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spacestationtrustfund's review
3.0
Sara Ahmed thought of an "orientation" pun and this is the result.
tallonrk1's review
5.0
This is the smartest book I've ever read. It's also one of the most lucid and clearest books I've ever read. Sara Ahmed writes so fluidly, with such insight and clarity, and without the opaque academic jargon you might expect from a book with the word "Phenomenology" in the title. It's rare I get excited over a theoretical/philosophical text, but Ahmed's perspective here is truly mind-changing. This is a book that won't let you look at the world around you the same way again. Ahmed is attentive to the background in this book-- the way that we inhabit the world around us, and how the spaces we inhabit, and the bodies and objects within those spaces, shape and are shaped by our contact with them. Ahmed ultimately pushes for a politics of disorientation-- of looking at the world askew, of allowing new bodies and objects to come into view as we take up new perspectives and see the world from a different angle. Ahmed reveals how our ways of living and relating to others are shaped by the repetitions of certain gestures and social formations over time, and she looks to new pathways to follow, or to moments where we deviate from following the well-worn straightened lines that have come before us, and it is in these moments we can become "disoriented" in order to shape new contours into the world. This is a book I would recommend to anyone. 10/10