Crossing the Chiasm: Queering the Ontology of the Chiasm in Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology

Abstract Embodiment is a particularly difficult dimension of experience to capture for transgender individuals, particularly individuals who identify as nonbinary. Accounts of embodiment in both philosophy and psychology often fail to capture the layers of perplexity which nonbinary individuals experience when attempting to understand the relationship between the lived body and social perceptions of the body. In reading Merleau-Ponty’s late work in The visible and the invisible , particularly the much-discussed notion of the chiasm, I attempt to work toward a potential remedy for phenomenology’s difficulty accounting for this particular dimension of experience. Drawing extensively on Megan Burke’s (2022) discussion of the notion of cis sense, I elaborate the implications of the ontological principle of the chiasm in relation to the nonbinary experience of the body. Through a close reading of the implications of Merleau-Ponty’s particular understanding of “invisibility,” I conclude that the application of the ontological principle of the chiasm to the nonbinary experience of the body is fruitful conceptually, as it offers a powerful language through which to counter normative and reifying ways of accounting for the body. Ultimately, a chiasmatic account presents a dynamic body which emerges from preeminent first-person authority over embodiment.