Introduction

This introduction presents an overview of key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book explores the study of the knowledge's and social practices that organise "society" as a whole by sexualising heterosexualising or homosexualising bodies, desires, acts, identities, social relations, knowledge's, culture, and social institutions. It draws the process philosophy and the turn to ontology and materiality in recent anthropological and feminist scholarship to explore the dynamism of materiality right down to the level of quanta. Queer theory has often reduced matter to an effect of discourse. The book argues that performative theories of gender tend to ignore the banquet of heterosexual failures served on a daily basis, and that attention to failure in recent queer writings needs to be rethought in the light of failure not only as ubiquitous but as an ontological fact. It addresses some of the implications of species thinking in Michel Foucault's famous account of emergence of the homosexual species.