“The work of states is to make distinctions among people, objects and actions.”
“[…] States are not moral beings, they are mobile technologies for arranging difference, distributing pain and pleasure.”
“The state does not spring fully formed out of the heads of classical liberal theorists and the men who put those ideas to paper as materializations of the idea of popular sovereignty and the rule of law; it is not the benevolent night watchman who has unfortunately neglected to keep up with contemporary theories and enactments of gender identities. Nor does the state come into being in a singular extraordinary declaration that marks a collision between fact and right. In fact, the territories that constitute what is now know as the United States, the institutions of government and the legitimacy that appears to saturate them take shape through he slow accretion of regularized practices of governing.”