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"Disgust is urgent and specific; desire can be ambivalent and vague. The former expects concurrence; the latter does not. I should clarify that in what follows, the word “desire” refers not to sexuality or sexual practices, or to psychoanalysis’ highly exacting concept of drive or libido, but rather to the vaguely affective idiom broadly used as an “index of [literary] heterogeneity” by late twentieth-century literary theorists across methods and affiliations. That is, I mean the “desire” associated with images of fluidity, slippage, and semantic multiplicity—what Kristeva in Desire in Language (111) calls polynomia or “the pluralization of meaning by different means (polyglottism, polysemia, etc.)”—which has become technical shorthand for virtually any perceived transgression of the symbolic status quo."
- Sianne Ngai, "Ugly Feelings"