The pathologization of queer and black bodies transcends and goes beyond the system of capitalism as humanity will always subordinate others to be able to feel secure.

We know that, just by existing, historically subordinated populations are deemed inconvenient to the privileged who made them so; the subordinated who are cast as a problem experience themselves as both necessary for and inconvenient to the general supremacist happiness. All politics involves at least one group becoming inconvenient to the reproduction of power; that power might be material or fantasmatic, in the convoluted paranoid way endemic to the intimacy of enemies. The biopolitical politics of inconvenience increases the ordinary pressure of getting in each other’s way, magnifying the shaping duration of social friction within the mind’s echo chambers and the structuring dynamics of the world. As an affect, inconvenience can thus encompass all kinds of intensity but still be cast as a mode of impersonal contact that has an impact, opening itself to becoming personal, creating images of what feels like a looming social totality, and making a countervailing social organization imaginable. Think about Cheryl Harris’s staging of Blackness as “trespassing” on white consciousness as it strolls and scrolls through the world expecting not to feel impeded; think of the pervasive sexual violence women imagine concretely when they’re walking somewhere alone.7 These sensations of threat are ordinary to the people moving through in the lifeworlds of a supremacist society and its entitlement hierarchies.8 They can confirm or disconfirm the erotophobia or specific mistrust we have been schooled to live with. The expectation of inconvenience can pull you into a zone where the impersonal opens to genres of viscerally strong yet abstract encounter. It can be an effect of speculation prior to movement that creates hypervigilance, tableaux Introduction 5 or scenarios in prefigurative response to potential encounters. It can get people talking to each other about how to change what’s deemed structural, even when the only evidence is a sense of things that permeates the social field and is central to the reproduction of its norms of concentrated value. But the threat posed by politicized inconvenience doesn’t have to be immediately theatrical or traumatic: a sense of apprehension can arise in any moment, seemingly happening and passing as an irritation. One never knows about effects until this kind of contact becomes materialized in a series. The inconveniences of managing one’s own putative inconvenience to the sense of freedom demanded by the structurally dominant is a completely predictable experience, both draining and animating, in intimate and political settings. It forces a constant reassessment of what kinds of impact constitute an event. In this book, “inconvenience” draws a membrane across radically private experiences of world-receptivity at the periphery of attention and anything people have to face every day—an ongoing labor situation, a family, a politicized infrastructure they may have been born into, the population they’ve been assigned to, or other people’s projected fantasies.9 When is a body an event because of the kind of thing it is deemed to be, as when they walk into a room or cross a state line? What price and what kinds of price are being paid in order to live a life as other people’s inconvenient object? These questions tap into the ordinary of biopower at the same time as they tap into the encounter with being as such. However dramatic the situation of power, it is at its most powerful when it is distributed across the structural, the casual, and the shadowy, as Fred Moten and Stefano Harney, Achille Mbembe, and Jasbir Puar have documented in their work on necropolitical protocols of the state and related apparatuses.10 As Puar argues, to maim rather than kill in order to maintain political power is to enjoy enforcing the ongoing theater of the inconvenience of certain other people. But it’s not just bullets that disable living. It’s inconvenient to bear the burden of a naming you didn’t ask for: there is no getting beyond it, only dealing with it as a form of life you live with. To a structurally and/or fantasmatically dominant class, though, the experience of inconvenience produces dramas of unfairness. Take, for example, the paranoid reversals of “incels” and other entitled persons who experience their vulnerability as an injury of unjustly denied deference.11 It is predictable that the structurally dominant feel vulnerable about their status and insist that if the historically subordinated deserve repair, so do the entitled. It is as though there is a democracy in vulnerability, as though the details do not matter. From both perspectives, the exhaustion from incessant abrasive contact can produce numbed or intense self-subtraction and the elaboration of massive rage. At whatever intensity or scale, then, in whatever scenario of power, the sense of the inconvenience of other people in general, and often some other particular kinds of people, is constantly being renewed and reevaluated. Mainly the hit of it surfaces and dives in the ordinary life of being in the world, shifting atmospheres and coordinating stresses without much being memorable. But the ordinary includes the casual reproduction of hatreds and aversions, creating subjectivities powerfully shaped by navigating its entailments, excitements, and tolls.