Embodied Realities

Ervin Malakaj

At one point in her book on queer phenomenology, queer feminist theorist Sara Ahmed turns to comfort as an analytic category by which to interrogate cisheterocapitalist whiteness. “To be orientated, or to be at home in the world,” she writes, “is also to feel a certain comfort” (Ahmed 2006, 134). This comfort indexes a world order structured in such a way as to accommodate how some bodies extend into space and not others. Extending, here, describes a practice by which the nature of some bodies aligns with the shape of social space, which suggests that privileged bodies experience their extension under the affective structure of comfort as they traverse the world (Ahmed 2006, 135). To feel “at home” in the world is then to feel the shape of the world cohere with your body. To talk about comfort is to talk about how the world coheres for some. And to believe in the existing world is to respect a coherence conditioned by disciplinary forces aligned with particular forms of embodied presence, which in turn are valued highly in the world’s hegemonic logics. To be orientated in this world thus means to be aligned with its operations. You move along with it and the world moves along with you.

For Ahmed, however, to feel at home in the world is more often than not taken for granted by privileged bodies and becomes a problem mostly once the world no longer coheres for them in the same way as it did before. In other words, to feel the world’s structuring mechanisms would indicate an out-of-sync-ness with the world—a condition those who fall outside of the world’s regulatory orders feel acutely in their everyday life. To feel the forms of disciplinary force on your body becomes palpable when your body dissociates from a world that aims to curtail its unruliness. The pressure is real. It forms the condition under which some bodies emerge as deviant. They are cast as dangerous and indeed are marked as threats to the operation of the system—and, by extension, the world itself. After all, at some point unruliness risks undoing an entire system of dominance put into place to dispel its power. Too much unruliness and too little discipline is dangerous for those who believe in the existing world order. Is this not how revolutions start?

The sites at which the comfy homeyness of the world does not register for some bodies thus not only form a rich archive of knowledge about the operations of the dominant orders of the world, but hold potential for a drive that might lead us toward liberatory futures. However, the aim of this critique and of its liberatory potential is not to reach a state of comfort within the existing system. As an affective state, comfort indexes a coherence with the status quo in the current world order. As such, it is interesting as an analytic category to interrogate a hegemonic system, but insufficient as a political aim. Aiming to feel comfortable in the existing world order means having to give up a lot of who we are in order to do so. It also means abandoning our comrades who might not be able to give up what it takes to fit in the existing structure. They also might not want to give up who they are. Rather, the focal point of the political critique underpinning a queer phenomenology is always structural transformation. Its charge is “Change the world!” It is not interested in amending existing systems or, worse, using aspects of queer feminist critique in order to improve such systems. Neoliberal feminism or queer nationalism maintain such dissatisfying relations to the status quo in that they believe in its operations as long as its structures are molded a bit differently to accommodate some of their aims. But this is nothing more than tolerance of the worst variety. Tolerating some at the expense of others and doing so provisionally in a way that casts any political wins of the last five decades as reversible is bad politics. In 2025, this is precisely a fear as neo-fascist and far-right movements take hold internationally and threaten the foundations of queer and feminist progress achieved thus far. Instead, the radical critique at the core of queer feminist thought aims for much more radical futures in which our existing world order is abolished to make room for new structures.

The beginning for such transformation is always critique. At its core, this work entails aligning with an intersectional queer feminist critical tradition that aims to unveil the limitations of the existing world order. Intersectional queer feminist critique works coalitionally and attends to numerous sites of struggle at once to detail the harm existing oppressive structures enact. Under the auspices of neoliberalism, critique wants to tend to one struggle at a time and robs us of the potential to forge solidarities through which we can tackle multiple struggles in multidirectional fashion at once. It is precisely such work that might yield insights upon which liberatory formations could be established. These alternative social formations will categorically be more nurturing in their relational dynamics than they are disciplinary. However, it is important to hold on to the idea that to interrogate the structures that cause harm is an ongoing project. As is the project of anticipating liberatory formations. Such work will inevitably span generations of scholar-activists after our own. It will pay homage to previous traditions even while it develops new critical tools by which to do its work.

The essays collected in the present volume focus on different such sites of discomfort and interrogate their limitations under the banner of intersectional queer and feminist thought and cultural practice. Their focal point might be Germanophone cultural practice, but the contributions pursue their work in a transnational and indeed global register. However, the contributions do not merely signal an internationalism that should be self-evident on the basis of the project being published in an Anglophone context with a focus on Germanophone matters. Rather, the contributions engage transnational queer and feminist theory, think about the situatedness of the work they are doing in relation to international political organizing or cultural practice, and always serve as an invitation for those reading the work to keep thinking about the ideas at the core of each contribution. As such, none of the contributions are ends of their own. This does not mean that these contributions are not erudite, extensively researched, engagingly written, and committed to advancing the broader interlinked queer feminist thought; rather, through their form, method, and content they create structures in which those interested in the work could find some comfort as they forge their own projects.

Katharina Oguntoye and Carolyn Gammon offer important reflections on intersectional queer/feminist thought that attend to various sites of struggle in different socio-political contexts. Of particular interest is their insistence that structural change emerging from queer feminist critique is possible. Critique seems sometimes overwhelming. But there is no reason to remain stuck in the thought that we have to do this work alone. Here, they remind us of the legacies of earlier queer feminist struggles, in particular their work with Audre Lorde and related coalitional work among queer feminists, especially queer feminists of color, which offer insights about the need to hold space for critique at the same time as holding space for potential solidarity as we struggle ahead. Their work is grounded in accountability but also in community, both of which emerge as practices that require a lot of time and effort to stage. Kathrin Spiller, Priscilla Wind, Charlotte Kaiser, and Melanie Raabe offer insights about the transformative potential of queer or feminist cultural practice. From popular culture to performance art, from literature to installation work, various forms of cultural practice can serve as sites through which to interrogate the discomfort and pain born of structural oppression. Of particular interest here is the practice of close analysis or personal confessional as modes through which to enact queer or feminist critique. Attending to minutiae or approaching critique through our everyday experiences can be a powerful means by which to practice a queer feminist thought that anticipates liberatory futures. Finally, Flora Roussel and Francis Tremblay turn to intersectional feminist or queer feminist critique in order to examine both the subversive potentialities as well as the regressive traps that some cultural products might stage. Here, critique becomes a major means by which to parse a political aesthetic embedded in cultural products that lay claim on liberatory political projects. Analytical patience can be a great friend of the critic committed to queer feminist critique, which is something all the projects included in this volume admirably model.