Tiffany Tsantsoulas

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.

Judith Butler argues for collective liberatory action grounded in ontological vulnerability. Yet descriptive social ontology alone provides neither normative ethical prescriptions nor direction for political action. I believe Butler tries to overcome this gap by appealing to equality as an ethical ideal. In this article, I reconstruct how equality operates in her transition from ontological vulnerability to prescriptive commitments. Then, turning to Sylvia Wynter, I argue Butler’s uncritical use of equality constrains the radical direction of her liberatory goals—?irstly because it cannot mitigate the coloniality of Being, and secondly because she ?igures the locus of critique as an anonymous and equally vulnerable body at the limits of the recognizably human. I conclude with Wynter’s demand for liberatory critique to arise out of speci?ic decolonial locations of rupture from our historically situated, oppressive, and overrepresented genre of being human.Judith Butler soutient une notion d’action libératrice fondée sur la vulnérabilité ontologique. Pourtant, l'ontologie sociale descriptive ne fournit ni de prescriptions éthiques normatives ni de directives pour l'action politique. Je pense que Butler tente de surmonter cette lacune en faisant appel à l’égalité comme un idéal éthique. Dans cet article, je reconstruis la manière dont l’égalité opère dans sa transition depuis la vulnérabilité ontologique jusqu’aux engagements prescriptifs. Puis, avec Sylvia Wynter, j’af?irme que Butler utilise l’égalité d’une manière qui limite la radicalité de ses objectifs libérateurs : premièrement, parce que Butler ne peut pas atténuer la colonialité de l'Être et deuxièmement, parce qu’elle désigne comme lieu de la critique un corps aussi anonyme que vulnérable aux limites de ce que l’on reconnaît comme humain. Je conclus avec la demande de Wynter selon laquelle la critique libératrice doit émerger à p artir d e l ieux d e r upture d écoloniaux s péci?iques à n otre genre humain historiquement situé, oppressif et surreprésenté.

María Lugones is a Latina feminist and decolonial philosopher of interest to anyone exploring questions about the lived experience of oppression and resistance. Though not strictly within a phenomenological tradition, Lugones offers insights on central phenomenological themes such as agency, communication, embodiment, intentionality, perception, space, and subjectivity, while foregrounding mestiza and other Women of Color experiences of marginalization. Critical phenomenologists will find that her work enriches articulations of the interplay between subjectivity, social structures, and power. Multiplicity, which Lugones understands as an existential feature of human life, is a major focus. Her most well-known ideas, world-traveling, limen/liminality, active subjectivity, and the coloniality of gender emerge from her descriptions of existing within and between multiple selves, spaces, and social states.

This article explores the role of second-order anger in the formation of resistant feminist space through the work of María Lugones and Sara Ahmed. I argue that this incommunicative form of anger can operate as a bridge between two senses of resistant spatiality in Lugones, connecting the hangout, which is a collective and transgressive space for alternative sense making, and the cocoon, which is a solitary and germinative space of tense internal transformation. By weaving connections with Ahmed’s concept of feminist fragile sheltering, I demonstrate that the insulating character of second-order anger need not be equated with spatial solitude. Rather, given its orientation toward a future becoming away from oppressed subjectivity, germinative cocooning can be understood as constitutive of collective, feminist, and resistant spaces. I conclude, therefore, that feminist spaces ought to shelter second-order angers and embrace fragility as a condition of resistant transformation.

Judith Butler argues for collective liberatory action grounded in ontological vulnerability. Yet descriptive social ontology alone provides neither normative ethical prescriptions nor direction for political action. I believe Butler tries to overcome this gap by appealing to equality as an ethical ideal. In this article, I reconstruct how equality operates in her transition from ontological vulnerability to prescriptive commitments. Then, turning to Sylvia Wynter, I argue Butler's uncritical use of equality constrains the radical direction of her liberatory goals—firstly because it cannot mitigate the coloniality of Being, and secondly because she figures the locus of critique as an anonymous and equally vulnerable body at the limits of the recognizably human. I conclude with Wynter's demand for liberatory critique to arise out of specific decolonial locations of rupture from our historically situated, oppressive, and overrepresented genre of being human