Queer Embodiments: fluidity, materiality, stickiness

In this essay, I identify how different vocabularies of queer embodiment complement and enrich one another in a productive dialogue; I also argue that at times these vocabularies speak past one another, without directly engaging with the other perspective. I focus in particular on the differences between more poststructuralist approaches to the queer body, associated most strongly with Butler, which have sometimes been accused of marginalising the body, and the approach taken by Sara Ahmed in her Queer Phenomenology, which draws in significant and productively irreverent ways on the phenomenology of Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Edmund Husserl. My aim in drawing together these paradigms is not to construct an opposition but to argue for the importance of continuing to think about materiality and the individual subject whilst taking sex, gender and sexuality to be discursively constructed; even when adopting a poststructuralist/queer point of view. This is, of course, not a new argument; however, the theoretical tools that enable us to think through these issues are still being forged. I emphasise the importance of lived experience to queer embodiment, and address the risk of immaterial non-presence that some have seen as implicit in the discursively constructed (queer) body by arguing for an increased interweaving of theoretical perspectives. In my view, it is only by insisting on the phenomenology of the discursively constructed body that we can do justice to the queer embodied subject.