Chapter 24 - Towards a Queer Phenomenology of Social Reproduction: Insights from Life Histories of Informal Economy Workers in Urban India

Summary

INTRODUCTION

In For Space (2005) and elsewhere Massey urges that “space” must be thought of in the same open-ended manner that “time” has in continental philosophy post- 1920s: namely, as multiple rather than unilinear, as therefore a terrain of “openings” that constitutes the very possibility of “politics”. In this recasting of time, space has been (implicitly or explicitly) posited as “closure”, hence – for Massey – as apolitical. In opening up “space” Massey reiterates its relational nature as process and becoming; this implies too that there is never one “space” that is in the process of becoming but a heterogeneity of spaces associated with a heterogeneity of relations that encompass humans and non-humans. Since the processes in question have different temporalities it follows that when we talk of politics we must meaningfully talk of “spatial politics” and, by implication, heterogeneous spatiotemporalities. It is through a relational conception of space that Massey avoids the pitfalls of objectivist (Cartesian) and subjectivist (individual-centred or perspectivist) approaches to space. A relational conception is congruent with dynamic approaches to space as a “production”.

Our chapter seeks to extend Massey’s dialectics of the spatiotemporal and the political through an engagement with “queer phenomenology” (Ahmed 2006a). There are two components to our argument here, both important: the aspect of phenomenology and the aspect of queering. By drawing on life histories of urban migrants in two Indian cities, we show how queer phenomenology compels us to comprehend humans as embodied beings made by orientations, disorientations and reorientations to social reproduction. The disorientations of handed-down life scripts powerfully reveal the queering that opens up spaces of political possibility. A phenomenological stance also enriches Massey’s conception of spatial production by engaging with practices of imagination that are vital elements of people as meaning-making beings. Finally, attentiveness to queer phenomenology jolts “us” (as theorists) from our inherited categories and suppositions as well. The tensions that permeate our life histories show how lifeworlds (and the desires that course through them) exceed the framework of social reproduction.