All of those who inhabit the world have a right to be here by virtue of their being here at all. To be here means you have a right to be here.

If we are trying to account for mobilization, we have to ask, under what conditions do outraged forms of knowing lead to social mobilizations and movements? So awareness alone does not suffice, and neither does outrage.

Some trans people thought that in claiming that gender is performative that I was saying that it is all a fiction, and that a person's felt sense of gender was therefore "unreal." That was never my intention. I sought to expand our sense of what gender realities could be. But I think I needed to pay more attention to what people feel, how the primary experience of the body is registered, and the quite urgent and legitimate demand to have those aspects of sex recognized and supported.

Maybe we need to start with the rethinking of what is "west" and what is "non-west." It seems to me that there are any number of populations who already cross that divide, and we could probably point to several existing states that belong exclusively neither to one category nor to the other. Do we use these terms to designate geographical realities, geopolitical ones, or perhaps sites of power, exploitation, orientalism that move through space and time in ways that have to be tracked historically.

The life doesn't simply get erased. It gets imprinted and remembered.

Until we learn that other lives are equally grievable and have an equal demand on us to be grieved - especially the ones that we've helped to eliminate - I'm not sure we'll really be on the way to overcoming the problem of dehumanization.

It is true that non-governmental organisations working within strong human rights frameworks are now confounded by securitarian forms of logic and power that extend the paternalistic bias of their work in new ways.