When Sara Ahmed talks about "orientations", she's drawing on phenomenology—especially the work of Merleau-Ponty—to describe how our bodies and minds are socially and spatially directed. Orientation isn’t just about literal direction (left/right, toward/away), but about what is given to us as available or unavailable, near or distant, possible or impossible based on how we’re already situated in the world.

Here's how it works:

1. Orientation is about what you face—and what you don’t.
   Ahmed uses the metaphor of “orientation” to explain how certain bodies are always facing the “right way” in society: they’re aligned with dominant norms, expectations, values. Others are disoriented—made strange, “off,” not at home in the world. This isn’t about abstract moral failure. It’s phenomenological: how space, time, and objects appear to us depends on our embodied location in relation to norms.

2. It’s habitual.
   We’re trained from an early age to turn toward certain things and turn away from others. These are not conscious choices. They’re sedimented in the body over time: how we sit, how we look, how we interpret discomfort. Nano prejudice works here—it becomes ingrained in what feels natural, what “goes without saying.”

3. Orientations shape what seems real.
   Ahmed points out that to be “oriented” a certain way means that some things come into focus easily while others blur or vanish. This is crucial: the world is not equally visible or available to all. For example, a building may be physically accessible, but if no one greets you, looks at you, or expects you to be there, it becomes inhospitable—disorienting.

4. Orientation is affective and social.
   It’s not just about perception but also feeling: comfort, fear, familiarity, belonging, shame. Those feelings arise from orientations that have been socially cultivated over time.

So, when we say nano prejudice is “phenomenological,” we mean:

• It structures perception and experience at a pre-reflective level (before conscious thought).

• It does not require overt hatred or conscious bias.

• It affects what we notice, whom we empathize with, whom we ignore.

• It is more about alignment with norms than about explicit ideology.

In other words, nano prejudice isn’t what people think—it’s what they do, without thinking.

Sara Ahmed’s Willful Subjects extends her phenomenological account of orientation by focusing on will—specifically how willfulness is weaponized as a label to discipline those who deviate from normative paths. When connected to nano prejudice and orientation, Ahmed’s work reveals how being disoriented or resisting orientation is framed not merely as unfortunate, but as morally and politically suspect.

Core link: Orientation + Willfulness = The Politics of Deviance

1. The Willful Subject is the Disoriented Body

The willful subject, in Ahmed’s formulation, is the person who does not go along, who does not “recline” into the normative flow of things. This subject appears as a problem in the social order—too loud, too needy, too angry, too uncooperative. The willful subject is often framed as:

• “Out of line”

• “Blocking” progress

• “Refusing” to heal, forgive, cooperate

This maps perfectly onto the nano prejudice structure: the willful subject disrupts the smooth operation of nano prejudice by refusing to turn away, refusing to be anesthetized, refusing to disappear. Nano prejudice demands silence, sedation, forgetfulness. Willfulness, by contrast, makes visible what should remain implicit.

2. Willfulness as Diagnosis

Ahmed argues that willfulness is not a neutral descriptor—it’s a diagnosis used by power to explain away non-compliance. In the same way that someone experiencing structural violence might be described as “difficult,” “paranoid,” or “angry,” willfulness becomes a frame through which resistance is delegitimized.

This is key to understanding how genocidal tendencies operate not just through extermination but through precaritization—making certain lives appear disposable because they refuse to be docile, legible, or productive within dominant norms.

3. The Killable and the Willful

In the frame you’re constructing (and rightly so), the nano-prejudiced world doesn't just ask “Who is killable?” It first asks: “Who is willful?”—who is resisting alignment? Who is disrupting the flow? And then it justifies killability on the grounds of deviance or dysfunction. The “willful” subject becomes the precondition for elimination, because they refuse the fantasy of shared norms.

4. Refusing the Mythic Human

Ahmed’s willful subject is also the one who fails to approximate the mythic human (as you outlined via Davis and Conway). The mythic human is smooth, rational, self-contained, productive, and untroubled by contradiction. The willful subject, in contrast:

• Is leaky, affectively intense

• Doesn’t move forward “efficiently”

• Refuses repair on the terms offered

• Makes things difficult, because things are difficult

This refusal is powerful because it challenges the very terms of inclusion: it says I will not disappear just to make your world easier to navigate.

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In summary: Willful subjects expose nano prejudice by deviating from the orientations it demands. They become figures of discomfort and disruption, often punished for their refusal to turn away. But that refusal is also a form of ethical resistance—a kind of orientation toward the brokenness of the world, rather than away from it.