"it is the very social and existential experience of loneliness that compels the lesbian body to extend into other kinds of space, where there are others who return one’s desire…lesbian desire moves us sideways."

sara ahmed, queer phenomenology 

on reading “beside”

“beside is an interesting preposition also, because there’s nothing very dualistic about it; a number of elements may lie alongside one another, though not an infinity of them. beside permits a spacious agnosticism about several of the linear logics that enforce dualistic thinking: noncontradiction or the law of the excluded middle, cause versus effect, subject versus object. its interest does not, however, depend on a fantasy of metonymically egalitarian or even pacific relations, as any child knows who’s shared a bed with siblings. beside comprises a wide range of desiring, identifying, representing, repelling, paralleling, differentiating, rivaling, leaning, twisting, mimicking, withdrawing, attracting, aggressing, warping, and other relations.” 

—eve kosofsky sedgwick, touching feeling: affect, pedagogy, performativity. related. i think it could be related to this, too.