That lesbians are not women because women are a class defined by their relation to men– a statement Monique Wittig has popularized–doesn't mean we know exactly what a lesbian is.

Envisioning psychosis and lesbian sexuality as joyful, and in that joy pathological, situates them both as exemplary warnings of the dangers of seeking pleasure where freedom and anguish collide, and where the body meets god.

The Law is the intersection of the lesbian and the psychotic.

The smoothness and ease of the lesbian continuum, unimpeded by the violent self-constituting effects of homosexual desire, is a source of sadness and loss, like an unimproved talent, rather than of the intense affectivities with which Sedgwick's work on gay men is charged.

The gay male archive because it is limited to a short list of favored canonical writers is also bound by a particular range of affective responses. And so, fatigue, ennui, boredom, indifference, ironic distancing, indirectness, arch dismissal, insincerity and camp make up [...]"an archive of feelings" associated with this form of anti-social theory. But this canon occludes another suite of affectivities associated with [...] a different form of negativity. In this other archive we can identify, for example: rage, rudeness, anger, spite, impatience, intensity, mania, sincerity, earnestness, over-investment, incivility, brutal honesty and so on. The first archive is a camp archive, a repertoire of formalized and often formulaic responses to the banality of straight culture and the repetitiveness and unimaginativeness of heteronormativity. The second archive, however is far more in keeping with the undisciplined kinds of responses that Bersani at leafs seems to associate with sex and queer culture and it is here that the promise of self-shattering, loss of mastery and meaning [...] are loosed.