Willful Subjects

In her Queer Phenomenology , Sara Ahmed suggests, “orientations are about how we begin; how we proceed from “here,” which affects how what is “there” appears, how it presents itself” (8). Ahmed’s Willful Subjects is about reorienting our relations to willfulness (48) and turning us toward an interest in the will as a cultural phenomenon in need of theorizing, by asking “what is it doing” (17). Through a kaleidoscopic whirl of literary, philosophical, and cultural representations, Willful Subjects makes the will present and active. Ahmed’s diverse discussions provide a veritable romp through the Western history of the will. This multiplicity of texts and images, including killjoy feminists (152), “willful women, unwilling to get along” (2), proceed from one particular starting point: a narrative that serves to orient the appearance of the will – Grimm’s 1884 story of “The Willful Child.” Ahmed explores this story in detail (1) and artfully returns to it throughout the book

Aesthetics · Art · Cultural phenomenon · Epistemology · Literature · Narrative · Phenomenology (philosophy · Phenomenon · Queer · Social science · Sociology · Gender, Feminism, and Media · Posthumanist Ethics and Activism · Walter Benjamin Studies Compilation · Gender Studies · Philosophy