Queer becomes a matter of how things appear, how they gather, how they perform, to create the edges of spaces and worlds.

Disorientation can be a bodily feeling of losing one’s place, and an effect of the loss of a place: it can be a violent feeling, and a feeling that is affected by violence, or shaped by violence directed toward the body.

…Disorientation is unevenly distributed: some bodies more than others have their involvement in the world called into crisis.

Through repeating some gestures and not others, or through being orientated in some directions and not others, bodies become contorted: they get twisted into shapes that enable some action only insofar as they restrict the capacity for other kinds of action.

The family pictures picture the family, often as happy (the bodies that gather smile, as if the smile were the point of the gathering). At the same time, the pictures put aside what does not follow this line, those feelings that do not cohere as a smile.

The fantasy of a natural orientation is an orientation device that organizes worlds around the form of the heterosexual couple, as if it were from this ‘point’ that the world unfolds.

The ‘hope’ of the family tree, otherwise known as the ‘wish’ for reproduction, is that the vertical line will produce a horizontal line, from which further vertical lines will be drawn.

What makes bodies different is how they inhabit space: space is not a container for the body; it does not contain the body as if the body were ‘in it.’ Rather bodies are submerged, such that they become the space they inhabit; in taking up space, bodies move through space and are affected by the ‘where’ of that movement. It is through this movement that the surface of spaces as well as bodies takes shape.

The failure of something to work is a matter of a failed orientation: a tool is used by a body for which it was not intended, or a body uses a tool that does not extend its capacity for action.

The word ‘occupy’ allows us to link the question of inhabiting or residing within space; to work, or even to having an identity through work (an occupation); to time (to be occupied with); to holding something; and to taking possession of something as a thing.