Fitting/Friction: The Queer Subject in Sara Ahmed

In “Queer Feelings” from The Cultural Politics of Emotion, theorist Sara Ahmed details relations between queer subjects and heteronormative space. While queer subjects are composed by their lack-of-fit within such space, Ahmed poses this lack as a terrain of not just erasure but mobility.

Ahmed first assesses heteronormative comfort. She defines comfort in relation to bodies and space: “to be comfortable is to be so at ease with one’s environment that it is hard to distinguish where one’s body ends and the world begins” (148). This claim is placed in the metaphor of a comfortable chair. A person will often use a chair they deem comfortable; from this repeated use, the chair comes to possess that person’s bodily impression (148). The person can then seamlessly sink into their impression, accenting the chair’s comfort as an accommodating surface. Ahmed explains heteronormativity in such terms:

Heteronormativity functions as a form of public comfort by allowing

bodies to extend into spaces that have already taken their shape. (. . .)

As Gil Valentine has argued, the ‘heterosexualization’ of public spaces

such as streets is naturalised by the repetition of different forms of

heterosexual conduct (images on billboards, music played, displays of heterosexual intimacy and so on), a process which goes unnoticed by heterosexual subjects. (148)

Heteronormative subjects display default sexual conduct; through their accommodation by public space, their default position is affirmed and deployed. This dynamic outlines both subjects and space as expressive agents, each mobilizing the other to form heteronormative content.

In contrast, queer subjects are marked by discomfort with heteronormative space. Queer bodies are “shaped” differently and cannot sink into now unaccommodating impressions. Though specifically evaluating the loss of queer life, a later of Ahmed’s claims can help clarify spatial arrangements: “Given that queer becomes read as a form of ‘non-life’- with the death implied by being seen as non-reproductive- then queers are perhaps already dead and cannot die. (. . .) Queer loss may not count because it precedes a relation of having” (156, italics in original). If queer life is stationed around lack, we can extend this to the lack of room for queer impressions in public space. Whether a queer body is physically present or absent, queer presence is not available to public space. The lack of queer impressions thus precedes the presence of queer bodies in space. In other words, queer bodies are out-of-place without ever having been placed.

So what of queer presence in heteronormative space? Ahmed proposes queer agency in contending with such space: “the closer that queer subjects get to the spaces defined by heteronormativity the more potential there is for a reworking of the heteronormative, partly as the proximity ‘shows’ how the spaces extend some bodies rather than others” (152, italics in original). Space is point of contact, where the friction of queer presence pivots foreclosure towards new forms.

Ahmed outlines the family as a central site of queer reworking. Here, “space” extends from an explicit city street to the arena of family development. We must first frame the family within public and private dialogues. By governing the intimate site of sexuality, heteronormativity is first stationed in the private sphere. As mentioned, heteronormative space affirms and deploys the position of its alike subjects; we thus observe an axis where the public is determined by a private origin. Such a translation is appraised when Ahmed presents families as “social practices” around “what people do in their intimate lives” (153). In particular, the nuclear family is the social practice of heteronormativity. Families gestate the terms by which their members are publicly readable; by “doing” heteronormativity in private, a nuclear family can then sink into public impressions. From here, we can locate queer navigation of the family space: “queer families often narrate the excitement of creating intimacies that are not based on biological ties, or on established gender relations. (. . .) It is in ‘not fitting’ the model of the nuclear family that queer families can work to transform what it is that families do” (154). Rather than proposing a dogmatic praxis, Ahmed emphasizes the simple scene of “not fitting.” Queer subjects are thus empowered to maneuver their own contact points towards unique creation.