I must say, I feel the reception of my work is none of my business.

People who expect enmity to suddenly convert into love are probably using the wrong model.

I am sorry to be so blunt, but I do not see much ambiguity here. [Barack] Obama was late to affirm the Egyptian revolution as a democratic movement, and even then he was eager to have installed those military leaders who were known for their practices of torture. And now he is quick to make allies with the Muslim Brotherhood for tactical reasons as well (though earlier that same administration stoked Islamophobic fear about that very political party).

The question is whether NGOs that bring protection or aid or reparation therapies are furthering the possibility of self-determination or extending a form of managerial power and paternalism.

It is true that one was not allowed at the time to really ask, what would lead people to do this, from what sense of political outrage or injury? And in that way, the possibility of sympathetic identification was foreclosed. That does not mean that some people took quiet pleasure in certain icons of US capitalism coming down, even though they would oppose such action on moral and political grounds.

If gender is eradicated, so too is an important domain of pleasure for many people. And others have a strong sense of self bound up with their genders, so to get rid of gender would be to shatter their self-hood.

War begets war. It produces outraged and humiliated and furious people. That is almost invariably the case.