6. Critical Phenomenology Now!

Theory as a Healing Place

2024. People often ask me what phenomenology is. I still don’t have the best answer. I struggle to define the philosophy, the project. There is a strange disjuncture between my enthusiasm—how much it means to me, how excitedly, how easily the clumsy word rolls off my tongue—and my explanation: “It is a body of philosophy concerned with perception, with consciousness.” Perhaps it is more clarifying to say it is an unwieldy, searching method, a way of making sense of the world. I get the sense that for most, it designates a niche scholastic interest, that the word fails to illuminate much of anything. I can see in their eyes that something gets lost in translation.

But what this word means to me! To get anywhere, I think, I would have to tell them these stories. I would have to trace the quiet and more spectacular origins of this queer philosophical project and, in the process, sketch the shape of a life. I would have to offer these stories that provide a foothold, a center of gravity, a sense of orientation to the circuits and folds of theory. Stories that give theory a body.

And, to get it at all, they would have to understand how this theory has reworked my body, how it has given me a body and a voice of my own. How these words have, with a kind of knowing precision, extracted what troubles and ails me, making meaning out of pain, plucking it out like Gloria Anzaldúa’s (1987, 73) cactus needle: “When it begins to fester I have to do something to put an end to the aggravation and to figure out why I have it. I get deep down into the place where it’s rooted in my skin and pluck away at it . . . making the pain worse before it can get better. Then out it comes. . . . No more discomfort, no more ambivalence. Until another needle pierces the skin. That’s what writing is for me, an endless cycle of making it worse, making it better, but always making meaning out of the experience, whatever it may be.” In this way, this act of writing, this practice of theorizing, has exorcised, externalized, redescribed a pain, turning an open wound into a scar, into a suture (Cerankowski 2021). In other words, theory has been a healing place (hooks 1991).

Healing of course, does not end the story; it is no neat conclusion but rather an opening, a live end. It is a permission to desire, to expand, to build and rebuild a self and a world.

A Critical Phenomenological Politics

Perhaps you’ve gotten the sense by now that the critical phenomenological project I am calling for is not merely a philosophical orientation, a mode of analysis, or a methodology, one theory of space among others. It certainly is all of that, but in the greater service of a political praxis, a project of world-building (and its necessary compliment, world-dismantling), a means of self-recovery and collective healing. Lisa Guenther (2020, 16) describes: “As a political practice, critical phenomenology is a struggle for liberation from the structures that privilege, naturalize, and normalize certain experiences of the world while marginalizing, pathologizing, and discrediting others. . . . As a transformative practice, critical phenomenology must go beyond a description of oppression, developing concrete strategies for dismantling oppressive structures and creating or amplifying different, less oppressive, and more liberatory ways of Being-in-the-world.” As Kirsten Simonsen and Lasse Koefoed (2020, 132) envision it, it is “a political practice of restructuring the world in order to generate new and liberatory possibilities for meaningful experiences and existence.”

Where does such a project begin? It begins in the here and now. It begins from a phenomenological questioning of the present, from an act of denaturalizing and redescribing the world we find ourselves in. Muñoz (2009) urges us to break out of the strictures of the straight present by orienting toward the queer horizons that already limn the present. He encourages us to refuse a present that is not enough, a present that is not simply given but serves as a social and affective infrastructure of a white, heterosexual world. He urges us to summon and manifest queer futurity through a kind of utopian performativity—an enactment of yet-unintelligible meanings and movements that, in their doing, anticipate and enact another world. To do so is to make other meanings, other lives, possible, to make queer futures now.

This project begins from the body, the body-with-others. It starts from a sense of enmeshment, of relation, of friction between this body—the body of the queer, the misfit, the other—and their world. It begins from a lived struggle in and for space. Guided by an ethic of coexistence, of recognition, of solidarity, of coalition, it reaches outward, bringing together different bodies in the project of making a different space, of building other worlds.

What we might seek to cultivate, then, is a multiplicity, a community of critical phenomenologies in conversation with one another: bodies coming to know each other, each turned toward another and tuned to the possibility of mutual recognition, of coexistence, of joint struggle. Jos Boys (2018, 63) imagines such a phenomenological project when they write: “I want a phenomenology that thinks about bodies that dwell upright and those that do not. I want a phenomenology that addresses bodies that are sighted and those that are not. I want a phenomenology that thinks about bodies that are queer, white or brown, throw like a girl, break down.” Following Boys, we need many critical phenomenologies. And we need them now. We need them to get us out of this “broken-down present” (Muñoz 2009, 12), to activate queer futures. We need them so that we might become alive to this present as a space of possibility, marked both by the sedimentation of histories and the spontaneity and creativity of human practice. As Sara Ahmed (2012, 182) asserts, “We need this critique now if we are to learn how not to reproduce what we inherit.” We need critical phenomenology now to locate and orient ourselves toward other horizons—toward other spaces of meaning and meanings of space—to recognize the concrete possibility of other worlds.

Let us remember that “the fleshy, temporal body is already in revolt” (Lefebvre 1991, 201) and revolutionary openings “are everywhere, on all sides, in the fractures, the unfinished loops, and the fuzzy edges” (Zurn 2025, 179). A critical sense of hope, of utopian possibility, resides in this unfinished space, this queer space. Perry Zurn reminds us that “hope is a kind of ‘sideways relationality’ to the possibilities implicit in material life at both edges, in this very moment” (179). Hope is squinting off into the distance in search of other horizons. Hope is moving our bodies, imperceptibly at first, toward other worlds.