This special issue of Social Text critically engages contemporary theory, shifting the question of "what matters" from an epistemological domain to an ontological one. Essays enter into debates over evolutionary theory and the potential effects of those debates on bodies and sexuality; examine South Asian racial formation, in which intense policing slides discipline into control, yet yields immeasurable "monstrous crossbreeds"; trace pharmaceutical governance in the control of AIDS in Brazil; and ask how political art commands or develops the capacity for attention, if not critique, in terms of the control exerted by dominant media cultures.