Ambiguous Spaces, Nonbinarism, and “‘World’-Travelling” Jenna L. O’Connor Maria Lugones offers a theoretical framework that allows for the confronting and deconstructing of patriarchal structures, arrogant perception, and ignorance. Lugones demonstrates how there must be a fundamental change in the way that we love, as well as a radical change in our ability to become “world-travellers.” In order to “world”-travel, we must understand the four ways (i.e. 1. Being a fluent speaker, 2. Being normatively happy, 3. Human bonding, and 4. Shared history) in which one is made to feel “at home” in their world, the differences between the logic of purity and the logic of impurity, and finally, how these ideologies combine in order to illustrate how we can begin to understand unintelligible and ambiguous people within a fundamentally set, exclusive, and pure society. In addition, in order to begin the process of “world”-travelling fully, we need to address that some people will never have the capacity to feel “at home,” in any world. Through addressing this homelessness of some, for lack of a better term, we can begin to comprehend arrogant perception on behalf of nonbinary individuals in order to truly and empathetically understand what it means to be nonbinary in a society that systematically and unwittingly invokes relentless binarical modes of oppression. The systematic unintelligibility cast upon nonbinary individuals consequently forces nonbinary individuals into a restless life of “world”-travelling. None of the worlds in which they travel can be their own. With observing this arrogant perception enacted on the nonbinary individual daily, a deeper understanding that life outside of the binary structures is not only a creatively impure way to live, but a livelihood that is systematically misunderstood and unintelligible while being violently subjected to forcible gendering. In other words, nonbinary individuals, indeed, have an uncharted world, yet the homogenized, heterosexist, patriarchal, capitalist, neoliberal, Western world in which we popularly live does not allow an understanding of this world. I intend to travel, intellectually and academically speaking, into the world of nonbinarism in order to fundamentally disrupt and disarticulate pure compartmentalized categories that systematically rule our lives.1 To elaborate, and as a disclaimer, as a nonbinary individual, I do not want to imply that I speak for every nonbinary individual, and certainly do not want to homogenize any experience of nonbinarism; and I certainly do not want to strictly define nonbinarism as this is a fundamental flaw within the philosophical implications of being nonbinary. On the contrary, I am attempting to academically tread an area that has been corrupted by knowable discourse in order to illustrate how binarical thinking allows
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