Excerpt: The problems facing adoptees of colour and white adoptees are different in many ways but no matter their colour, adoptees inevitably face the burdens of race.
Excerpt: It is a particular irony of the times we live in that a woman of colour helps to suspend any ongoing awareness of the deathliness of American history by retelling her personal trauma.
With her, all our pasts — the queer one, the feminist one, and the ostensibly straight one — become infinitely more complicated, and infinitely richer.
Excerpt: It’s not that anal sex disrupts capitalism… but that it symbolises the dichotomy between public and private which also characterises the accumulation of capital.
Taking all these intertwining histories into account reveals an archaeology of power. This is not just a history of Farrow’s life, but a cultural history of the link between celebrity, adoption, and the idealisation of the nation-state.
Excerpt: Most of all, terms like “sapiosexual” and “demisexual” seek to make stable and coherent and legible and understandable a part of our lives that is simply not something we can easily contain: Desire.
Excerpt: We have always been defined by our thingness, our places in different economies, different kinds of circulation of value. We’ve only just learned how to make our thingnesses visible to each other.
Excerpt: The problem with relationships is not that individuals engage in them in particular ways, but that systems compel individuals to relate to each other in particular ways.
