1. Becoming Disoriented

The Bathroom Problem, After Merleau-Ponty

2022. It was any other night. This time we’d ended up at Sky Bar, looking for a place to shoot some pool. We had tried the Surly Wench—the closest thing to a dyke bar in Tucson—but someone had the table and we didn’t want to wait. So we went a couple blocks up Fourth Avenue to Sky Bar where we sometimes went if the Wench was busy and we wanted to play.

I hadn’t spent much time in this bar—I didn’t really know the crowd or the energy of the place—so when I had to go to the bathroom, I wasn’t sure where to head. Inertia usually led me to the women’s room, but occasionally something in me protested. (These days the “bathroom problem” was an open, unresolved problem, and a constantly recurring one.) At the Wench I would typically go in the men’s room—the bar leaned queer and trans—but otherwise I usually ended up in the women’s room, often but not always without incident.

I peeked into the men’s room. There was too much going on inside to slip in without notice. The only stall was in the back—past an occupied line of urinals—and it appeared to be in use. At the Wench it was easy: There was a clear line of sight into the men’s room as you approached the bathrooms, so you could survey the situation and make a quick call on it. But here I went with the default: the women’s room. With a tinge of gendered resignation—a feeling that oscillated between mundane and terribly profound—I pushed open the door.

I walked in the moment right after a woman had entered. She had taken a few steps into the bathroom by the time I opened the door and walked in. The bathroom was otherwise empty. When I saw her, she was paused in front of the stalls—as though she was waiting for one to become available—though all three were empty, the doors ajar. The moment I walked in seemed to be the same moment she stalled out in her action: She turned and looked at one open stall, and then another, about to walk into one, but hesitating, turning toward the other, starting and stopping her movements awkwardly. She appeared physically unstable, wavering in her action, like she had lost her balance. I wondered if she was particularly drunk, though it turned out she wasn’t at all. She looked nervously into the open stalls, clumsily teetering back and forth.

I had also stalled out: In trying to anticipate the broken trajectory of her action, my direction had also faltered. Perhaps sensing my anticipation, she then turned to me, uncertainty in her eyes, her mouth open, ready to address me, but searching for words. “. . . I . . . I’m . . . I’m sorry . . . I am . . . I’m lost . . . I don’t know where I am.”

Sensing what was happening, I quickly offered, “I’m transgender. That is probably the problem.” It was enough to break the spell of her confusion, to restore her anchor in space.

“Oh . . . I didn’t mean it . . . I’m sorry . . . I didn’t . . .”

I offered some words of assurance, a bit of an explanation, and things smoothed out, the atmosphere warmed up, and space became fluid again. Her sense of disorientation resolved: With my disclosure, things straightened right up, the ground became secure under her feet, she moved her body forth with confidence into a stall. She knew once again, with reasonable certainty, where she was: She was in the women’s restroom.

I, however, was less sure than ever of my place. What was disorienting about the situation stuck with me, stuck to me, and not to her. Her disorientation was momentary, fleeting. Mine had nowhere to go, no immediate or apparent way to resolve. Things wouldn’t straighten up for me; my relation to this space would remain oblique, slantwise, in question, with inconsistent traction, with a contingent, uncertain center of gravity. This disorientation, it seemed, belonged to me, or perhaps, rather, it had somehow been assigned to me.

It would happen again a half an hour later. Sensing my presence behind her as we entered the bathroom, a woman muttered, “Oh shit,” and stopped so suddenly that I almost ran into the back of her. She looked around in a stunned state, wondering if she was in the wrong place. This time I didn’t say anything.

It would happen again and again. Heads would turn, lively conversations becoming hushed. Catching a glimpse of me coming out of the labyrinthine hall of the women’s bathroom at the airport, a woman awkwardly shuttled backward, practically tripping over her roller bag, which was now operating in rushed reverse around the crowded passageway’s tight curves. Another time, another place: A woman walked into a large bathroom and, finding me standing at the sink, stopped in her tracks, looked directly at me in disbelief, turned to a female custodian, and asked aloud, with a tone of exasperation, “Am I in the right bathroom?”

“Yes, ma’am.” She was in the right bathroom.

I suppose that meant I wasn’t. When, I wondered, had this become the wrong bathroom? When had I become a body so markedly out of place that my presence caused others to become lost, disoriented, to lose their ground, their bearings, to lose their very hold on space?

Disorientation

“Disorientation can be a bodily feeling of losing one’s place, and an effect of the loss of a place” (Ahmed 2006, 160), it can be “unsettling, and it can shatter one’s sense of confidence in the ground” (157). To become disoriented is to lose one’s hold on a space, on a situation. Moments of disorientation call into question a “perceptual ground, a background for [one’s] life, a general milieu for the coexistence of [one’s] body and the world” (Merleau-Ponty 2012, 261).

When we are disoriented, things do not cohere, space does not cohere. We lose our hold on space, on our bodies, or, more precisely, we lose the link between the two, the ability to seamlessly and unselfconsciously inhabit and move our bodies through space. The taken-for-granted wheres and whens of experience are unsettled, the world as we took it to be shifts beneath our feet. The coordinates of our existence—our gearing into a situation (Merleau-Ponty 2012, 262), our anchoring in space—slide, no longer aligning with our tacit, embodied knowledge of space, no longer supporting our action within it.

While disorientation is a perceptual and existential phenomenon—a glitch in how we perceive and move through the world around us—it is also an inherently political one. Some of us are more disoriented, differently disoriented than others. Philosopher Lauren Freeman (2015, 26) describes that it is an “often unacknowledged and overlooked privilege to be able to move through the world without losing one’s way,” without one’s body and the way one moves through the world being called into question. Disorientation, then, is also a spatial problem.

To return to the scene of the bathroom: Our disorientation was not the same. Mine stuck to me, to my body. It marked my body as a “disorientation device” (Ahmed 2006, 172), a source of disorientation for others. Her disorientation was prompted by a fleeting moment of confusion at the sight of a trans person in a bathroom; my disorientation was produced by the structure of space that surrounded me, by a tenuous and increasingly strained accord between my body and this world.

For a moment that disorientation transferred, it caught hold, it jumped out of my body and into hers. Yet, despite what ended up being a rather sympathetic exchange, this sense of disorientation would never be shared. This uneasy affect would be mine to digest, to metabolize (Whitney 2018). Her disorientation could be resolved by a disclosure, a resolution of my queer body. It would vanish as soon as we passed through that space; it had already begun to lift like a fog. Whatever tear in space had opened up there would close again. She would be on her way, the ground solid beneath her feet.

Mine would linger. This disorientation would follow me, out of the bathroom and back into it again (and again), into other spaces and other times. It would become predictable, familiar: disorientation becoming a habit, an inhabitation. It would insinuate itself into the coordinates of my existence: into my body, into my time, into my space.

I didn’t know if this disorientation could ever be resolved. It seemed that my vertigo, my alienation, couldn’t be straightened up without a recalibration of an entire world.

A Misfit Epistemology

In Queer Phenomenology, queer feminist theorist Sara Ahmed describes how the experience of disorientation exposes the phenomenon of orientation; disorientation reveals how we situate and orient ourselves in the world, what we take for granted, what supports and sustains our directions, our projects, our bodies. This sense of orientation is so ordinary—a condition of possibility for our perception, our sense-making, our action, our selfhood, our being-in-space—that it recedes into the background. A disruption of our orientation is thus at once a rupture in perception and sense-making and a breakdown in our capacity to act, to extend our bodies in space. When our taken-for-granted coordinates slip, when they no longer align with our body, our bodily action becomes blocked (Ahmed 2006, 66). We stall out.

This rupture, this broken link, exposes the contingency of what we deemed to be the ordinary contours of a world. In this vein, feminist disability scholar Rosemarie Garland-Thomson (2020, 228) describes, “when we fit harmoniously and properly into the world, we forget the truth of contingency because the world sustains us.” When we are disoriented, however, the contours of a taken-for-granted world come into view.

As we already know, some of us are more disoriented than others. Those of us minoritized along axes of gender, race, sexuality, ability, and other forms of embodied social difference find shaky footing in dominant worlds of embodiment, knowledge, and sense. Speaking from trans experience, trans scholar Hil Malatino (2022, 55) writes, “Some of us are dizzier, more off-balance, than others, because the shape of the world we’re in offers little in the way of stability, little for us to hold on to.” Mariana Ortega (2020, 171), a queer, immigrant Latina philosopher, describes how multicultural selves hover and travel between worlds of sense in their everyday experience, living lives in which their “everyday practical orientation” is continually ruptured. French Afro-Caribbean political philosopher Frantz Fanon (1967) describes how, as a Black and colonized subject, he is forced to inhabit a lived space of refraction between his own sense of self (and sense of possibility) and the racist modes of perception he is hailed by, producing a lived sense of alienation and a split and “double consciousness” (Du Bois 2008). There exists, then, a racialized, gendered, sexualized economy—a differential distribution—of disorientation and other such “bad affects” (Malatino 2022) and “existential feelings” (Magrì and McQueen 2023, 78).

When we are continually disoriented, dislodged from a world, we come to know quite intimately—and often quite painfully—what makes a world. Some of us thus come to perceive the contours of dominant worlds with finer resolution, with a different kind of knowledge. It is what Black feminist sociologist Patricia Hill Collins (1986) calls being “an outsider within,” a positionality that gives rise to a particular standpoint: a vantage point that can grant us access to a clearer view on the workings of privilege, power, and oppression.

When we live with and through this tension—existing in a fraught inhabitation of space and its symbolic orders—interrogating space becomes a mundane fact of existence, an assignment of sorts. I have become a theorist of space out of this unhappy coincidence, but also out of a particular kind of necessity: As Judith Butler (2002, 3) argues, critique becomes necessary when one “run[s] up against a crisis within the epistemological field in which one lives,” encountering a “tear in the fabric of our epistemological web.” While this “tear” is difficult to bear and produces forms of foreclosure and violence that mark our lives and our most intimate senses of self, it can also be fashioned into an intellectual and political resource: a misfit epistemology, a queer project.

Indeed, this in-betweenness, this disorientation, this sense of misfit, is the grounds for a critical knowledge, a critical phenomenology of space. We gain a critical knowledge about the world—and what shapes the world—through our experiences navigating and coming up against that world. Accordingly, this experience of disorientation, of “misfitting,” can be a source of knowledge and a terrain of political struggle (Garland-Thomson 2020, 2011).

This book begins from this very premise and its promise: that the embodied knowledge minoritized subjects have of space—its contours, its logics, its possibilities and foreclosures, in short, its politics—is the grounds for a critical philosophy and practice of space, a project of inhabiting and imagining space differently, a project of building other worlds. For those minoritized by systems of oppression, this differential geographic consciousness and imagination is more than a source of knowledge; it is a means of survival in a world in which many of us were apparently not meant to exist as ourselves, to know ourselves, to be possible, to live fully, to have survived. This critical phenomenology of space—this embodied geography of difference—is a call to diagnose, dismantle, and rebuild that world.

A Critical Phenomenology

I, like many others, arrive at phenomenology from a queer starting point. I’ve become a critical phenomenologist out of the experience of disorientation, of misfitting, of not being at home in a world. What, then, is this thing called phenomenology?

Phenomenology is a method and philosophical practice of taking stock of a world—its contours, its patterns and logics—from the vantage point of inhabiting that world. It is a practice of rendering the familiar and the taken-for-granted strange, of making the “backgrounds” of experience explicit. This involves identifying the presuppositions, habits, and sedimented perspectives that support and ground our inhabitation and meaning-making in the world. In this sense, critical phenomenologist Gayle Salamon (2018, 15–16) offers: “‘Phenomenology’ does not name a unified school of thought, but designates a diverse number of thinkers in philosophy and the social sciences concerned with perception, the relation between human existence and meaning, and what Husserl named the ‘lifeworld’ and its structures. Common to all phenomenology is careful attention to how the world is delivered to us through our perceptions.” To do phenomenology is to trace the entangled contours of space and subjectivity—our experience and sense of self and world. This requires suspending a commonsense attitude (referred to by phenomenologists as “the natural attitude”) and describing how it is we come to move through the world and make sense of it.

Classical phenomenology—developed by people like Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, among others—sought to describe fundamental structures of human experience by theorizing the constitutive relations between subjects and their worlds. Phenomenology was a radical departure for its time and opened up a new method and set of concerns for philosophical inquiry. At the same time, in pursuing supposedly universal structures of consciousness, in ways that were at times apolitical and ahistorical, it replicated a more general problem of European philosophy of this era: beginning from and universalizing cishetero white male experience. Here, the supposedly universal human experience that was to illuminate the structure of consciousness, embodiment, meaning, and perception was in fact the experience of a small subset of humanity.

As Ahmed (2006) points out, the great men of this tradition have privileged positions in the world that enable their thought and necessarily inflect its content and its assumed subject position. They can engage big, transcendental questions about the nature of being because they are not routinely stopped in their being: They can ruminate, lost in thought, on walks in the strasse or boulevard without the situational awareness and hypervigilance of a queer person. They can sit at their table and dedicate themselves to thinking because, in this world, it is someone else’s fate to clean and clear that space (31). As Jos Boys (2018) points out, the subjects at the center of classical phenomenology have a relatively unproblematic relationship to the world. Compared to many of us, they are “happily housed” within it and “do not have different kinds of bodies, complex histories and trajectories, or different (unequal) relationships to one another or to resources” (57–59).

In this sense, we can see how classical phenomenology’s imagined universal is, in fact, the normative (Norwood 2018). And the normative—at least in the world in which I find myself—is sutured to white supremacy, to sexism, to cisheteronormativity, to ableism: to systems of privilege and oppression. Accordingly, this epistemological starting point of classical phenomenology obscures more than it reveals; the fact that these universal experiences are issued from such a privileged position means that they overlook their conditions of possibility: privilege. The forms of difference and power that underwrite this privilege thus recede from view. We are left with theories of human experience that, at best, fail to interrogate and, at worst, invisibilize and naturalize the ways that power and difference shape our bodies and our worlds.

This limitation, however, has not prevented students of phenomenology from taking it up for critical purposes. Recent developments of critical phenomenological thinking demonstrate the potential of phenomenology to speak to a broader diversity of human experience, particularly to experiences of minoritized embodiment. A genealogy of these critical appropriations of phenomenology can be traced from the anticolonial philosophy of Frantz Fanon, to the work of feminist existential phenomenologist Simone de Beauvoir, through to many contemporary scholars working in fields like disability studies (Lajoie 2023), queer and trans studies (Salamon 2018), feminist theory (Ahmed 2006), architecture (Norwood 2018), and geography (Simonsen and Koefoed 2020; Kinkaid 2020).

These critical reappropriations of phenomenology, spanning decades, have recently been united under the banner of “critical phenomenology” (Guenther 2013). Critical phenomenology is a retooling of classical phenomenology, one that inserts questions of difference, power, and intersubjectivity into the center of phenomenological inquiry. Critical phenomenology “mobilizes phenomenological description in the service of a reflexive inquiry into how power relations structure experience as well as our ability to analyze that experience” (Weiss et al. 2020, xiv). These power structures often take form around embodied differences and the social identities that attend them. Critical phenomenology, then, is a phenomenology that starts from embodied difference in an effort to understand how difference and power shape our broader worlds and our experience and knowledge of them.

Critical phenomenologists do not seek a universal, transhistorical account of human experience but instead produce phenomenological descriptions from the perspective of those minoritized within dominant worlds and sociopolitical structures. They begin from the recognition, then, that there is no “general world of humanity” (Simonsen and Koefoed 2020, 31), only unevenly shared and differentiated worlds of experience that map onto relations of power, difference, and oppression.

Disorienting Phenomenology

My task in writing this book is to call forth, to illuminate something of these worlds: to shatter a unified theory of space and replace it with the unresolvable vertigo of worlds jostling and pressing up against each other. I articulate a critical phenomenology of social space by tracing the contours of an intellectual and, above all else, a lived struggle in, of, and for space.

I begin this project from that which is most immediate to me—my everyday world of sense—to show how trans life throws up fundamental philosophical and political questions about space, (inter)subjectivity, power, and possibility. Recognizing the limitations of my own location as a privileged queer subject—white, nondisabled, transmasculine, middle class, American—the project does not end there. I purposely adopt critical phenomenology as a coalitional project, one capable of speaking to the interlocking systems of oppression that produce space and foreclose the lived possibilities of variously situated “others.” I wonder, with trans historian Susan Stryker (2019, 41), “to what extent might the affect that emanated from my own enmeshment as a white transgender person . . . share some kinship with affects emanating from others who have been differently racialized than I, differently subordinated in the hierarchies of life than I, yet with whom I could strive toward some commons that better sustains all of our differently enfleshed lives?” This is not to conflate or render simply analogous the historically and conceptually distinct systems of race, class, gender, ability, and others but to pursue an intersectional analysis that seeks their common threads in perception, intersubjectivity, and the production of space. I offer my account, then, as one set of coordinates among many that might collectively shape a critical phenomenology of space.

The following chapters trace the contours of my own critical phenomenological project, one in which problems of space, perception, and embodiment figure prominently. Drawing together the work of critical theorist of space Henri Lefebvre and phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “What Is a World?” presents the key conceptual terms of this project: world, space, intersubjectivity, difference. I bring Lefebvre’s work into contact with Merleau-Ponty’s to develop an explicitly political conception of phenomenological space. Building on these foundations, “Constrained Horizons” considers the production of space under white supremacist cisheteropatriarchy, focusing on the forms of existential, social, and material constraint that attend living in and through a minoritized body and subjectivity. Drawing on phenomenologies of race, disability, and gender, I highlight a shared though variegated existential condition of minoritization that might serve as the basis for a coalitional spatial politics among variously minoritized people.

Building on these conceptual foundations, “Institutional Worlds” takes us into the spaces of institutions—in this case, the US academy—to trace the coproduction of space, subjectivity, difference, power, and knowledge. In examining institutional worlds, I consider how dominant worlds of sense are stabilized and reproduced. Seeking reprieve from these logics, “Queer Space, Trans Worlds” charts moments of exit from dominant social and spatial orders, considering the possibility of differential space: of other worlds of meaning and sense-making that are accessed through forms of queer relationality and recognition that reckon with the ways our lives are always co-constituted with others. In the conclusion, “Critical Phenomenology Now!” I close with reflections on the political stakes and potentials of a critical phenomenology of space, understood as an intellectual project and a form of antioppressive spatial praxis that can rupture the taken-for-granted horizons of the here and now and bolster the possibility of other worlds.