Reorienting Political Thought: On Disorientation and the Phenomenological Insights of Personal Essays

This article pursues the connections among experiences of disorientation, methods of political thought, and the genre of personal essay. Its contributions are threefold. First, it reads three personal essays published in The Village Voice in the 1970s. Although recent scholarship has revisited feminist political thought and activism from the late 1960s to the early 1990s, little attention has been given to the genre of personal essay frequently engaged during that time. Second, this article considers how these essays partake in a queer phenomenological method of thought. Drawing on the work of Sara Ahmed, I contribute to feminist theorists’ interest in the fruits of phenomenological and psychoanalytic approaches to the political. Such approaches help to explain how political structures shape gendered and racialized experiences of embodiment, temporality, and spatiality. My third contribution is to demonstrate how the queer phenomenological approach of these essays emphasizes disorientation as a political experience and reorientation as a potential avenue for pursuing political change. These essays not only narrate moments of political disorientation, but they also show how such moments urge the authors to reorient toward the recurrence, emotion, and ambivalence that they experience, respectively. Reorientation is not final and thus cannot be reduced to the kinds of conclusive argument one might expect of political writing. This last thread of my argument helps to elaborate how essays may (1) facilitate the reorientation of their contemporary readers toward new directions for politics and (2) instruct present-day scholars on the potential for disorientation to offer insights for political theory.