Marq contemplates her loss of Rat Korga. She learns from Japril, a friend of hers in the Web who set up her initial meeting with Korga, that their "experiment didn't work" and that it was "too dangerous" to leave Korga on Velm, due to the threat of Cultural Fugue. The reader learns more about the nuances of Marq's sexual attraction and her desire for Korga. According to Avilez, Marq's desire for Korga disrupts the power held by the Web. Major themes Fractured subjectivity Thomas Foster argues that Stars in My Pocket treats "fractured subjectivity" as a natural condition by representing "nonnormative racial, sexual, and familiar formations and practices" as normal within Marq's world. Quoting directly from the novel, Foster claims that "[t]he utopian project of this novel resides in its attempt to imagine a future setting in which 'the 'fragmented subject' is at its healthiest, happiest, and most creative because society and economics contrive... to make questions of unity and centerness irrelevant'" This theme of fractured identity is part of Delany's own postmodern critique of identity that treats social categories like race, sexuality, gender, and class as absolute and static. Cleansing In his essay Clean, Robert F. Reid-Pharr argues that what Delany achieves in Stars "is a thematization of the complex ways the spectacle of gay male identity is established through a set of essentially ritualistic practices wherein the gay man is figured clean or more precisely cleansing." The character of Korga, and his movement through RAT procedures into liberation and then to corporate slavery exemplifies this process in Stars, and Reid-Pharr also suggests a connection in this method of identity construction between the gay male subject and the subject position of the African-American slave. Delany explores issues related to miscegenation through his employment of the Thant family in the novel. The Thants do not approve of the mixed family status of Dyeth family, which has produced offspring with the Evelmi species, six-legged, many tongued, three sexed beings that are the original inhabitants of their planet, Velm. Delany also broaches the question of consent, as it relates to one's enslavement, by depicting characters, such as Rat Korga, having the option to choose to go into slavery. In fact, one cannot be enslaved in the novel, without explicit consent. This is exemplified in beginning of the novel, when Rat Korga is asked to verbally consent by another character who is handling