Quotes from Sara Ahmed

Complaints about hostile environments might be necessary in order not to reproduce hostile environments. But complaints about hostile environments are often made in hostile environments.

A complaint can be a point you reach when you can't take it, when you are "just done with this," the violence

White supremacy can be enacted in the response to a complaint about white supremacy; you can be dispossessed from a complaint about dispossession.

If we start close to home, we open ourselves out. I will try to show how, in making sense of things that happen, we also draw on histories of thought and activism that precede us. Throughout I thus reflect on how feminism itself can be understood as an affective inheritance; how our own struggles to make sense of realities that are difficult to grasp become part of a wider struggle, a struggle to be, to make sense of being.

centering of whiteness, white tears, the racism of denying racism, hurt feelings, white supremacy performed as hurt feelings.30 She is told off, called out for calling them out, for complaining in the wrong way.

We have different tactics for dealing with sexism and racism; and one difficulty is that these tactics can be in tension. When we give problems their names, we can become a problem for those who do not want to talk about a problem even though they know there is a problem. You can cause a problem by not letting things recede.

Sometimes we are too fragile to to this work; we cannot risk being shattered because we are not ready to put ourselves back together again.

diversity management" becomes a way of managing or containing conflict or dissent.

Becoming the race person means you are the one who is turned to when race turns up. The very fact of your existence can allow others not to turn up.

Kirton, Greene, and Dean argue that as diversity becomes more professionalized, practitioners are less likely to mobilize an activist framework. They suggest that diversity practitioners have an ambivalent relationship to institutions, as captured by their use of the phrase "tempered radical" to describe the attitude of practitioners (2007: 1981)

The person who puts the complaint forward ends up being the conduit; they have to hold all the information in order that it can be circulated; they have to keep things moving. We sense a difficulty here given that many of the experiences that lead to complaint can make it hard to hold yourself together, let alone an unwieldy process.

This kind of caring for oneself is not about caring for one's own happiness. It is about finding ways to exist in a world that makes it difficult to exist. This is why, this is how: those who do not have to struggle for their own survival can very easily and rather quickly dismiss those who attend to their own survival as being self-indulgent. They do not need to attend to themselves; the world does it for them.

To be a killjoy is often to be assigned as being emotional, too emotional; letting your feelings get in the way of your judgment; letting your feelings get in the way. Your feelings can be the site of a rebellion. A feminist heart beats the wrong way; feminism is hearty.

So much feminist and antiracist work is the work of trying to convince others that sexism and racism have not ended; that sexism and racism are fundamental to the injustices of late capitalism; that they matter.

We need to tell each other stories of different ways you can live, different ways you can be; predicated not on how close you get to the life you were assumed or expected to have, but on the queer wanderings of a life you live.

We have to hesitate, to temper the strength of our tendencies with doubt; to waver when we are sure, or even because we are sure.

To become a complainer can also mean becoming the object of other people's complaints.7 Members of her department submitted an informal complaint to Human Resources identifying her as a bully. It should not surprise us that a "pushy minority" can morph into a bully. Bullying often works to create a narrative about a person as behind whatever is deemed problematic. She was a new head of department; she was trying to make changes to the culture of that department.

When violence gets in, a complaint comes out.

Jag tänker på feminism som poesi; vi hör hela historier i ett ord; vi sätter samman historier genom att klä dem i ord

Whiteness can be reproduced in the spaces where it is supposedly being questioned. You even have to do the work of questioning the terms of their terms ("if you want to decolonize, we'll do it on our terms"). If you don't use their terms, or if you question their terms, what happens then? You might be dropped; you might be stopped. But the questions you raise are turned into questions about you.

You complain because you do not belong here. And your complaint becomes evidence you do not belong here. When the judgment that you do not belong here has already been made, you have to work hard not to provide evidence to support that judgment. She

If a body can express a complaint, a body can be a complaint testimony.

So much of feminist and antiracist work is the work of trying to convince others that sexism and racism have not ended

You can kill joy by not looking happy enough.