Liminality needs to be conceived as both a process and a state of being. More accurately, liminality highlights that being is always in-process: dynamic, temporal, future-orientated and open-ended....Its value as an ontological claim about the nature of the self lies in the way it evokes an evasion of ontological security through the crossing of boundaries and embracing of the marginal / threshold. In other words, if liminality is seen as a site of the multiply constituted and relational self, then it is an essentially unstable and elusive site. One could thus read liminality as enacting a shift from an ontology of being to an ontology of becoming; or, indeed, a synthesis of becoming and being. Rather than simply reconfiguring the spatial aspect of the self (i.e. moving from an atomistic to a relational conception of the ‘I’), liminality draws out the temporal features of selfhood through characterising it as fundamentally transitional.
- Paddy McQueen, "A Life Less Liminal? Issues of Inclusion and Recognition for Trans-Identities"
descensus Averno facilis est