When we look in the mirror—regardless of our gender or color, the documents in our pocket or shoved in a sock drawer, the beloved in our bed or the absence beside us—do we see ourselves? Or do we see a reflection of the “other,” some version of what we imagine others see? Do we feel we belong in the communities in which we live our daily lives? Or are we repeatedly reminded that belonging is conditional, or simply unattainable for reasons beyond our individual control?
The other is not born; the other is formed and classified—through census categories, biometric data, legal definitions, and visual grammar. Belonging, likewise, is not given. Belonging is built, denied, engineered, negotiated, refused—and, most importantly, practiced.
We live in a time of heightened focus on demarcating boundaries. With the rise of ethno-nationalism, many religious, ethnic, and sexual minorities have come under attack. Dehumanizing rhetoric has gone mainstream, and identities are criminalized and pathologized. Some, due to the backlash of identity politics, find themselves in a paradoxical situation where they have to choose between an invisibility that threatens erasure and a visibility that subjects them to surveillance, including having their achievements scrutinized for evidence of fraud. Caught in a double bind, some are asked to perform their identities in order to be credible, yet they are punished for appearing like a stereotype. Even our efforts at inclusion—Civil Rights acts, Pride parades, the Woman, Life, Freedom movements, Indigenous self-determination movements—remain negotiations with a power that reserves the right to withdraw what it grants.
And yet something else is also happening, and it’s quieter, harder to televise, but no less impactful.
Standing by a campfire in Norway, a woman cries because, for the first time, she has felt she could be herself in a large group of near-strangers. On a catwalk in the UK, a collective of queer, brown performers refuses to flatten their overlapping histories into a single identity. In a digital forum, people who have been told their lack of desire is a pathology instead build a community organized around refusing that diagnosis. In Afghanistan under Taliban rule, women walk up a mountain, listen to birds, paint a picture. In a village in America, a family builds a life, tending to the intimacies of everyday, despite the racism at the edges. These are not policy victories. They are the practice of living in the world otherwise.
Otherwise is a way of being in the world that does not wait for permission from categories and gatekeepers. To live otherwise is to insist that who and how we are is more important than what we are called. It is to know that a life cannot be reduced to documents, property, data points, and census entries. While the dominant society seeks to produce and control the Other, the Otherwise transcends that control by living in the everyday.
The articles in this issue explore being Othered and living Otherwise from various places and through diverse genres. Some pieces are analytical or historical, others playful or reflective. Most draw on personal experiences, and a few are especially raw — testimonies of living a life as an other that may be challenging to read. Across them, several patterns emerge.
The first is the gap between an individual’s internal sense of self and the broader society’s willingness to recognize that self. Belonging, in these accounts, is conflicted: desired but denied, intimate but political, shaped by both visible and invisible forms of exclusion. A related contradiction emerges in the issue: dominant societies eagerly consume the food, art, and cultural expressions of immigrants and minorities while excluding or stigmatizing the people themselves. Immigrants — regardless of qualifications, degrees, or societal contributions — are treated as outsiders even after decades in the same place. A culture may be welcomed while the humans who carry it are not.
Beneath these tensions lies a question of power: who decides belonging, and on what terms? We see this in the legal system of property — where deeds and titles determine whose presence is permanent and whose is provisional. Property is rarely just about possession; it is a primary mechanism through which a society decides who is “fully here” and who is trespassing. The question, then, is not only who is allowed to belong, but whether dominant society will ever be willing to learn — rather than take—from those it considers marginal.
It is in the micropolitics of the everyday where belonging and meaning are made possible or are rejected: in the hesitation before a handshake, in the neighbor who does or does not extend an invitation for coffee, in the algorithm that does or does not recognize a face, in the interviewer who does or does not believe a story of persecution. This is the micropolitics of the everyday — and it is here, not in parliament or congress, that Otherwise either becomes possible or barred.
Otherwise requires space. When that space isn’t given, it must be made. A garden party, a catwalk, a digital forum, a mountain walk, a kitchen table, a small-town front porch — these are all spaces that had to be claimed before they could be lived otherwise. Living otherwise comes from understanding that the rooms we are given were built to hold particular kinds of bodies and stories, and that belonging sometimes requires building new rooms, and sometimes requires occupying the old ones in ways they were not designed for.
This is why refusal matters. The most radical version of otherwise is not the insistence to be let in to a space that is already there, but the refusal to accept that “in” is the only place worth being. To refuse property as the measure of belonging. To refuse the stereotype as proof of one’s own persecution. To refuse the mirror the dominant culture upholds and insist on an entirely different image. Refusal is the clearing of ground on which Otherwise can be built.
The question this issue asks, then, is not “who belongs here?” — a question assumes the “here” is already determined and already someone’s to gate-keep. The Otherwise question is different and harder: what kind of “here” are we willing to become? This is a question about ontology as much as politics. It is about whether we can imagine a “we” that does not depend on the exclusion of a “them,” a home that is not built on someone else’s homelessness, a belonging that does not need a border.
When we look in the mirror, do we see someone who divides the world into us/them, is comfortable with borders, and accepts the rhetoric and stereotypes of our newsfeeds? Or do we see someone who practices making space for the unfamiliar, even when it’s uncomfortable, and who is open to the otherwise, along with the countless rich and mundane possibilities that emerge there?
Somewhere, a performer is walking a runway that did not exist a decade ago. Somewhere, a community is meeting online to insist that their way of loving or living is not a diagnosis. Somewhere, a Palestinian woman is writing to keep history from being erased. Somewhere, a woman under Taliban rule is painting a picture no one gave her permission to paint. They are living otherwise. Do we see ourselves?
