Quotes from Sara Ahmed

Having evidence of being wronged does not stop you from being judged as in the wrong.

Diversity workers could be described as institutional plumbers: they develop an expertise in how things get stuck, as well as where they get stuck.

of how diversity can be used by organizations as a form of public relations.

Diversity is thus increasingly exercised as a form of public relations: "the planned and sustained effort to establish and maintain good will and understanding between an organisation and its publics.

The family is performed by witnessing her being wound up, spinning around.

Mainstreaming did not work. This practitioner gave no more detail than necessary to convey why it did not work: "We haven't been able to give as much attention as we would have liked to it.

for. We have feminist centers and feminist programs because we do not have feminist universities: that

So much of the inventiveness of student activism comes from an intimate knowledge of how institutions work to protect themselves, comes out of an experience of being obstructed, whether by procedures or by people.

accommodated. For example, even when universities have access policies, it is often still left to students with disabilities to find out about those policies, to ask about access arrangements at each and every event. 7 The very effort required to find out about access can end up making events inaccessible.

It is deemed more polite to assume you are white.

What does it mean to redirect children out of fear that they would be unhappy?

To want happiness for a child can be to want to straighten the child out.

that in some parental responses to a child coming out, this unhappiness is expressed not so much as being unhappy about the child being queer, but as being unhappy about the child being unhappy.

Translation: happiness becomes proximity to whiteness. Camel Gupta (2014) notes how it is sometimes assumed that brown queers and trans folk are rescued from unhappy brown families by happy white queer and trans communities. We are not a rescue mission. But when you deviate, they celebrate. Even happy brown queers would become unhappy at this point.

You can kill joy by not looking happy enough. If

I was profoundly shy growing up, and my sense of human sociality was of something from which I was barred: almost like a room with a locked door for which I did not have the key. Perhaps that was it: gender seemed like a key to a lock, which I did not have, or which I did not fit. Looking back, I think I decided to self-girl when I went to university, as I was exhausted by not fitting or not fitting in.

And note then: you can killjoy not as a deliberate or intentional act; you might even be trying to participate in the joy of others. You can killjoy because you are not properly attuned to the requirements of a social system.

Solidarity does not assume that our struggles are the same struggles, or that our pain is the same pain, or that our hope is for the same future. Solidarity involves commitment, and work, as well as the recognition that even if we do not have the same feelings, or the same lives, or the same bodies, we do live on common ground.

Let's take this figure of the feminist killjoy seriously. Does the feminist kill other people's joy by pointing out moments of sexism? Or does she expose the bad feelings that get hidden, displaced, or negated under public signs of joy? Does bad feeling enter the room when somebody expresses anger about things, or could anger be the moment when the bad feelings that circulate through objects get brought to the surface in a certain way?

When you expose a problem you pose a problem. It might then be assumed that the problem would go away if you would just stop talking about or if you went away.

The personal is theoretical.

To live a feminist life is to make everything into something that is questionable. The question of how to live a feminist life is alive as a question as well as being a life question.

Rolling eyes = feminist pedagogy.

Feminist consciousness can be thought of as consciousness of the violence and power concealed under the languages of civility, happiness, and love, rather than simply or only consciousness of gender as a site of restriction of possibility. You can venture into the secret places of pain by recalling something. You can cause unhappiness by noticing something. And if you can cause unhappiness by noticing something, you realize that the world you are in is not the world you thought you were in.