« A thousand things make it impossible to mistake the verdict on queer lives and on women’s lives, as on the lives of those who are poor or not white. The hecatombs of queer youth; a decade squandered in a killing inaction on AIDS; the rapacious seizure from women of our defense against forced childbirth; tens of millions of adults and children excluded from the health care economy; treatment of homeless people as unsanitary refuse to be dealt with by periodic “sweeps”; refusal of condoms in prisons, persecution of needle‐exchange programs; denial and trivialization of histories of racism; merely the pivot of a disavowing pronoun in a newspaper editorial: Such things as these are facts, but at the same time they are piercing or murmring voices in the heads of those of us struggling to marshal “our” resources against illness, dread, and devaluation. They speak to us. They have an amazing clarity. »

eve kosofsky sedgwick, 1993