This piece is great, I really enjoyed it! It made me feel kind of quietly hopeful. The passage "Every gathering is a set of private
tables, faces serving plates of sound or sense. One by one we listen and know, co-linear, adjacent, overlapping and not touching, sharing common time in the proximity of our bodies or their traces, and now or later, in the touch of understanding" reminded me a lot of Sara Ahmed's "Orientations: Toward a Queer Phenomenology," from the table metaphor to the spatial language you use. Your emphasis on processes of production as almost forgotten in favor of the thing itself at the end of the piece ("it was never global, only a string of beads calling itself a necklace and forgetting the needle and thread, how we’ve moved and nudged, rolled, and scuffed. How we were blown from glass or rolled from clay, or yes, machine-fabricated in polymers") made me think about trans studies, which is similarly invested in unpacking how bodies/genders/etc come to be produced rather than taking them at face value, which has become a mode of political thinking in some trans scholarship. For example, in Normal Life Dean Spade states resistance in critical trans politics "is about practice and process rather than a point of arrival, resisting hierarchies of truth and reality and instead naming and refusing state violence." Sorry I don't have more fleshed out thoughts, I wish I had more time to spend with this!
