3. Constrained Horizons

The Perils of Visibility

2023. I was slowly making my way out for the night when my father called. We chatted a bit before he asked me what I was up to that evening. I told him I was headed to a drag show in a plant shop. “What does that entail?” he asked. I wasn’t sure—I had just seen a flyer around town and thought I’d check it out. “Some Tucson-style queer shit. I don’t know.” “Okay, well . . . be careful. Don’t get shot.”

I bristled, my tone turning low and sharp. “How would you like me to accomplish that?” I asked. “I don’t know . . . Just be careful,” he told me.

I was annoyed that he brought the thought to my mind, though it was already there. Of course it was. That was an everyday violence of being queer and trans: a learned hypervigilance, a bracing for violence. A fear that the space you finally found might be targeted, might be destroyed, and the possibility of your life with it. An unsettling knowledge that visibility meant possibility, community, recognition, life, at the same time it meant the potential for violence, that it might mean death.

Even before he said anything, I had already thought through it exhaustively: what kind of space it would be, if there would be enough exits, if this was the kind of thing someone would target. I had not even been to the space, and I already had scenes running in my mind about having to escape it.

The thoughts had turned and turned for hours—why, I wasn’t sure. These thoughts didn’t usually come like this. But I had to set them aside, now it was time to go. I was running late. I had stood in the closet for too long, looking in the mirror, wondering if my outfit—a thin, slinky white muscle shirt, slender straps hanging from my shoulders, my nipples slipping out—was “too gay.” Would they see in me what they hated, what they feared? Would they recognize in me what they sought to destroy?

I suppose what my father was telling me was not to mark myself out like this, not to invite the attention; though looking in the mirror, I thought that by now my queerness was a foregone conclusion. I was caught there, hesitating at the site of what might appear as a choice. It wasn’t my choice. This hesitation wouldn’t yield a reconsideration—I wore what I wore—it would instead mark an intimate, conflicted space: the anticipation of, a resignation to, what felt like inevitable violence.

I biked across town with a sense of defiance but also with a sinking feeling that I was being drawn toward an inescapable fate, violence a matter of probability, of being in the wrong place at the wrong time. This fear was supposed to make me stay home, out of public space, away from others, alone. I refused that. I wondered if someday, as much as I needed it to live, my defiance might be the death of me. I assured myself that whatever should happen, it wasn’t a choice.

I parked my bike at Sixth and Sixth, unable to discern more precisely the coordinates of the place. At the end of a storefront, a sandwich board pointed me down a gravel alley. I’d found it. Down the alley, I saw light spilling forth from a nondescript doorway, a couple of backlit silhouettes hovering in the door frame.

I stepped into the frame, standing at the opening of a very small space teeming with bodies, some sitting in chairs, others snaking around in a conga line. I jumped onto the end of the line as a way of breaking into the space. The crowd was young, mostly undergrads with some younger kids accompanied by their parents. I was late, but I caught the last couple drag performances—bubbly, irreverent, colorful, teenage—before they cut a rainbow cake and everyone resumed mingling, the couple children in attendance running up to the performers for photos with their parents in tow.

Thrown by the age of the crowd, seeing no one I recognized, I just stood there watching, content to be witnessing the whole scene, trying to soak up some of its effervescence. The mood was light and sugary and poppy and playful, the juxtaposition with my dark mood disorienting, my mind caught up in a state of self-conscious reflection.

I had read, just that morning, that Arizona legislators had drafted a bill that would make it a criminal offense to expose minors to drag performances. These were the spaces they wanted to destroy. We were the people who they vowed to eliminate from public life.

As I wandered out and headed back home, the scene stayed with me, and so did the fear, the sense of impending foreclosure. Queer spaces would always remain, I told myself. They had to. There’d always be word of a gig in a warehouse, a party somewhere weird, a hidden space down an alley, precise coordinates unknown. There had to be. We couldn’t live without them. Queer people needed queer spaces to become queer—to recognize each other, to recognize ourselves, to build a world for ourselves. The legislators and other antagonists knew that, and they weaponized that knowledge. If they eliminated our spaces, they eliminated us.

The Body as Site of Trouble

You can’t help but notice these politics of space when they seem to emerge from your own body—when your body is apparently the problem, when your existence seems to be what is at stake. It is an unsettling experience to have your body and your ordinary existence turned into an urgent, volatile question, a national debate, a political crisis.

In being made into a problem in this way, the body, in fact, begins to become a problem—not only for these others but for oneself. The kind of self-consciousness and hypervigilance produced when one’s body is consistently perceived and problematized in this way gets in the way of being in the world. As philosopher of race George Yancy (2012, 49) describes: “One begins to feel one’s body as the site of trouble—it is as if one’s body is ontologically troublesome.”

This self-consciousness gets in the way of having a body; it disrupts the spatiality of the body and what Maurice Merleau-Ponty refers to as the body schema: a lived, nonconceptual sense we have of our bodies and a dynamic and situational mode of spatiality through which we respond to a given situation, through which we inhabit a world.

The body schema orients us in space, giving us a sense of location and uninterrupted presence in our bodies that allows us to occupy them as vehicles for action. When the body schema is unified, when it is “working,” our bodies fade into the background and the world is immediate to us in our engagement with it. In such circumstances, our body is unthematized for us—it is not experienced as an object that we inhabit but is lived as a means of having a world. It is in this sense that the body schema also has an existential quality, not only a physiological one. A unified body schema is an embodied “I can” that propels us toward the world and into spontaneous and fluid engagement with it.

When the body schema falters, when it is disrupted, our bodies no longer flow into space. Critical phenomenologists have demonstrated how forms of perception and social judgment inhibit the body schema—things like racist, sexist, transphobic, and ableist attitudes and perceptions. This is because these incidents pull us out of the unselfconscious inhabitation of our bodies; being made into a question, problem, or object of scorn heightens one’s self-consciousness, forcing us to see ourselves as both subjects and objects of an oppressive gaze (Ngo 2017; Fanon 1967). The result is a kind of “double consciousness” (Du Bois 2008) wherein one “stands in multiple relations to and perspectives upon the self, in a way that disrupts the spatial cohesion of the body schema” (Ngo 2017, 66). The resulting sense of disorientation, of alienation, necessarily affects how one moves through space and if one can move through or inhabit space. This alienation flows out from the body, into our engagements with the world, our experience of which becomes marked by this sense of hesitation, of constraint, of foreclosure.

Throwing like a Girl

How does one become alienated from their own body, from their own space? How does one come to internalize and embody social judgments and norms that undermine their own capacity for action in the world?

In her famous essay “Throwing like a Girl,” feminist phenomenologist Iris Marion Young (2005) draws on the concept of the body schema to describe how this sense of alienation becomes a normal and naturalized feature of female embodiment. Her essay begins as a response to phenomenologist Erwin Straus’s (1966) description of a girl throwing a baseball. In his account, Straus describes how girls do not make full use of space and their bodies when throwing a ball; their actions are mechanical, disconnected, and ultimately ineffective. In contrast, a boy of the same age throws his body into the task, moving his body in an ensemble that unlocks his full strength and sends the ball flying with force and direction (157–60).

Reflecting on this gendered difference, Straus ultimately argues that this is not the product of an anatomical difference—nothing about the female skeleton or musculature stops girls from throwing a ball effectively. He instead attributes this difference to a “feminine attitude” toward space and the body, which is, for him, rooted in biology but not anatomical per se (Straus 1966, 157–58).

In her critical response, Young sets out to examine what exactly this “feminine attitude” is. As a feminist, she locates the difference in the realm of gender, not of biological sex. She writes, “I take ‘femininity’ to designate not a mysterious quality or essence that all women have by virtue of their being biologically female. It is, rather, a set of structures and conditions that delimit the typical situation of being a woman in a particular society, as well as the typical way in which this situation is lived by the women themselves” (Young 2005, 30–31). It is thus the social meaning of female sex—that is, patriarchal gender norms—that makes girls move through space in restrained ways. As their bodies become limited in these ways, the external world of girls also shrinks. As Young describes, there are “particular modalities of feminine spatiality. Feminine existence lives space as enclosed or confining, and the woman experiences herself as positioned in space,” like an object rather than a subject (39). For those socialized as girls and women, a sense of space and engagement in the world tends to be more limited and constrained than that available to boys and men.

The effects of this gendered ideology are not limited to how girls and women throw balls, sit in chairs, hold their bodies, or exert themselves; these constrained actions are indicative of a broader existential problem. Young argues that female embodiment as a whole is characterized by this frustrated transcendence—a kind of socially mandated self-consciousness that frustrates embodied action and existential freedom. “Throwing like a girl,” then, becomes a more profound condition of being embodied as female in a cisheteropatriarchal world. Young (2005, 42–43) concludes: “Insofar as we learn to live out our existence in accordance with the definition that patriarchal culture assigns to us, we are physically inhibited, confined, positioned, and objectified. As lived bodies we are not open and unambiguous transcendences that move out to master a world that belongs to us, a world constituted by our own intentions and projections.” Instead, female embodiment and the broader lives of women and girls are contoured by a kind of muted possibility. To become a woman is to have the world recede from you, to have space foreclosed, to have your horizons of possibility close down.

Black in an Anti-Black World

A constrained phenomenological condition is also experienced by Black subjects living in an anti-Black world. In Black Skin, White Masks, Frantz Fanon offers a complication of Merleau-Ponty’s body schema by tracing how his own psychic integrity, mobility, and bodily capacity for action are disrupted by racism. “In the white world, the man of color encounters difficulties in the development of his bodily schema. Consciousness of the body is solely a negating activity. It is a third-person consciousness. The body is surrounded by an atmosphere of certain uncertainty” (Fanon 1967, 110–11). Facing an onslaught of racist utterances, stereotypes, and perceptions, he doubts himself and is alienated from his body in profoundly disruptive ways.

To Merleau-Ponty’s account, Fanon (1967, 111) adds another layer of the body schema: “Below the corporal schema I had sketched a historico-racial schema. The elements that I used had been provided for me not by ‘residual sensations and perceptions primarily of the tactical, vestibular, kinesthetic, and visual character,’ but by the other, the white man, who had woven me out of a thousand details, anecdotes, and stories.” The racist meanings and perceptions Fanon internalizes as a Black colonized subject undermine the integrity of his body and constrain his mobility and inhabitation of space: “I stumbled, and the movements, the attitudes, the glances of the other fixed me there, in the sense in which a chemical solution is fixed by a dye” (109).

Fixed me there. As Sara Ahmed (2006, 109–12) notes in Queer Phenomenology, Fanon’s account is marked by both an existential and a spatial alienation. The effects of racism are spatially alienating in that they affect—they block—his body and his movement through public space. Helen Ngo (2017, 167) names the effects of racism on the body schema as a “forestalled motility.” This spatial alienation and blockage have profound existential and ontological consequences: They shape who we can become and what we can accomplish in the world, what is possible. Subjects facing this kind of existential foreclosure are stripped of agency and meaning. Reflecting on this experience, Yancy (2012, 36) describes, “I am robbed of ontological upsurge. I feel as if the capacity to transform the meaning of my life, to define the terms of my existence, has been stolen from me.” One’s life, one’s world closes down: As Fanon (1967, 114) describes: “The white world, the only honorable one, barred me from all participation.”

It in this sense that Lauren Freeman (2015, 25) argues that existing as a racially minoritized subject in a white supremacist society changes “the ontological structure of one’s being-in-the-world.” Racism breaks the subject’s relation to their body, to their space, it robs them of the openness of the world, in part by undermining their openness to the world through persistent forms of symbolic and material violence. It robs them of possibility, with possibility understood not only as imagination or potential but also as coherence and meaning.

Foreclosed Horizons

Across these experiences—the experience of being queer and trans in a cisheteronormative world, the experience of being socialized as a girl in a patriarchal social order, the experience of being Black in an anti-Black world—we see how dominant sociospatial orders, and the modes of perception that attend them, operate to foreclose the lived horizons of minoritized subjects. Here, a horizon represents a space of possibility, one that is constrained by forms of oppressive perception and sociospatial marginalization.

In phenomenology, horizon is a term that operates in perceptual, spatial, and existential registers. In the perceptual sense, a horizon is the field of possibility that makes perception possible. This is captured in Merleau-Ponty’s discussion of the figure-background structure; it is only through the generation (through recession) of a background of perception that a figure can come into focus as an object of perception. As Ahmed (2006) develops, this means that the things we come to see are not simply “given” but produced through acts of relegation; perception is selective and oriented. There is always more to see. As David Morris (2020, 175) describes: “Perception, cognition, and reflection [are] conditioned, oriented, delimited, and buoyed by never-yet-determinate background horizons that continually billow and flow beyond our grasp.” As a kind of background, structuring condition of perception, we often do not perceive horizons as such but experience them indirectly as a condition of possibility and meaning.

In addition to being a structure of (visual) perception, horizons are embodied in a sensorimotor register: They are encoded and activated in our bodily sense of “I can”—our body’s prereflective gearing into the world (i.e., operative intentionality). Our embodied, sensorimotor system (i.e., the body schema) approaches and engages a given milieu as an arena for action and the expression and extension of our bodily capacities. These embodied horizons of possibility are lived in and as space—as the existential dimension that results from the gearing in of a subject to a world shaped by particular meanings, practices, constraints, and possibilities. In this sense, horizons are “the taken-for-granted social and temporal milieu in which bodies are oriented, [a context that] shapes and lends meanings to bodies, lives, and relationships” (Hall 2022, 31). Horizons are spatial in so far as they configure our embodied relations to our milieu, objects, and others.

Finally, horizons operate on an existential and cultural register: In a more collective, cultural sense, they operate as the socially structured possibility that renders meanings, actions, and identities as intelligible, legible, and livable (or not). Horizons are made through the “sedimentation of historical and cultural values” through the reproduction of particular worlds (Magrì and McQueen 2023, 30). These horizons delineate shared social and cultural worlds, yet these shared worlds are marked by difference and inequality. For critical phenomenologists, horizons help us to describe “a world characterized by asymmetrical power relations” wherein power can “delegitimize other horizons, can render them as untrue, invisible or unthinkable” (Salamon 2018, 92). In the process, some worlds become “‘historically muted or distorted,’ . . . due to systemic imbalances of power” (Pitts 2020, 345).

The concept of “horizon,” then, helps us to connect the operations of systems of perception, norms of embodiment, and oppressive cultural systems by tracing how the possibilities of minoritized subjects are regulated and foreclosed through these interlocking registers. In this way, horizons condition our individual and collective sense of possibility: what meanings are intelligible, what modes of embodiment are possible, what lives are livable. These obstacles predelineate “the exterior horizons of what is possible and what to anticipate in an anti-Black world” (Mahendran 2007, 198). José Esteban Muñoz (2009, 12) diagnoses the foreclosures of a heterosexual “broken-down present,” showing how straight time and space delimit the possible life trajectories of queer people. He looks toward the horizon for an exit from straightness and the space-times and social formations it creates.

Horizons, then, encode a sense of possibility at the same time that they index the structuring conditions that produce and constrain the present. As Muñoz (2009) demonstrates, the horizon can be a source of utopian possibility (as they are in his conception of queer futurity), but the horizon must also be read backward to diagnose the structuring conditions that give rise to the present. Ahmed (2006) similarly encourages us to read from the “background” to understand the conditions of what appears—and what is possible—as the product of a particular history and power structure. Indeed, the evidence of this power structure is all around us; it is encoded in space.

Uneven Worlds

These existential roadblocks faced by minoritized subjects shape how we inhabit our bodies and how we experience space. As Henri Lefebvre (1991, 106) describes: “Many people, members of a variety of groups and classes, suffer (albeit unevenly) the effects of a multiplicity of reductions bearing on their capacities, ideas, ‘values,’ and ultimately, on their possibilities, their space and their bodies.” If we understand that spaces are made through repeated and habitual forms of inhabitation, we can see how worlds become built around some bodies more than others (Ahmed 2006). The withdrawal of particular bodies from space—the repeated failure of particular bodies to inhabit space and claim it as their own—reproduces a world where space is not for them, creating a feedback loop between forms of existential and spatial marginalization. Thus this sense of existential, embodied constraint is also a spatial and material foreclosure.

The experience of foreclosed existential horizons cannot be separated from the systematic production of uneven worlds—worlds that offer ease, comfort, support, resources, and possibility to some bodies while denying it to others, often along the fault lines of privilege and social difference (Butler 2022, 3). Space operates differentially in this way. For the minoritized subject, the structuring logics of abstract space are operative in a way that forecloses possibility, operating as oppression. For the privileged subject (along any axis of difference), abstract space creates and upholds possibility (operating as privilege) and thus recedes from view. White supremacy, for instance, forecloses the lived possibilities—and, indeed, the lives—of people of color, while it is an enabling ontological and political condition of white lives, granting them a kind of “ontological expansiveness” (Sullivan 2006). Ableist spaces and social orders close out disabled people while extending the reach and dominance of nondisabled bodies. Cisnormativity impedes upon trans lives while at the same time giving cis lives their naturalness, legitimacy, and form, thus allowing cisgender and its forms to recede into the background of experience, consciousness, and perception.

In this way, minoritized people occupy, to varying extents and degrees, different realities than their more privileged counterparts. Freeman (2015, 39) describes this as such: “One who is racially oppressed lives in a different world from those who occupy dominant social positions.” Disability theorist Margaret Price (2024, 8) echoes this: “Experiencing the material difficulties of life as part of a subaltern group—including the joys, the surprises, and the harms—constitutes a different reality.”

In this sense, the meanings of social difference are thoroughly spatial and material. This is evidently clear in the case of disability: disabled bodyminds become misfits through both ableist social attitudes and the materiality of the world; their “outcast status is literal when the shape and function of their bodies comes in conflict with the shape and stuff of the built world” (Garland-Thomson 2011, 594). There is thus a feedback loop between the kind of existential foreclosures described in the last section and the shape of the world, leading crip phenomenologist Corinne Lajoie (2022, 330) to argue that “spatial exclusion is ontologically operative.”

This linkage is perhaps most obvious in the case of disability and access, but it also operates through other logics of embodied social difference. Yancy (2012, 21) similarly illuminates this connection through the concept of the color line, which he sees as both a spatial-material and an existential problem: “The color line, in short, is not just a signifier of spatial demarcation. . . . Rather, the color line also functions as a powerful demarcation that has profound negative ontological implications for black people and those of color vis-à-vis whiteness. Indeed, the process of racial spatialization and the process of ontological stigmatization are mutually reinforcing.” Ontological stigmatization and dominant modes of spatialization are mutually reinforcing. The constrained horizons experienced and embodied by minoritized subjects are mirrored in the shape of—the material reality of—the world, in space.

We can also see this interplay between social judgment, spatial control, and the foreclosure of lived possibility at work in the everyday experience of trans and gender-nonconforming people. For example, sex-segregated bathrooms have become a rhetorical and material hinge in antitrans debates; they stand as a symbolic space of a gendered social order at the same time that they are a basic infrastructure that enables one’s participation in public life. Controlling who can use this space becomes a means of controlling who can be in public space more generally. As Gayle Salamon (2018, 166) points out, “This legal struggle is not about bathrooms any more than desegregation was about water fountains, lunch counters, or municipal buses. The point is to purge trans people from public spaces. To make them disappear.”

In various ways, the existential constraints of existing in a minoritized body are echoed in the shape of the worlds we inhabit. The production of minoritized subjectivities is not incidental or epiphenomenal to the existing order of the world. This connection is structurally produced and reinforced. The production of these truncated, hesitant, disoriented, deprived, depressed, rageful, suicidal, excluded subjects are part and parcel of the reproduction of that world and its power structures (Malatino 2022). This is how social difference works to structure space, at the site of both our bodies and subjectivities and broader social and material orders.

The Intersectional Politics of Space

All minoritized subjects, to varying degrees, experience this social and spatial production of their own difference and its existential, embodied, social, spatial, and political effects. While experiences of minoritization along axes of race, gender, sexuality, and disability, for example, are distinct—and the intersections of these experiences offer a wide array of particularities of experience—these locations are all shaped by troubled experiences of and in space due to the manner in which interlocking systems of oppression shape space and operate through it.

Trans geographer Jack Jen Gieseking (2023, 572–73) highlights these politics of space by showing how a diversity of minoritized people are thought not to “belong” to space: Indigenous people, Black people, disabled people, women, trans people—and those occupying the intersections of these categories—are marginalized in space, both symbolically and materially. Indigenous spaces are consigned to the past, while settler colonial, white supremacist, and capitalist logics of possession overwrite Indigenous meanings and practices of place, producing Indigenous people as “out of place” and anachronistic (Barnd 2017; Moreton-Robinson 2015). Black “social lives are often displaced, rendered ungeographic,” as Katherine McKittrick (2006, x) argues. Disabled bodyminds are so often perceived as “out of place” that they “become interrogation points, bold, conspicuous punctuation marks on a blank page, stringing together a series of questions: ‘What are they doing here anyway?’” (Lajoie 2022, 321, quoting Titchkosky 2011, 78). Women and femmes know the ubiquitous violence (e.g., sexual assault, domestic abuse) that attends being in the supposedly wrong place or not knowing one’s place. Gieseking (2023, 573) observes that the geography of trans people is no place because we are thought not to exist or treated as though we shouldn’t exist. In different ways, we are all told we do not belong to space, that space is not for us, and this judgment indelibly shapes our bodies and how they move through the world, manifesting a world in which space indeed does not belong to us. A highly uneven sociomaterial and political order hinges on this judgment.

Dominant worlds are contoured in this way by distinct but interlocking forms of social difference. In the words of the Black feminist Combahee River Collective (1977), “The synthesis of these oppressions creates the conditions of our lives.” It is in this sense that the “interlocking violence of racism, patriarchy, heteronormativity, and capitalism constitute a spatial formation” (Mollett and Faria 2018, 566), one that we encounter and live out through our bodies, in our experience of space.