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Introduction: In Touch with the In/Human

In the introduction to the GLQ special issue Queer Inhumanisms, Dana Luciano and Mel Y. Chen critically interrogate how an emphasis on the “human as standard form” results in the unjust dehumanization of queer subjects. They underscore that while “liberal-humanist values” (188) promise inclusion, the very notion of the human is bound up with norms of behaviour, ability, health, rights, citizenship status, and political and social agency, which result in the dehu­ manization and regulation of some bodies as well as practices of exclusion and marginalization. As such, the human is a relational category that emerges from its engagement with those deemed inhuman; or, rather, the inhuman functions as the foil to produce and bolster a particular notion of humanness with its very specific configuration—that of the white, cisgender, heterosexual, able-bodied, Christian, educated subject of a certain socio-economic and citizenship status— through various discursive-material practices . The need to complicate the human as the focus of analysis and the “ground of any epistemology” (Luciano and Chen 189) and theorize alternative ways of being and relating has been highlighted in recent years by critical race, queer, disability, and animal studies scholars such as Rosi Braidotti, Judith Butler, Mel Y. Chen, Eunjung Kim, Dana Luciano, Jasbir K. Puar, and Dinesh Wadiwel, to name just a few. Their various critiques of the human and the Enlightenment project of humanism link humanness to productivity, autonomy, and the ability to manifest normative bodily features and identity markers. Indeed, the normatively human operates as the point of reference against which bodies are measured; it constantly produces subjects and ways of being in the world that do not fit this mold and are cast as disposable, replaceable, and unworthy of care. That the human is inextricably tied to, even predicated on, various dehu­ manized and inhuman others also affects our ways of knowing, thinking, and articulating, which are steeped in the very thing that scholars and activists are trying to break free from, such as “ the protocols of human knowledge produc­ tion” ( Muñoz, “Sense” 209). This means that there is a looming danger in the critiques of reproducing the very categories that many thinkers are trying to