Academic books I love

Theory that I always go back to, think with, live with

Nov 14, 2024

Queer Phenomenology: Objects, Orientations, Others + The Cultural Politics of Emotion, Sara Ahmed

Sara Ahmed’s scholarly voice—particularly in some of her earlier work—is a perfect marriage of smart, incisive, and easy-to-follow. Her work in these two volumes was essential to my introductions to phenomenology (the philosophical account of experience and perception), affect theory (the study of moods, emotions, atmospheres, and tones), and queer theory. Queer Phenomenology’s argumentative emphasis on ‘orientation’ also radically rethinks queerness beyond sexuality, looking at it as an alternative relation to normative ways of living, reproducing, and relating to one another, drawing together LGBTQIA+ lives alongside racialized, feminist, diasporic, and other (typically maligned) ways of being in our social world; as Ahmed points out, the etymological seed of the word “queer” is oblique, and thus it describes parting from the “straight” path. I love how she brings this to bear on the normative assumptions of the Western philisophical imaginary. I would happily assign both of these texts to an undergraduate class—I even dream of building a whole course around QP—but in particular, chapters from The Cultural Politics of Emotion on pain, disgust, and feminist attachments, which do incredible work with psychoanalysis, affect theory, and critical theory.

Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence, Judith Butler

Though Butler is most famous for their groundbreaking studies of gender performativity, they have more often published as a political theorist, and I think Precarious Life—a meditation on war, mourning, and the public sphere post 9/11—is their best entry into the field (and surprisingly written with great elegance, although this is not historically something for which they are known!). Butler’s main argument is that to be injured allows us to meditate on injury, and that this ought to be an incitement to value life rather than destroy it—this premise may seem simple enough, but it has time and time again been something that political actors fail to fulfill. They also write on Palestine and free speech, images of torture, and the ways in which a moratorium on grieving—particularly grieving the civillian deaths caused by American wars abroad—is used to shore up whose lives count as human and whose do not. Unfortunately, this is a text that remains timely.

Black Looks: Race and Representation, bell hooks

I was first introduced to this book through hooks’ essay “The Right to Look,” an essay that in many way responds to famous treatises on the gaze, such as Laura Mulvey’s “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” hooks adds to the ways in which looking is understood to be politically charged, considering the power dynamics of seeing and being seen in the context of transatlantic slavery. Not every essay has aged to perfection, but hooks’ lively writing and serious treatment of major cultural texts—from Toni Morrison’s Sula to Jennie Livingston’s Paris is Burning—make for an object lesson in passionate, incisive criticism.

Why Stories Matter: The Political Grammar of Feminist Theory, Clare Hemmings

Hemmings’ iconic book is not a history of feminist theory—instead, it is a critical analysis of how feminist theorists have written about their history. She thinks through discourses of progress, loss, and return and asks what kinds of (political, institutional, emotional) investments motivate these tendencies: for instance, when feminists claim that X period was more generative, whose authority does that shore up and whose does it sideline? I admire the ways in which Hemmings puts pressure on assumptions about how feminist theory has been organised, calling theorists to be critical of the ways in which they imagine this archive to be coherent, legible, or complete.

Black Feminism Reimagined: After Intersectionality and How We Live Now: Living with Black Feminist Theory, Jennifer C. Nash

Nash’s writing is often in conversation with Hemmings’, in that both of them are interested in writing about theory and in particular, the ways in which feminist academic thinking is organised and circulated. This is first clearly established in Nash’s book on intersectionality and the ways in which, long after Crenshaw first coined the term, this word has been called upon to do all kinds of reparative work, and so has become a site of contention and struggles for ownership. Nash’s insistence on raising these concerns but not responding to them with a definitive claim to a ‘true’ reading of intersectionality has so much integrity. It also speaks to her characterization of Black feminist theory as an “anti-captivity project,” which has recently been given another life in her latest book, How We Write Now, an encounter with loss and beauty in Black feminist writing. The latter text works with a new kind of form for her, insisting on the scholarly merit of writing the personal and lived not just alongside theory, but as theory itself (also working in the tradition of thinkers like bell hooks, Audre Lorde, Christina Sharpe, etc.).

The Difference Aesthetics Makes: On the Humanities ‘After Man,’ Kandice Chuh

When I read Chuh’s book in my second year of grad school, I found it immensely helpful for clarifying my understanding of two things: 1) what aesthetics are and what this term really means, and 2) the role of the humanities in de/constructing the figure of the human, and who counts under its frameworks. In other words, Chuh reminds us that the aesthetic is about the connection between perception, judgement, and knowledge formation, showing how the aesthetic properties of an object or the interpretive faculties it solicits are not neutral but crucial to how we assign value and relate to people/places/things. To that end, a humanities education might aspire to train us in certain kinds of aesthetic valuation which reinforce ideas of colonial white supremacy, and so Chuh thinks through how the terrain of the aesthetic can also undermine, reorient, and frustrate this agenda.

50 Concepts for a Critical Phenomenology, ed. Gail Weiss, Ann V. Murphy, Gayle Salamon

Earlier, I described phenomenology as the philosophical account of experience and perception. Its progenetors are Heidegger, Husserl, and Hegel, who were followed by other household names such as Sartre, Beauvoir, Merleau-Ponty, and De Certeau. Each of these voices offered something—but also left something to be imagined—for contemporary thinkers invested in understanding how social identity and political relations impact the everyday ways in which we behave. Enter the emergent field of “critical phenomenology,” which, like Ahmed’s book, aims to rethink some of the aforementioned thinkers’ privileged assumptions about what is normal in order to make phenomenology operative for fields like critical race theory, disability studies, gender studies, and queer theory. This edited volume breaks down 50 key terms—both canonical and not—and describes how we might understand them from a critical—even intersectional—point of view.

Ways of Seeing, John Berger

A classic for students of visual culture and art history, this short book is a terrific introduction to how seeing is not a straightforward, passive witnessing of truth, but is instead cultivated through social and economic assumptions. Particularly strong is Berger’s anticapitalist and feminist analysis—the chapter on looking at women (and women looking at themselves being looked at) in art is *chef’s kiss.* Ways of Seeing was also disseminated as a TV program in the UK, in a fascinating attempt to bridge academic and public knowledges.

Honorable mentions:

The History of Sexuality and Discipline and Punish by Michel Foucault
On Female Body Experience by Iris Marion Young
Performance and The Archive and the Repertoire by Diana Taylor
Demonic Grounds by Katherine McKittrick
Film Bodies: Queer Feminist Encounters with Gender and Sexuality in Cinema by Katharina Lindner
Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist Theories of the Human by Alexander G. Weheliye
Wandering: Racial and Sexual Performances of Freedom by Sarah Jane Cervenak.