In her 2006 book Queer Phenomenology: Objects, Orientations, Others, Sara Ahmed asks how we are oriented and how we come to find our way. Ahmed thus thinks across queer feminist theories of sexuality and traditional phenomenology, evaluating the latter’s efforts to bring what is commonplace or taken-for-granted into focus, and doing so through matrices of gender, race, and sexuality. Thus, Ahmed considers the ways in which we become familiar with and habituated to spaces, and how we are socialized to follow certain lines more than others, experiencing disorientation when one makes a 'detour' from the normative path, or meeting the normative at a disorderly angle ('oblique,' she reminds us, is etymologically central to the term 'queer' itself). Knowing this, how do we open up to new worlds? How do we embrace disorientation as a practice and/or theory of queer politics without romanticizing its frequent groundlessness and disruption? 

Queer Phenomenology’s path-breaking interventions have provided a framework for thinking through the orientations of individual bodies, as well as the orientations of queer theory, feminist theory, postcolonial theory, and critical race theory more broadly. On the occasion of its 20th anniversary, this panel invites papers that engage with Ahmed’s text in new ways, expanding on its notions of queerness, relation, phenomenology, orientation, space, embodiment, and/or belonging. Inspired by writers spanning Adania Shibli, Négar Djavadi, Virginia Woolf, Etel Adnan, Dionne Brand, Elif Batuman, and limitless others, paper topics may engage the applications of Ahmed’s theories to texts—literary or otherwise—concerned with networks of bodies who experience the world in a 'queer' fashion, understood capaciously. Papers may also take an interest in the trajectory of queer feminist theory over the past 20 years and the role of Ahmed and Queer Phenomenology in this development, opening up new horizons for thinking, working, and writing.

Submit abstracts via the ACLA portal by October 2, 2025: https://www.acla.org/seminar/0faffb0b-ea88-4f5e-ab71-e537b8d6b150. The 2026 conference will take place from Feb 26-Mar 1, 2026 in Montréal, Canada.