(Working draft. This post is about the concept of “disorientation” in Sara Ahmed’s Queer Phenomenology.)
When I was 18, I backpacked around Scotland and ended up on New Year’s Eve at a pub in the Orkney Islands off the northern tip of the country. I was having a good time until a homophobic older guy said something incredibly offensive to me. That was my first memory of being overtly discriminated against. In such a situation, I might have felt intimidated, but the 18-year old me, filled with liquid courage from a beer (you can drink at 18 in the UK), felt pretty much fearless and told him to basically shut the front door. I was fine because some random homophobe meant nothing to me.
What was difficult, though, was constantly being ignored by my "own" people. Having lived in the closet in Singapore for my entire life up to that point, I finally came out in London, and sought out the gay community. It didn’t take me long to figure out that the vast majority of white gays regarded people of color as invisible, and that hit me like a sucker punch. I felt like I had nowhere to go, and didn’t know what to do—it was disorientating. Being a person of color defined my experience with the gay community.
Later on, when I was completing my doctoral degree in the US, I returned frequently to San Francisco, where there were so many Asians that I had no difficulty orientating myself within the gay community. Of course, there was still exclusion, but I felt like I could breathe. One time I was waiting for a bus and ended up talking to a bartender about some novel he had read about Buddha’s life. “Was it Hesse’s Siddhartha?,” I asked (it was). Over a Swiss writer’s problematically orientalist novel, a gay-Chinese-musicologist bonded obliquely with a straight-white-bartender. This involved convoluted social intersectionalities and relationalities, but it was not disorienting in the least because our interaction was warm and positive.
I’m not suggesting that my specific experiences in these various places are necessarily indicative of their general social atmosphere. I recall them in an effort to think through experiences of disorientation that Sara Ahmed theorizes as “queer phenomenology.” Starting with the trope of the Orient, Ahmed weaves the imperial gaze of Europe—a way of orienting oneself towards the Other—together with minority racial and queer experiences of disorientation. The privilege of being able to orient oneself, to have access to well laid out paths, is enjoyed by whites, but also, in certain contexts, by people of color who usually face the disorientation of not knowing where to turn, having been shut out.
When doors have been opened for me, it was because others have been inclined towards the alternative and the other (even if viewed through an ethically suspect, orientalist lens). This predisposition towards alterity can be described as a kind of positively valenced, curiosity-based “disorientation” from one’s own culture. When everyone is so inclined, we have a friendly environment in which diversity is a universal value. This is one way of explaining the tenet of anti-normativity which was key in the queer theory of the 90s, and which I have observed in recent years as I led the project for queer music theory. Queer music theory is not just the province of queer music theorists—it encompasses work by all music theorists who are dedicated to the advancement of anti-normative music-theoretical methods, while crucially acknowledging the lives of LGBTQ people who have no choice but to be different. In queer music theory, anti-normativity serves as the general, universal ethical principle and as a means of coalition building across different identities. This is different from my experiences in Orkney and London, when heteronormativity was the universal. While there is a structural similarity between a universal anti-normativity in “queer” music-theoretical practice, and other oppressive forms of universality, the crux of the matter is that the former is anchored in the intention to advance queer recognition and is methodologically structured to achieve that goal.
We live in an age when difference has been commodified in monetized blog posts that purport to discover earth shattering difference (choice of words, politicians, ethical orientations). Add to this the catastrophic history of Eurocentric universality, and it may seem to be impossible for us to contemplate a complex ethical framework that differentiates between the positive and negative effects of both difference and universality. Certainly, we seem inclined to prefer to regard academics as purely progressive or oppressive unities instead of imperfect multiplicities. I have seen feminists, including feminists of color, who were rejected based on even just hearsay about (as opposed to evidence of) their alleged transphobia or anti-Semitism. Obviously, no form of discrimination is acceptable, but the lowering of the threshold of judgement to mere hearsay suggests that academia is organized more around the fantasy of a perfectly integrated scholar who is perfectly woke on all fronts, as opposed to the reality of multiple, well-intentioned but conflicting conceptual paradigms that impinge on anyone of us today. Assuming that the scholar has a body of work which indicates their commitment to social equity, intellectual disagreement should (at least at first) be regarded as grounds of intellectual foment that speak to the irreducible complexity of social life, rather than as the means of oppressing one another: this is something that all sides of any debate should bear in mind.
Politically, the concept and practice of coalition building on the left have all but vanished, as all forms of universality (such as within coalitions) are suspected of being racist means of distracting from the experiences of the marginalized. But a coalitional politics without a horizon of universality alongside its internal differences is doomed to failure in a democratic system built on majority rule. My project in The Means and End of Difference is a musicological attempt to cultivate habits of thought that can nourish remedies for this situation.
Politically, the concept and practice of coalition building on the left have all but vanished, as all forms of universality (such as within coalitions) are suspected of being racist means of distracting from the experiences of the marginalized. But a coalitional politics without a horizon of universality alongside its internal differences is doomed to failure in a democratic system built on majority rule. My project in The Means and End of Difference is a musicological attempt to cultivate habits of thought that can nourish remedies for this situation.
