"Something has shifted in vernacular discourses about gender and sexuality in the global North, something that queer theory has not caught up to and that departs discomfitingly from the values and critical habits of queer and trans theorization. In 1990, Judith Butler (1990: xxx) could still take a “heterosexual matrix,” in which binary gender and heterosexuality followed ineluctably from bodily sex, as the object of her deconstructive critique. Likewise, in 1990, Eve Sedgwick (1990: 22) could still make this comment about her first axiom, “People are different from each other”: “It is astonishing how few respectable conceptual tools we have for dealing with this self-evident fact. A tiny number of inconceivably coarse axes of categorization have been painstakingly inscribed in current critical and political thought: gender, race, class, nationality, sexual orientation are pretty much the available distinctions.” As I write this in 2021, Butler’s heterosexual matrix has exploded in a way hitherto unimaginable. Vernacular discourses have subdivided the “tiny number of inconceivably coarse axes” of gender and sexual orientation to which Sedgwick refers into a series of more precise distinctions. If the heterosexual matrix was a tight and immobile structure, then the contemporary system to which I refer works more like a kaleidoscope, in which each axis of definition is mobile and may be combined with any other axis, making way for an almost infinite array of variations."
Amin, K. (2023). Taxonomically Queer?: Sexology and New Queer, Trans, and Asexual Identities. GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian & Gay Studies, 29(1), 91–107.
"Certainly the relationship between the experience of Otherness, of pleasure and death, is explored in the film The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover, which critiques white male imperialist domination even though this dimension of the movie was rarely mentioned when it was discussed in this country. Reviewers of the film did not talk about the representation of black characters, one would have assumed from such writing that the cast was all white and British. Yet black males are a part of the community of subordinates who are dominated by one controlling white man. After he has killed her lover, his blonde white wife speaks to the dark-skinned cook, who clearly represents non-white immigrants, about the links between death and pleasure. It is he who explains to her the way blackness is viewed in the white imagination. The cook tells her that black foods are desired because they remind those who eat them of death, and that this is why they cost so much. When they are eaten (in the film, always and only by white people), the cook as native informant tells us it is a way to flirt with death, to flaunt one’s power. He says that to eat black food is a way to say “death, I am eating you” and thereby conquering fear and acknowledging power. White racism, imperialism, and sexist domination prevail by courageous consumption. It is by eating the Other (in this case, death) that one asserts power and privilege."
hooks, b. (1992). Eating the other: Desire and resistance. In Black Looks: Race and Representation (pp. 21–39). South End Press.
"Fortunately, there is another solution that is revealed by this picture and by the work that has been carried out, or a generation now on the practice of science. Koch bacillus can be extended into the past to be sure—contrary to the radical anti-whiggish position—, but this cannot be done at no cost. To allow for such an extension, some work has to be done, especially some laboratory work. The mummy has to be brought into contact with a hospital, examined by white-coat specialists under floodlights, the lungs X-rayed, bones sterilized with cobalt 60, and so on. All this labor-intensive practice is quietly ignored by the whiggish position, which speaks of the extension in time as if it were a simple matter requiring no laboratory, no instrument, no specially trained surgeon, no X-rays. What is made clear by the Paris-Match picture is that Ramses II's body can be endowed with a new feature: tuberculosis. But none of the elements necessary to prove it can themselves be expanded or transported back to three thousand years ago. In other words, Koch's bacillus may travel in time, not the hospital surgeons, nor the X-ray machine, nor the sterilization outfit. When we impute retroactively a modern shaped event to the past we have to sort out the fact—Koch bacillus's devastating effect on the lungs—with that of the material and practical setup necessary to render the the fact visible. It is only if we believe that facts escape their network of production that we are faced with the question whether or not Ramses II died of tuberculosis."
Latour, B. (2000). On the partial existence of existing and non-existing objects. In L. Daston (Ed.) Biographies of Scientific Objects (pp. 247-269). Chicago University Press.