“They said I was lesbian. I decided to self-administer regular doses of testosterone. I never thought I was a man. I never thought I was a woman. I was several. I didn’t think of myself as transsexual. I wanted to experiment with testosterone. I love its viscosity, the unpredictability of the changes it causes, the intensity of the emotions it provokes forty-eight hours after taking it. And, if the injections are regular, its ability to undo your identity, to make organic layers of the body emerge that otherwise would have remained invisible. Here as everywhere, what matters is the measure: the dosage, the rhythm of injections, the order of them, the cadence. I wanted to become unrecognizable.”

Paul B. Preciado, An Apartment on Uranus, 2020

“In Mojave thinking, body and land are the same. The words are separated only by the letters ‘ii and ‘a: ‘iimat for body, ‘amat for land. In conversation, we often use a shortened form for each: mat-. Unless you know the context of a conversation, you might not know if we are speaking about our body or our land. You might not know which has been injured, which is remembering, which is alive, which was dreamed, which needs care. You might not know we mean both.”

Natalie Díaz, Postcolonial Love Poem, 2020

“Woolf's molecular sensibility illustrates that sexuality is elemental, geological, meteorological, cross-species. It organizes entire territories of becoming by including non-human elements, like the quality of the light and the curve of the wind. Woolf creates heterogeneous assemblages of life lived more intensely. The spatio-temporal, geographical, historical and environmental features are a vector for collective non-human and more-than-human encounters. Sexuality constitutes the transversal plane of immanence that goes beyond individual psychologies and circumstances. Something much more elemental, more raw, is at stake: desire draws its own affective landscapes.”

Rosi Braidotti, Posthuman Feminism, 2021

““The world is always new,” said Coro Mena, “however old its roots.””

Ursula K. Le Guin, The Word for World is Forest, 1972/76

“Indbyggerne på planeten Sirius er egentlig ikke fremmede for os, i det mindste ikke i den betydning, der kan komme i betragtning sociologisk, for de eksisterer overhovedet ikke for os, de befinder sig hinsides fjernhed og nærhed. Den fremmede er et element i selve gruppen på samme måde som de fattige og de mangfoldige „indre fjender" - et element, hvis immanente stilling og stilling som led i det store hele samtidigt indebærer et udenfor og et overfor.”

Georg Simmel, Ekskurs om den fremmede in Hvordan er samfundet muligt? Udvalgte sociologiske skrifter, 1908/1998

“During this period of invading nomads the passion for self-definition first appears in the guise of personal adventure. Along the route of their voyages conquerors established empires that collapsed at their death. Their capitals went where they went. "Rome is no longer in Rome, it is wherever I am." The root is not important. Movement is. The idea of errantry, still inhibited in the face of this mad reality, this too functional nomadism, whose ends it could not know, does not yet make an appearance. Center and periphery are equivaIent. Conquerors are the moving, transient root of their people.”

The West, therefore, is where this movement becomes fixed and nations declare themselves in preparation for their repercussions in the world [...] The reason for our return to this episode in Western history is that it spread throughout the world. The model came in handy. Most of the nations that gained freedom from colonization have tended to form around an idea of power -the totalitarian drive of a single, unique root- rather than around a fundamental relationship with the Other. Culture's self-conception was dualistic, pitting citizen against barbarian.”

Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation, 1997

“Even now, you're imposing order onto chaos at every possible moment, deciding the direction of a world that, until just now, existed merely as a set of possibilities. Your mother created you at your genetic birth, but she also re-created you, moment by moment, by watching you grow up.”

The past, however, doesn't change with our observations of it. Too many eyes have frozen it in place. The future holds endless possibilities because no one has yet observed it. And without human eyes, both the past and the future would exist only as infinite chaos.”

A long time ago, when young scholars first proposed such theories, the older scholars scoffed and said that the world couldn't really work that way. Indeed, no one had ever seen such a world. No one had observed the unobserved world. We only see what we have witnessed, and we only know what we have seen. And yet people talk with such confidence, as if they have witnessed every aspect of the world”

Kim Bo-young, On the Origin of Species and Other Stories, 2021