Ghostly Matters Avery Gordon

Ghostly Matters. Haunting and the Sociological Imagination is an innovative sociological work in which Avery F. Gordon uses the metaphor of haunting to rethink how social life, memory, power, and history shape the present. Rather than treating ghosts as supernatural curiosities, Gordon argues that “haunting” represents the lingering presence of past social forces—such as racial violence, inequality, and trauma—that are not fully understood or addressed in everyday life.

These ghostly matters, she suggests, are real social phenomena that illuminate hidden structures of power and exclusion that traditional sociology often overlooks. Haunting becomes a way to recognize how suppressed histories continue to influence contemporary social relations.

Interdisciplinary Approach

Gordon draws on a wide range of sources, including literature, social theory, and cultural case studies, to demonstrate how haunting reveals the limits of standard empirical approaches and invites a more imaginative and reflexive form of sociological analysis.

Key Themes

• The persistence of unresolved historical injustices
• The social impact of collective memory and forgetting
• The intersections of race, gender, and class
• The presence of invisible or marginalized social experiences

Conclusion

By foregrounding what is barely seen or officially acknowledged, Ghostly Matters challenges readers to reconsider how knowledge is produced and how sociology can account for the “ghostly” dimensions of social life that persist beneath visible institutions and events.

That life is complicated may seem a banal expression of the obvious, but it is nonetheless a profound theoretical statement—perhaps the most important theoretical statement of our time. Yet despite the best intentions of sociologists and other social analysts, this idea has not been grasped in its widest significance.

There are at least two dimensions to such a theoretical statement. The first is that the power relations that characterize any historically embedded society are never as transparently clear as the names we give to them imply.

Power can be invisible, fantastic, dull, and routine. It can be obvious; it can reach you by the baton of the police; it can speak the language of your thoughts and desires. It can feel like remote control, it can exhilarate like liberation, it can travel through time, and it can drown you in the present.

Power is dense and superficial. It can cause bodily injury, and it can harm you without seeming ever to touch you. It is systematic and particularistic, and it is often both at the same time. It causes dreams to live and dreams to die.

We can and must call power by recognizable names, but we also need to remember that power arrives in forms that can range from blatant white supremacy and state terror to “furniture without memories.”

Avery F. Gordon teaches at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where she is an associate professor of sociology. She has published articles on social theory, feminist theory, and race and culture in Social Problems, Critical Inquiry, Social Text, and other periodicals. She has coedited Body Politics: Disease, Desire, and the Family (1994) and Mapping Multiculturalism (Minnesota, 1996).