#sara ahmed
thinking through strategy and accountability with Living a Feminist Life, Sara Ahmed (2017)
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I’m working on a conference paper about Sonia Sotomayor, and especially her dissent in Utahv.Strieff (2016). One part of the paper uses Sara Ahmed’s Queer Phenomenology to try to think through what Sotomayor is doing in the dissent. Here’s some of what I wrote today, in draft form:
Sotomayor’s dissent pushes further than its citational practices alone. This section argues that Sotomayor constructs, in Part IV of the dissent, a phenomenology of the bodily experience of being stopped and searched, which I explore through Sara Ahmed’s theorization of a “phenomenology of ‘being stopped.’”(2006, 139) In doing so Sotomayor enables, at least for a few pages, the loftiness of a Court opinion to reach down and connect to lived experience. Dayan contends that law and its “rituals” creates new forms of legal personhood that often do not have connection to law as it is lived by those the law affects—by those whose personhood is put into question, disfigured, made ghostly, or seized in the operations of law. She focuses on the “law’s power to define” as “mak[ing] things on its own terms, terms that may or may not be accountable to experience” (216). This entails, for Dayan, “unearthing … the ‘dry bones’ of law and giving them life in unexpected places,” something that is possible only “outside the guild of lawyers” (xi). And yet, in her dissent in Strieff, Sotomayor performs this unearthing and enlivening from within not just the guild of lawyers, but from inside the Supreme Court itself—albeit, of course, in a decision in which she is in the minority. While Dayan’s overall argument is essential, we see in Strieff the occasional crack in the façade of deadened legal language through which law might illuminate life.
Sotomayor’s dissent works against the tendency of obscuring experience that Dayan identifies—a tendency that the majority in Strieff partakes in—by providing a detailed and I argue phenomenological analysis of what being stopped and searched entails. Notably, she opens Section IV with the disclaimer “Writing only for myself, and drawing on my own professional experiences…” (9-10). No longer joined by Ginsburg in the dissent, Sotomayor makes explicit the turn to personal experience, to the law as lived. She marks this dissent as something different, and marks herself as a living, experience person, even in her position as a Justice of the Supreme Court. What follows involves bringing to the Court a detailed account of being stopped that integrates a phenomenology of the stop and search with a command over Fourth Amendment precedent.
Part IV of the dissent commences, following Sotomayor’s avowal of drawing on her own professional experience, with her assertion that she “would add” to her dissent that “unlawful ‘stops’ have sever consequences much greater than the inconvenience suggested by that name” (10). For her, the naming of the stop in an opinion does not capture its reality; conventional legal rhetorics are not enough to grapple the law as lived. Furthermore, while “many Americans have been stopped for speeding or jaywalking, few may realize how degrading a stop can be when the officer is looking for more” (10). It is not that all experience being stopped in the same way, but rather that the experience of being stopped and searched is differentially distributed. Sotomayor writes that while Strieff is white, “it is no secret that people of color are disproportionate victims of this type of scrutiny” (12). Thus, we should not focus primarily on the lived experience of any random person living in the United States, or of a generic colorless (read: white) citizen. Rather, conceptualizing the stop-and-search encounter with police requires proceeding from the lives of the people of color disproportionately targeted by police.
In this sense, Sotomayor recognizes and makes legible in her dissent what Ahmed calls in her queer phenomenology a “political economy” of stopping (Ahmed 2006, 140). This political economy analyzes how “stopping…is distributed unevenly between others” and how the stop and search “is a technology of racism: “some bodies more than others are ‘stopped’ by being the subject of the policeman’s address” (139-40). The third chapter of her work examines the racialization of space, contrasting “the ease with which the white body extends itself in the world through how it is orientated” (a phenomenology of “the ‘I can’”) with a Frantz Fanon-inspired “phenomenology of the black body” that “could be described in terms of the bodily and social experience of restriction, uncertainty, and blockage” (a phenomenology of “the utterance ‘I cannot’”) (138-9). She delineates two different modalities of phenomenology:
…whiteness becomes a social and bodily orientation given that some bodies will be more at home in a world that is orientated around whiteness. … For bodies that are not easily extended by the skin of the social, bodily movement is not so easy. Such bodies are stopped, where the stopping is an action that creates its own impressions. Who are you? Why are you here? What are you doing? … A phenomenology of ‘being stopped’ might take us in a different direction than one that beings with [whiteness and] motility” (138-9).
I argue that in her dissent Sotomayor engages in this second mode of phenomenology, one that interrogates the legal mechanisms that authorize the stopping from the perspective of one who is stopped and details the impressions such stopping makes.
Only those bodies subject to constant stopping “realize how degrading a stop can be,” and their experience is most important for examining how “this Court has given officers an array of instruments to probe and examine” as a result of Strieff—which itself is only the most recent case in a long trajectory of cases weakening Fourth Amendment protections. The language Sotomayor uses in her phenomenology is striking, especially given the venue. In the span of only the three pages of Part IV on their own, she describes the rampant stop and search practices as (10-12): “degrading”; an “indignity”; making the person being stopped “‘helpless’ (citing Terry v. Ohio, 392 U.S. 1); placing one under an “officer’s control”; effecting civil death (about which more in the next section); subjecting one to “humiliation” and a “violation” of one’s “dignity”; producing a “double consciousness”; and making one’s “body…subject to invasion.” All of this language suggests that those subject to being stopped at any time, for no particular reason, experience a loss of personhood and bodily integrity. Dayan analyzes the ways that “law encapsulates, sustains, and invigorates philosophies of personhood,” contending that American law has constructed a set of “negative personhood” statuses as a series of “legal disabilities,” many of which depersonalize and disfigure (in multiple sense of the word) people of color and/or those convicted of crimes (2011, xii). Sotomayor’s dissent, rather than further entrenching the seizing of personhood as much of the Court’s jurisprudence does, uses its positionality within the official legal discourse to unearth the way the Court has participated in the construction of negative personhood and legal disability. The effect of the Court’s decisions when it comes to the Fourth Amendment is to ensure that the bodies of people of color constantly experience a political economy of stopping and cannot extend into space, with the result of this being the robbing of their very personhood.
A poem for Gulzar Bano
By her loving nieceSara Ahmed
The words of an aunt
Can breathe life
Rummaging away
In the uncertain thoughts
The confused picture
A mind trying to grasp
That which retreats
Until you see things again
Clear and crisp
You asked me once
I don’t know if you remember
You had read one of my poems
The poems of a young girl
Casting words out too quickly
Because she had been taught
What not to attend to
“Sara” you asked me
“Why do you use he?”
“When you could use she?”
And I heard in your gentle question
The word anew
The world anew
He is not she
Nor we
She is she
We too
And I learnt
How to use words again
To register my presence
To sharpen with precision
As a girl, as a woman
To announce
Here I am, here she is
Here we are
Through a word
A world
Through a word
You were my first feminist teacher
Who taught me words could be weapons
How we could crafts worlds
Through words
How we could register violence
In what we send out
In what we do not send out
Your warmth, your wisdom
Was like a promise made
A life that could be lived
By what we refuse
What we seize
You taught me that feminism is a spark
We can be lit up by it
How we claim our minds
As our own
How we reach each other
So that even if we stray
We are not alone
Even though you have left
You are guiding me
The words of an aunt
Shimmering with life
Are a path
A way of following
Without being led
Challenging, finding, holding
A memory preserved
Can be a leaky container
Spilling all over you
The words of an Aunt
How I pick myself up again
How I make my way through
“A podcast about Clayton and Kelley, two lost millennials, and their never-ending conversation about the questions that keep them up at night, from the history of v-necks to ethical mourning to media curation.” Check out conversationstarterscast on Tumblr.
“Lynch Law in America” by Ida B. Wells (1900)
“Not only are two hundred men and women put to death annually, on the average, in this country by mobs, but these lives are taken with the greatest publicity.”
Against Students by Sara Ahmed
“Complaining, censorious, and over-sensitive, university students are destroying their own institutions. Wait, seriously? People think that?”
Ada: A Journal of Gender, New Media, and Technology
Beatrice Martini - On tech tools for social justice and rights
Material beings: objecthood and ethnographic photographs by Elizabeth Edwards
“Photographs are both images and physical objects which exist in time and space and thus in social and cultural experience.”
“codedoodl.es is a showcase of curated creative coding sketches. The aim of these doodles is to exhibit interactive, engaging web experiments which only require a short attention span. No loading bars, no GUI, no 5MB 3D models or audio files, just plain and simple doodles with code.” Read more about the project from Neil Carpenter.
Inspecting the Nineteenth Century Literary Digital Archive: Omissions of Empire by Adeline Koh
Adeline Koh examines the use and operations of archives alongside the developments of digitization. Specifically, Koh discusses “the politics of digitizing the literary nineteenth century.” Koh outlines three different components of her study, which are “(1) how the politics of the literary nineteenth century archive interact with and reflectissues within Victorian studies; (2) existing issues with interfaces of existing literary digital projects that limit their correlations with colonialism or the literary productions by the colonized; (3) the contrast between digital literary projects and broader historical digital archives, and the urgency of dealing with this gap (385).”
Check out more resources here.
Hello everyone! While we are working on our first issue, we wanted to share with you what has been informing our thought processes, what inspires us, and some resources we have been working from. At Mesh Archive, we want to provide as much access to resources as we can, and many of these resources are typically under the radar. These are our personal archives; we hope to bridge these gaps with you and encourage you all to share with us what informs yourlearning!
The Hyper-affective Turn: Thinking the Social in the Digital Age
Nestor García Canclini and Maritza Urteaga discuss the shift of many 21st-century social theorists toward affect studies and how this has affected as well as been formed by digitization.
‘I WILL DO EVERYthing That Am Asked’: Scambaiting, Digital Show-Space, and the Racial Violence of Social MediabyLisa Nakamura
“Memes that depict the black body in abject and bizarre poses and situations are part of the long history of viral racism that spreads using user and audience labor.”
Pao Out as Reddit CEO; Co-Founder Huffman Takes Over
“The social news service has thousands of loyal, unpaid moderators who produce and curate the lion’s share of content on the site. But a staff firing and the controversy that erupted thereafter yesterday has moderators of some of the most influential and important parts of the site closing off their sections in protest, posing a serious problem for Reddit’s future … “
Monoskop is a wiki for collaborative studies of the arts, media and humanities (Monoskop About). This is a large database of resources that can helpful in exploring some other concepts in relation to what we have been talking about.
Mindy Fullilove – Reading about Displacement
A collection of research and resources by Mindy Fullilove, who has provided a profound amount of her research online for access concerning displacement in relation to black women and community, housing, family, and AIDS.
Center for Art and Thought is a network of artists, scholars, and activists who use the internet as a platform to showcase the variety of works being produced out of the Filipinx diaspora (CA+T About). They have collections of work, art, essays, and exhibitions speaking to the digital era and importance of access to resources that inform learning.
Jane Jin Kaisen is Korean transnational adoptee who works with a variety of artforms that explore representations of memory, history, and transnational subjectivity (Jane Jin Kaisen About). She has produced an incredible amount of works surrounding this fairly difficult concepts such as her film The Woman, The Orphan, and The Tiger, which can be found here.
Chapter One of Queer Phenomenology by Sara Ahmed
Queer Phenomenology explores orientation — a turn of the body toward objects — as well as the significance of objects’ physical impressions upon the body. Much of Ahmed’s work focuses on the occupation of spaces and bodies and the politics of those spatial-material interactions.
