2. What Is a World?

M or F?

2021. Whenever I’m in the airport, I play a little game, keeping a tally of how my gender is perceived: how many sirs, how many ma’ams, and how many ambiguously gendered honorifics are used to refer to me. These days, the sirs usually win out. I passed like this most commonly at the airport, a reality I chalked up to the fact that I tended to travel in a snapback hat, a face mask, a t-shirt and sweats, and maybe a flannel or boyish jacket. Then again, I guess I didn’t know how I was being read much of the time in other spaces; it was just that the airport forced a determination. Gender was a function of security—identity needed to be rendered transparent, knowable, traceable. It was also a function of sociality: The staff were compelled in all instances to sir or ma’am you as a matter of politeness.

At the time, my sir status rarely held for long, it was a momentary accomplishment. Once I spoke, the registering of my vocal tone set off a cascade of backtracking and apologies, a nervous flurry of “Er . . . um, ma’am,” “I’m so sorry,” and “Excuse me.” Now an explanation was called for. “Really, it is fine,” I would explain, having to quell the discomfort my ambiguous presentation seemed to cause. “I’m transgender . . . Honestly, I prefer you call me ‘sir’ than ‘ma’am.’”

My gender not only frustrated standard manners of address, it posed a question of procedure, of security, though my white body meant that I was never automatically perceived as a threat in such spaces—only as an aberration. Emerging from the body scanner, I was more often than not met with some kind of confusion. Sometime after I had top surgery, I was wearing a sports bra to keep silicone strips adhered to the site of my incision. The bra zipped up the front. The zipper often caught the eye of the x-ray machine. I was called aside by a male TSA agent. “Sir, are you wearing . . . a chain?” he asked. “It is a zipper on a sports bra,” I replied. His uncomfortable surprise was palpable. “Okay, um . . . let’s get a lady officer over here.”

I gradually learned some things about the airport and how it works. After a chat with sympathetic young TSA officials, I learned that they are mandated to call you “sir” or “ma’am” as part of their training. I also learned that as you enter the body scanner, the operator has to select your sex/gender. I learned this by virtue of being perceived as a man when I entered it, being (mis)recognized as a woman once I came out the other side, and being sent back through so they could adjust the setting and run it again.

Once, on Transgender Day of Visibility, in fact, I stepped into a scanner and a soft-spoken, middle-aged Latina TSA agent asked me, “Which button do you want me to press?” “Huh?” I responded, not entirely registering the question. “Which button do you want me to press? It’s your choice.”

I was flustered by the question; I’d never been asked it. Had I not been through this situation before, I wouldn’t have even known what she was asking. “I don’t know. Female, I guess.” I did not even understand why this determination had to be made. I assumed the model was trying to account for the tissue of breasts or male genitals in the body scan, though I had neither. I was touched by her sensitivity and flattered by her perception of my gendered indiscernibility, but I couldn’t help but linger on the absurdity of the exchange: It’s your choice.

What choice, exactly, did I have in a space that was built around gendered recognizability not only as a matter of an ordinary, unquestioned social order but as a matter of perceived security? What choice did I have when “we live and function in a world where we are scattered, despite ourselves, into two genders, two social roles, two bathrooms, and two boxes” (Zurn 2025, 116)? How had this space become so impervious to the possibility of my embodiment, which, at least to me, was really not that spectacular after all? How had an entire world?

What Is a World?

These are the kinds of moments in which you learn about the world, about what a world is. A world comes into view when it ceases being the frictionless space of your projects, of your movements, of your “I can.” A world comes into view when it stops you (Ahmed 2006). You run up against its contours, its logics, its judgments. In the process, you learn who you are or, at least, what your body means to others within this world. You enter spaces shaped by this world’s commonsense assumptions, by standardized procedures, by histories of bodies that have come before. These histories become present, become embodied in space. You live in worlds that are the institution of these layers of materiality and meaning. This is the stuff of a world: an enmeshment of bodies, logics, discourses, perceptions, habits, procedures, gestures, movements—space as a history of practice.

What is a world? In the phenomenological sense, a world is the totality of meaning—material, symbolic, somatic—in which our consciousness, our existence as subjects, takes form. As perceptual and existential subjects we are born into a world—we inherit its meanings as a condition of emergence as subjects. Our languages, our bodily practices, our identities, our subjectivities are the products of an intersubjective tradition (Oksala 2006). This lived, intersubjective tradition is shaped by the sedimentation and institutionalization of meaning but also transformed by the spontaneity and creativity of human practice (Merleau-Ponty 2012).

A world is not “out there,” beyond us; worlds surround us like flesh. Worlds trace the contours of our bodies like a second skin, a contiguous surround that gives our bodies their shapes and their meanings, at the same time we impress upon it and remold it. Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1968, 250) describes, “It is by the flesh of the world that . . . one can understand the lived body.”

A world, then, is this “context-giving horizon from within and against which our lived experiences emerge” (Simonsen and Koefoed 2020, 9). We live in—and often in between—multiple, competing, overlapping worlds of sense that structure our selves, our meaning, and our social relations. Andrea Pitts (2020, 344), following María Lugones (1987), explains that “a world can be an actual society, be a portion of a particular society with just a few inhabitants, be incomplete or in the process of being constructed, and have inhabitants who may or may not understand how a given world constructs them. Worlds are also, in [Lugones’s] words, ‘multiple, intersecting, co-temporaneous’ and ‘permeable.’” Worlds are not singular or total—though some come to dominate others. Rather, they are living intersubjective histories: overlapping, sometimes even colocated, structures of meaning that define the contours of the bodies, spatialities, and temporalities we inhabit and the horizons of possibility available to us.

These worlds make space; or rather, the relation between body and world makes space. In Merleau-Ponty’s work, this flesh of the world “distributes space as a charged, relational interval between us and the world, as a field of interaction between us and others” (McCann 2018, 154). The world is not what is on the other side of the boundary of our bodies—with a clean separation between self and external world; rather, a world is what takes form at the boundary. This relation is what produces space and our sense of ourselves as subjects, as perceptual and existential beings. Space is this lived, existential dimension of being-in-the-world.

Indeed, for Merleau-Ponty (2012, 262) this coarticulation of subject and world is the origin of space. We are born as subjects through this relation; we are of space, not in it (149). Our inherence as perceptual and existential subjects in the world is, for Merleau-Ponty, “the condition of spatiality” (293). Space, then, is not an empty container, nor is it an abstract set of coordinates or relations; it is the lived dimension of the relation between body and world. Subjectivity and space are twinned births of this meeting of body and world.

The Production of Space

In The Production of Space, Marxist philosopher and sociologist Henri Lefebvre begins from a similar starting point as Merleau-Ponty, sketching a relational ontology of space, albeit by a different route and with different aims. Lefebvre’s Production is a history of space under capitalism. In Production, he traces how the meanings and practices of space have been transformed by the logics of the state, capitalism, and technocratic rationality and molded into an instrument of ideology and domination. Production also reads as a manifesto, a call to transform the political ideology and social relations structuring space and society.

Lefebvre has been largely read as a Marxist, albeit a heterodox one. Yet in overlooked and unremarked upon passages throughout Production, he sketches out what resembles a phenomenology of social space, one inflected with his concerns with ideology, domination, and difference. These moments in the text can serve as a bridge to the work of phenomenologists, particularly Merleau-Ponty, and provide direction for a politically engaged phenomenological account of lived space.

What is Lefebvre’s phenomenology of space? Like Merleau-Ponty, Lefebvre (1991) agrees that we are not in space as an object is in a container; space is lived, and as such, it emerges from the body. “The whole of (social) space proceeds from the body,” he writes (405). “Bodies themselves generate spaces” (216), such that a history of space may very well be a history of the body (196). Our subjectivity—our experiential being and sense of ourselves—is thus fundamentally linked to space; to be a subject is to be spatial (182). Throughout Production, Lefebvre returns to and lingers on this coproduction of embodied subjects and space.

Yet, the history of space that Lefebvre traces through Production stretches far beyond the body. Developing a critical history of spatial representation and practice—linking art, statecraft, semiotics, the body, technology, capitalism, and everyday life—he traces how modern philosophies and political formations have created an abstract conception of space that has neglected the body. Modernity—considered as both a historical period and an ideological formation—is built on and through this abstract space, imagined as a geometric space, a mathematical space, a conceptual space that transforms lived space into an abstraction. This abstract space is operationalized by capitalism, state power, and technocratic rationality, becoming a means of visibility, control, and domination.

Abstract space, and the social relations that subtend it, produce particular worlds of meaning, codes of practice, political-economic formations, and subjectivities, all of which serve as part of an ideological apparatus. While Lefebvre does not use the term world here, in the phenomenological sense, what he describes is a historically specific set of social relations, social practices, representations, aesthetics, symbologies, technologies, knowledge traditions, and spaces that the modern subject finds itself within and is, in part, produced through. For Lefebvre, the semiotic and political field—the space—that emerges from this hegemonic formation constrains the production and intelligibility of alternative meanings and social practices and thus stands in the way of producing a different society, a different space.

Space is, after all, what is at stake for Lefebvre. He is interested in how the social production and lived experience of space is both a symptom of and a vehicle for dominant social and political-economic formations. It is here that Lefebvre radicalizes a relational ontology of space. While he begins from a similar premise as Merleau-Ponty—space is an intercorporeal matrix of relationality—his focus is on demonstrating how space as a medium is a vehicle for ideology and domination (Lefebvre 1991, 349). “The space of a (social) order is hidden in the order of space” (289). Social space is “politically instrumental in that it facilitates the control of society” and “is equivalent, practically speaking, to a set of institutional and ideological superstructures” (349). Here, space stands in as these institutional and ideological superstructures because it has so fully become an instrument of them; abstract space has become an instrument for the imposition of a particular world.

So too have our bodies. Our bodies have come to internalize and reproduce this sociopolitical order. The ideologies embedded in space are lived through the body, through our subjectivity; embodied subjects are disciplined and shaped by the codes of space. Lefebvre (1991, 139) writes, “A society is a space and an architecture of concepts, forms and laws whose abstract truth is imposed on the reality of the senses, of bodies.” In a more explicitly political register, he describes: “Space commands bodies. . . . It is produced with this purpose in mind; this is its raison d’être” (143). Under such political conditions, bodies become a vehicle for ideology; the comportments, meanings, and subjectivities we inherit and enact through our bodies reproduce this political system. Acts of the body become “the corporeal equivalent of ideology” (Simonsen and Koefoed 2020, 30).

While the body and space have been conscripted into the reproduction of dominant worlds, they also hold a revolutionary potential for Lefebvre. For him, any revolutionary project must begin from the reappropriation of the body and of space (Lefebvre 1991, 167). If a hegemonic capitalist, technocratic order is accomplished through the imposition of particular subjectivities, embodiments, and spaces, it must be the case that the body and space can be reappropriated toward other social and political orders. There is always the potential that a body “putting up resistance” might “[inaugurate] the project of a different space,” that we might reorient our bodies toward other horizons and other worlds (349).

Intersubjectivity and the Social

In different ways, Merleau-Ponty and Lefebvre point us to the fundamental relationality of space and the problem of intersubjectivity: the way our worlds, lives, and meanings are coproduced with others. Merleau-Ponty sketches a self born into and through intersubjective relations; our worlds are inherited and shared and always marked by the presence of others. Lefebvre comes at this problem a different way, through a critique of the (uneven) social relations that make space; Lefebvre’s critique of abstract space is also a critique of the dominant and dominating social relations shaping our lives.

Here, the terms intersubjective and social both name this fundamental relationality of self and world, a relational matrix that produces space. The term social space, often used by Lefebvre, does not imply that there is a nonsocial space. Lefebvre (1991, 199) clarifies, “For the spatial body, becoming social does not mean being inserted into some pre-existing ‘world’: this body produces and reproduces—and it perceives what it reproduces or produces.” The embodied subject is already embedded within the production of space as a living tradition—perceiving and “reading” space and reproducing it through embodied knowledge and practice. Space is thus always already relational, it is always in relation to a subject, to a body, to a world.

Space, then, is an intersubjective medium that composes our bodies and relations to others. Lefebvre (1991, 184) describes: “Space—my space . . . is first of all my body, and then it is my body’s counterpart or ‘other.’ . . . It is the shifting intersection between that which touches, penetrates, threatens or benefits my body on the one hand, and all other bodies on the other.” Turning to Rachel McCann (2018, 154), space here is a “charged, relational interval between us and the world . . . a field of interaction between us and others.” For Lefebvre (1991, 17), space also belongs to others in the sense that it is a historical inheritance; space is a history of practice inherited and picked up by the subject who “reads” space and acts within it.

Merleau-Ponty argues that the mark of intersubjectivity—the fabric of “the social,” the trace of others—resides not only in the spaces we inhabit but also in our very bodies and consciousness. As feminist phenomenologist Johanna Oksala (2006, 235) describes, as embodied subjects, we are born into a “historical nexus of sense” and are members of a “historical community” and “intersubjective tradition.” This is to say that the social—the intersubjective constitution of meaning—is already at work in our emergence as subjects, and we carry it within us as a kind of lived history, one that flows from our bodies out toward space at the same time that the histories of space shape our bodies. Intersubjectivity—our relational being—defines us as much as it defines space.

Power and Difference

Lefebvre and Merleau-Ponty, in different ways, both show us how space is not simply given—not just “there”—but is a social product emerging from our bodies and the bodies of others, one thick with history, symbolism, materiality, relationality, and relations of power. While Merleau-Ponty’s treatment of intersubjectivity provides the basis for an ethics of collective life, Lefebvre’s more overtly politicized conception opens onto a political critique of space and society. This is how Lefebvre’s work can provide a politically engaged conception of lived space that is largely underdeveloped in phenomenology, one that can help us develop a critical phenomenology of social space.

This critical phenomenology begins from the question of intersubjectivity. To say that a world is shared is not to say that it is shared equally, that it bears the imprint of all subjects or communities equally, or that it is accessible to all equally. Kirsten Simonsen and Lasse Koefoed (2020, 31) caution that a “world is not a general world of humanity, but a differentiated world.” Lefebvre returns to a similar point repeatedly throughout Production. While modern, abstract space gives the illusion of being semiotically empty, inert, and neutral—the same everywhere—it actually conceals differences and seeks to homogenize them. In the process it creates unevenness: Space is operationalized to sort, classify, and marginalize, putting constraints on the lived space of minorities and other marginalized populations (Lefebvre 1991, 375).

In other words, our lived experience of space is differentiated, shaped by difference. This is recognized by Lefebvre—who centers difference as an ontological and political force in his theory of space—though he rarely connects this generic principle of difference to historically specific and concrete forms of social difference (see Kinkaid 2020). For the critical phenomenologist, however, the terms of this differentiation are sutured to categories of embodied social difference: race, gender, sexuality, and ability, for example. Our imprint on, access to, and inhabitation of space relies, in other words, on our social locations and the manner in which they are read and perceived by others within a particular world of sense and set of social relations (while also being sutured to broader systems of differential valuation under racial capitalism).

Intersubjectivity in Merleau-Ponty’s work and the social in Lefebvre’s account thus name a complex and politically charged matrix of relationality. It is not only connective—a shared skin of humanity—but also shot through with power relations and violence that produce and sustain forms of symbolic and material inequality. Thus, intersubjectivity can be enabling or disabling, a reality that Merleau-Ponty overlooks in his relatively positive treatment of intersubjective life (Weiss 2017, 239; Butler 2022, 78). The social, in Black trans poet and theorist Cameron Awkward-Rich’s (2022, 188) words, is “nothing less than the organization of the world that both enables and constrains the lives we can and do live, what kinds of subjects it is possible to think, and therefore, be.”

The politics of space are, then, in part, a politics of intersubjectivity and difference. Space, after all, is “a site of complex, contested, and often inequitable everyday encounters and relationships” and “an uneven mediator of difference, not an expression of archetypical sameness” (Boys 2018, 57). Yet, due to the prevailing ideology of abstract space, the uneven landscapes that result from this spatial project are often treated as natural, as given. As Black feminist scholar Katherine McKittrick (2006, xv) observes, the “naturalization of ‘difference’ is, in part, bolstered by the ideological weight of transparent space that ‘just is.’”

In this way, space is a vehicle for the production and naturalization of difference and the power relations that define it. For Lefebvre (1991, 365), “socio-political contradictions are realized spatially. The contradictions of space thus make the contradictions of social relations operative.” Accordingly, we can trace connections between forms of social and spatial marginalization. By papering over the contradictions of space—which are, in fact, social conflicts—through an ideology of abstract space, a dominant sociospatial order is installed and maintained with little trace.

Yet such ideological closure, such domination, is never total; if we know how to look, we can see the cracks in this ideology around us: “The more carefully one examines space, considering it not only with the eyes, not only with the intellect, but also with all the senses, with the total body, the more clearly one becomes aware of the conflicts at work within it, conflicts which foster the explosion of abstract space and the production of a space that is other” (Lefebvre 1991, 391). These conflicts—lived, felt, and embodied contradictions—threaten to expose the ideology of abstract space, imploding the myth of sameness and challenging the social order premised on that myth. As minoritized people whose lives are constrained by the dominant logics of space, these conflicts live in our bodies and our relations, they insinuate themselves into our space and the horizons of our lives.