23.  Is there no difference between “telling people to change their desires” and asking ourselves what we want, why we want it, and what it is we want to want? Must the transformation of desire be a disciplinary project (willfully altering our desires in line with our politics)—or can it be an emancipatory one (setting our desires free from politics)?

27.  Is my talk of transforming desire moralizing in a different sense, in that it focuses too much on personal responsibility? Racism, classism, ableism, heteronormativity: these are structural problems and—as we have learned to say—they demand structural solutions. That is surely right. It is also surely right that a myopic focus on individual action is characteristic of a bourgeois morality whose ideological function is to distract from the broader systems of injustice in which we participate. (To use Chu’s phrase, individualistic morality can be a shell corporation for systemic injustice.) But to say that a problem is structural does not absolve us from thinking about how we, as individuals, are implicated in it, or what we should do about it.

28.  This is something that earlier feminists knew well. Radical feminists did not rethink their ways of working, child-rearing, arguing, decision-making, living, and loving because they were bourgeois moralists.9 They were not confused about the structural nature of what it was they wanted, or about the demands it placed on them as women. It is true they were often divided on the question of how much of the “personal” to make “political”: whether feminism required separatism, lesbianism, communal property, collective child-rearing, the dissolution of family relations, the end of femininity. And it is true that, taken too far, a prefigurative politics—a politics that insists individuals act as if they were already in the world to come—not only alienates those who do not conform, but also becomes an end in itself for those who do. At its worst, prefigurative politics allows its practitioners to substitute individual personal transformation for collective political transfiguration. It becomes, in other words, a liberal politics. But the same is true of a politics that refuses prefiguration. What does it mean to say that we want to transform the political world—but that we ourselves will remain unchanged?

67.  A vexed question: when is being sexually or romantically marginalized a facet of oppression, and when is it just a matter of bad luck, one of life’s small tragedies? (When I was a first-year undergraduate I had a professor who said, to our grave disappointment, that there would be heartbreak even in the post-capitalist utopia.) Are the un-beautiful an oppressed class? The short? The chronically shy?