Carla Bergman > Quotes

“Gaslighting can be subtle and unintentional, but as feminist writer Nora Samaran explains, it is particularly insidious because it undermines people's trust in their own capacities:
"If you think of the power, the strength, the capacity to effect change that women who trust themselves are capable of, what we are losing when we doubt ourselves is an indomitable force for social change that is significant and therefore, to some, frightening. In other words, our capacity to know ourselves is immensely powerful."
All forms of oppression seem to have this tendency: racism, heteropatriarchy, ableism, ageism, colonization, and other systems of oppression contort people's insights, experiences, and differences into weaknesses or deny them outright. For this reason, the emergence of trust can be a powerful weapon, which is being recovered all the time through struggle.”
― Carla Bergman, Joyful Militancy: Building Thriving Resistance in Toxic Times

“Maybe the concept of friendship is already too colonized by liberalism and capitalism. Under neoliberalism, friendship is a banal affair of private preferences: we hang out, we share hobbies, we make small talk. We become friends with those who are already like us, and we keep each other comfortable rather than becoming different and more capable together. The algorithms of Facebook and other social networks guide us towards the refinement of our profiles, reducing friendship to the click of a button. This neoliberal friend is the alternative to hetero- and homonormative coupling: "just friends" implies a much weaker and insignificant bond than a lover could ever be. Under neoliberal friendship, we don't have each other's backs, and our lives
aren't tangled up together. But these insipid tendencies do not mean that friendships are pointless, only that friendship is a terrain of struggle. Empire works to usher its subjects into flimsy relationships where nothing is at stake and to infuse intimacy with violence and domination.”
― Carla Bergman, Joyful Militancy: Building Thriving Resistance in Toxic Times

“What happens when politics becomes something a person *has*, rather than something people *do together* as a shared practice?”
― Carla Bergman, Joyful Militancy: Building Thriving Resistance in Toxic Times

“At times, my most urgent desire is to feel untroubled. Thank you for divesting me from it over and over.”
― Carla Bergman, Joyful Militancy: Building Thriving Resistance in Toxic Times

“Imarisha’s words reveal the capacity to hold on to intensity and ambivalence, without parsing it into a binary between “feeling good” and “feeling bad,” or setting optimism against pessimism. To be capable of holding all of this—of wins attached to losses, and joys attached to sorrows—is fundamentally about being affected. It is about inhabiting a world of uncertainty and complexity, about feeling and participating in emergent and collective powers. Joy.”
― Carla Bergman, Joyful Militancy: Building Thriving Resistance in Toxic Times

“Responsibility in this sense is not a burden but something that actually enhances our life experience. The word literally means “ability to respond.”
― Carla Bergman, Joyful Militancy: Building Thriving Resistance in Toxic Times

“...no one will really be able to embrace the mission of tearing “this shit down” until they realize that the structures they oppose are not only bad for some of us, they are bad for all of us.”
― Carla Bergman, Joyful Militancy: Building Thriving Resistance in Toxic Times

“Whereas morality asks and answers the question: “what should one do?” a Spinozan ethics asks: “what is one capable of?”
― Carla Bergman, Joyful Militancy: Building Thriving Resistance in Toxic Times

“From a certain perspective, it can be depressing to hear about places where the social fabric is much stronger, where there are deep traditions of mutual aid, or where struggles against Empire are visible, widespread, & intense. It can activate a feeling around us that people are too flawed, too complacent, or that our own worlds are lacking something...”
― Carla Bergman, Joyful Militancy: Building Thriving Resistance in Toxic Times