In collections of essays on topics of current theoretical interest it’s becoming quite common, if not yet a fully established part of the genre, to start off the piece with a little story about the final stages of its genesis. Such a story typically mentions the last-minute influence of a suggestion or critique by someone whose position, in terms of their gender or race or sexual orientation, might be thought to give their opinion legitimacy of a kind that the writer, by their own position, might be thought to lack. ‘I was discussing this article over breakfast with a lesbian friend, and she said . . .’, writes someone who thereby identifies themselves as either a man, or straight, or both.

This type of gesture serves a number of functions. It seems to apologise for writers’ disqualifications to speak about what they are going to speak about, marking an awareness that what they say will be open to modification. And it also does the opposite, making up for the disqualifications through the medium of the qualified friend who puts things right, and supplying the text with a provisional certificate of political or even general correctness: with an input from every possible position, the chances are that you can add up all the elements into a complete account.