and the colonizers by definition as the forces of good. Such a world involves an ontological projection: some people become, simply, “natives,” and others “settlers.” “[I]t is the settler,” Fanon writes in The Damned of the Earth, “who has brought the native into existence and who perpetuates his existence.” To analyze the colonial situation, both colonized and colonizer generally begin with the ontology projected by the colonizer, an ontology in which “native” appears so as to justify a colonization and in which the continued being of the native is ensured by the maintenance of colonial hegemony. However, decolonization involves a consciousness that suspends the ontology projected by the colonizer: the colonized refuse to accept that they are subhuman.
At first, such consciousness may seek merely to replace the settler, to be considered “Man.” But as Fanon illustrates, such efforts to replace the colonizer are doomed to replicate colonial values and institutions, a fate that can only be avoided through rigorous political education and efforts to re-imagine human possibilities. Thus, Fanon can be characterized as arguing that the achievement of genuine decolonization involves a process through which the colonized achieve a phenomenological consciousness not only of the colonial system but of the revolutionary process and the conditions it sets forth.
Similarly, queer politics could be understood as from the start employing a phenomenological move of sorts: it begins with the impulse to see queer people from a perspective in which they can appear as more than a heteronormative ontology allows appearance. The point is well-illustrated through reference to a classic work in queer theory, Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble. Butler performs an ontological suspension of the presumption that feminism is only intelligible on the grounds of accepting “woman” as its subject, contending that “Within feminist political practice, a radical rethinking of the ontological constructions of identity appears to be necessary in order to formulate a representational politics that might revive feminism on other grounds” (8). Butler demonstrates the power relations producing women’s subordination to be part and parcel of constructing the basic ontologies of gender, sex, and sexuality. Undermining such subordination would thus demand a critical orientation toward these ontologies, and not simply adopting the feminine position within them.
Butler calls for a praxis of troubling gender, of performing the incoherence and invalidity of prevailing ontologies of sex and gender precisely so that other ways of performing gender and sexuality—and, indeed, of performing beyond them—can come to the fore. Thus, queer forms of parodying gendered ontologies emerge as, in effect, a performance of a phenomenological free variation, which raises the question, “How else could the social relations characterized as ‘sex, gender, and sexuality’ come to appear from other orientations?”
Similarly, Nelson Maldonado-Torres’s phenomenological interpretation of decolonial thought calls for adoption of “the de-colonial attitude,” a praxis that calls for phenomenological reflection and critique in order to overcome coloniality. Coloniality is understood as at once structuring relations of power and also the mundane consciousness of the “modern” world. Hence, the being of the world such that it is divided between a community of masters and a community of slaves is presupposed in the “common sense” of contemporary life as a basic addendum that structures and reconfigures the natural attitude. Thus, the decolonial attitude demands an ontological suspension of colonial ideologies but, as with Butler’s discussion of parody, is irreducible to an intellectualist exercise, calling ultimately for liberatory political engagement.
Queering Decolonization and Decolonizing Queerness
These points suggest that decolonization and queerness, considered as theoretical and political orientations, call for forms of ontological suspension that bracket how the world appears to consciousness within the natural attitude(s) produced by coloniality and heteronormativity. Given this, should these forms of ontological suspension be considered as overlapping or distinct, competing or complementary?
An initial answer might be that these are simply complementary forms of analysis, well-suited for simple combination. Following Kimberlé Crenshaw’s now well-known metaphor, we might say that the coloniality and queerness intersect, so that what is called for is an intersectional ontological suspension. While such a formulation has prima facie appeal, it nonetheless calls for further examination. In the context of ontological suspension, an issue immediately arises: if decolonial phenomenology suspends colonial ontology, does it not likewise suspend the very ontology under which queerness becomes legible? Likewise, we might ask the same for queer phenomenology, given that it may demand queering even the basic framework of colonizer/colonized.
Following theorists such as Oyèrónkẹ́ Oyěwùmí and María Lugones, we might begin by saying that the decolonial attitude is in one sense an independent means, exogenous to Western queer theory, of arriving at an ontological suspension of gender and sexuality. From the standpoint of many colonized peoples, notions of gender, sex, and sexuality appear as colonial impositions, ones not bearing any necessary relation to the prior ontologies of colonized peoples.
Yet to affirm that the forms of sex and gender that queer phenomenology ontologically suspends are also suspended by decolonial phenomenology does not suffice to subsume the relevance of queer phenomenology. This is so, first, for the simple reason that queer theory bears resources for understanding precisely those ontologies that have been colonially imposed. How queer phenomenology orientates itself so as to bracket heteronormative ontologies enriches decolonial thought; how queer phenomenology engages in free variation to imagine how else “sexuality” and other competing notions could appear is of great relevance to decolonial phenomenology. As ontological suspension is an imaginative exercise, rather than a mechanism that by pure fiat would eliminate an ontology, the interplay of queer and decolonial imaginaries animates the phenomenology of each.
Taking decolonization and queerness together, in light of the phenomenological spirit, suggests that each is capable of bringing about orientations in which monolithically colonial and/or heteronormative ontologies can be displaced and “seen” beyond. In some sense, this implies an overlap: insofar as what is displaced in each comes from a shared axiological source, each counters the same hegemony. This is most obviously so where those seeking decolonization also embrace queerness and vice versa, but on some level the case can be made that rigorous decolonization entails queering and rigorous queering entails decolonization.
If this is so, then the overlap paradoxically implies the persistent meaning of differentiating these projects. As Ahmed writes, “If queer is also (in effect) an orientation toward queer, a way of approaching what is retreating, then what is queer might slide between sexual orientation and other kinds of orientation” (172). To decolonize may, then, involve a queering of queerness. This pertains, especially, to those whose notion of queer politics implies subtle forms of coloniality, such that it is in effect the experience of queer people in the Global North that ought to dictate the agendas and terms of engagement of queer people the world over. Indeed, such queer politics may assume that sexuality could be liberated without decolonization, but given the conjunction of coloniality and ontologies of gender, many decolonial queer thinkers would argue that this is an impossibility. Decolonization might, then, offer an ontological suspension of the presumed subject of much queer theory.
Yet, by the same token, since—as Fanon warned—the anti-colonial impulse often begins with the desire to replace “Man,” many decolonial efforts presume precisely those gendered ontologies that a rigorous decolonization would have to unsettle. Queer politics and thought, then, and the orientations that they broker—whether initially formulated as part of a decolonial project or not—may need to be understood as points of reference for decolonial projects that take seriously the imperative, in effect, to decolonize themselves.
The relationship between queer phenomenology and decolonial phenomenology, then—like the relationship between queer politics and decolonial politics—calls not for adding one to the other as such but, instead, for each to realize what its orientation already demands through a process of reorienting in relation to the other. Any genuine phenomenology faces the issue that having suspended the ontology initially encountered does not suffice to render a subsequent ontology flawless, pure, or absolute. To call into question that the item before me is just a “toilet-tissue holder” is not for the purpose of declaring, “Actually, it is a cylinder of cardboard.” Indeed, for phenomenology in general as well as for queer and decolonial phenomenologies in particular, the intended function of suspending an ontology is not to draw a conclusion about which competing ontology would correctly replace it. The intended function is, instead, to engage in the creative project of imagining what else could be.
Thomas Meagher
Thomas Meagheris Assistant Professor of Philosophy atSam Houston State University. He specializes in Africana philosophy, philosophy of race, phenomenology, political theory, existentialism, and philosophy of science. Meagher earned his PhD at the University of Connecticut in 2018 and has previously been a Visiting Assistant Professor at Quinnipiac University, Visiting Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of Memphis, and a W. E. B. Du Bois Visiting Scholar Fellow at University of Massachusetts, Amherst.
