The conclusion highlights the book’s main theoretical contributions and briefly sketches avenues for further research. It develops the monograph’s contribution to existing constructivist scholarship, which consists in demonstrating how international relations’ macro-concepts originate from ordinary and extraordinary interactions. The book’s primary focus is on the visual gaze. Yet representants can target other senses, and more research is necessary to direct attention to other sensory stimuli. Second, the Conclusion stresses the book’s contributions to the booming literature on recognition and misrecognition. The monograph can provide new perspectives for studying processes of colonization and decolonization as moments of misrecognition and recognition. It can also guide the analysis of struggles of recognition over sovereignty claims in the contemporary era. Concerns about recognition are crucial for questions about the future of the liberal international order. The chapter directs attention to representants for interpreting the efforts of major players from the periphery and the semi-periphery to acquire something akin to great power status. Other, hitherto more marginalized international actors, such as indigenous communities, and some terrorist networks are equally seeking changes in representants. The Conclusion also opens questions about how changes in communication technologies might trigger changes in representants that can have broader systemic effects.

The role of the female in copulation as long been studied exclusively as a response to male behavior, if not completely disregarded. Nevertheless, from the establishment of physical contact until penis withdrawal, mammalian females implement a number of hormonal, physiological, and behavioral adaptations to maximize and optimize sperm capture. The initiation of copulation is mostly dependent on female receptivity and the display of behavioral estrus, including the lordotic posture. During this period, the series of copulatory acts emitted by the female is based on a sequence of inhibitory-excitatory events at the initiative of both members of the copulating pair. The significance of female interference with copulatory thrusting has been highlighted in naturalistic conditions that give the female the possibility to pace sexual interaction. In such settings, male intromission, thrusting, and eventually ejaculation are rendered physically possible by female posture, as well as optimized by somatosensory feedback from the female vulva to the penis. Genital interaction during intromission, including female pelvic, perineal, and vaginal contractions, stimulate ejaculation and may increase insemination probability by improving sperm transfer through the cervix. In addition, females can provide direct copulatory stimulation during thrusting through visual and olfactory cues, or vocalizations. The neuroendocrinological mechanisms responsible for mammal sexual adaptations are similar across species, and some basic behaviors such a lordosis present a certain interspecific rigidity. However, many qualitative aspects vary between species, notably the structure of the pattern sequence in a copulatory series, or the characteristic of sensory stimuli and their relative importance for enhancing sperm capture. In particular, human adaptations to copulatory thrusting show a wide diversity that evolutionary tools do not entirely comprehend.