The term phenomenon stems from the Greek phainein, „to appear, become visible“ which itself emerged from phôs, „light“. The philosopher Emmanuel Kant saw phenomena as a combination of the impressions we perceive and our own cognitive abilities. He also stated that phenomena are situated in space and time. For Edmund Husserl, the founder of phenomenology, the term describes the lived processual experience of how an object manifests within a consciousness in space.

Barad introduces an entirely different interpretation of the term, which deeply irritates our conditioned understanding concerning the world. As she points out in „Nature's queer performativity“: „According to my agential realist account... empirical claims do not refer to individually existing determinate entities, but to phenomena-in-their-becoming, where becoming is not tied to a temporality of futurity but rather a radically open relatingness of the world worlding itself.“ We cannot rely on clearly defined things or facts in our perception of the world, but have to perceive the lively process of permanent creation and recreation, caused by the world's inherent dynamics. By stating „Space and time are phenomenal, that is, they are intra-actively produced in the making of phenomena; neither space nor time exist as a determinate given outside of phenomena.“ she goes one step further and defines phenomena as the realm of creation of what we understand as the basic coordinates of our worldly orientation: space and time. Everything we perceive is thus being shaped by agential cuts within phenomena, which themselves are not graspable.