Julietta Singh challenges the drive toward the mastery over self and others by showing how the forms of self-mastery advocated by anticolonial thinkers like Fanon and Gandhi unintentionally reproduced colonial logic, thereby leading her to argue for a more productive human subjectivity that is not centered on concepts of mastery.

Theorizes the political agency of things and natural phenomena-such as trash, food, weather, and electricity-to examine how non-human elements exert force on human politics and social relations.

Jack Halberstam offers an alternative history of sexuality by tracing the ways in which the wild-a space located beyond normative borders of sexuality-offers sources of opposition to knowing and being that transgress Euro-American notions of the modern subject.

Elspeth H. Brown traces modeling's history from the advent of photographic modeling in the early twentieth century to the rise of the supermodel in the 1980s, showing how it is both the quintessential occupation of a modern consumer economy and a practice that has been shaped by queer sensibilities.