TITLE: What is the original reference for disorientations on tangle diagrams?
QUESTION [6 upvotes]: There are several invariants whose "natural" domain is a category of disoriented tangles, that is tangles which are piecewise-oriented, but which contain points called `disorientations' at which the orientation is reversed.
For example:

Khovanov homology HERE and HERE.
Kauffman's extended bracked polynomial HERE.

I was unable, however, to track down the origin of the idea- where were disorientations first used, and what is the correct citation to use to reference it outside the context of one of these invariants?
Further, I would like to ask whether there are other known contexts in which disoriented tangles of some flavour appear, other than the contexts mentioned above.

REPLY [3 votes]: The term "disoriented tangle" first appeared in arxiv:0701339v2 (your first link).  That is also the earliest reference I know for bordisms of disoriented tangles.
But the idea of disoriented tangles is much older.  It emerges naturally when one considers string diagrams for $Rep(U_q sl_2)$.  See, for example, Figures 3.22 and 4.8 of Kirby and Melvin's paper here.  I strongly suspect there are earlier examples in papers of Reshetikhin and/or Kirillov and/or Turaev.