(Sexual) Orientation

Psychiatry (Sciences), 1946

A Derrida-inspired perversion of the medical concept of “disorientation” into a geographic/pathfinding compass. Like a “spectrum”.

The origin is unclear, but the term was originally defined as a “process” of orientation (1931), and then as the concept of “deviant sexual orientation” by feminist psychologist Georgene Seward in her 1946 paper “Sex and the Social Order” which claimed “Deviant sexual orientation in later life may originate in the child’s inability to identify himself with his like-sexed parent”. You only need to orientate yourself if you don’t know where you are.

• https://oed.com/view/Entry/261213
• https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?&year_start=1950&year_end=2019&content=sexual+orientation
• https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=sexual+orientation
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgene_Hoffman_Seward
• https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2007-02248-000