The Dynamic Disorientations of Marginalized Life

The notion that disorientation is defined by incapability is present in most philosophical accounts to date. Its prevalence may stem from Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s discussion of disorientation as a temporary disturbance of the body-subject’s normal mode of being-toward-the-world in Phenomenology of Perception, but it is also found in most recent feminist descriptions of disorienting experiences brought on by living life under cisheteropatriarchy. In this article, I turn to María Lugones and Sara Ahmed to make the case for tracing another thread in contemporary understandings of disorientation, one rooted in feminist and queer philosophies. My dynamic view challenges the traditional connection between disorientation and incapability and replaces it with a concept defined by critical liminality, rupture, and creative invention. By weaving together insights from Ahmed and Lugones, I argue we ought to embrace certain dynamic experiences of disorientation as awakening our radical capacities to produce new intentional relations between self and world.