#lone shadow

Lone shadow

Also on rereading I think my borrowing of Sara Ahmed's dining table analogy is pretty unclear because I didn't have space to clarify – Ahmed is, in that passage of Queer Phenomenology, talking about 'kinship objects' in the sense of Hannah Arendt's Kantian theory – that is, that objects come into being as such through recognition in a concept. So, the dining table is an object through which kinship is recognised and made possible, and which comes into being through that recognition. We sit down at a dining table with our loved ones and experience relatedness. Ahmed complicates this relatedness by looking at how queerness disrupts straight ways of orienting towards others, and in doing so disrupts the possibilities of relatedness – which is both a gain and a loss. And without a 'dining table' entirely – a medium of kinship and relatedness – we lose a means of orienting ourselves in relation to others.