Hazel

“I’m sorry, she always thinks, I learned to police myself pretty fiercely when I was a tiny little baby, internalizing social norms and trying to keep myself safe from them at the same time.”
― Imogen Binnie, Nevada: A Novel

“As in the mid-twentieth century, one of the things we need to work out for ourselves is a true definition of happiness. Are we being duped by gentrified happiness, and can we find pleasure in something more complex, more multi-dimensional, and therefore more dynamic? Can we be happy with the uncomfortable awareness that other people are real?
Gentrification replaces most people’s experiences with the perceptions of the privileged and calls that reality. In this way gentrification is dependent on telling us that things are better than they are—and this is supposed to make us feel happy. It’s a strange concept of happiness as something that requires the denial of many other people’s experiences. For some of us, on the other hand, the pursuit of reality is essential to happiness.”
― Sarah Schulman, The Gentrification of the Mind: Witness to a Lost Imagination

“...being socialized as a man for me, especially at fancy colleges, was being trained, over and over again, to hold power by criticizing things from a place of objectivity, instead of just saying my emotional intuition and not making up a reason for why it felt that way.”
― Hannah Baer, trans girl suicide museum

“The deaths of these 81,542 New Yorkers, who were despised and abandoned, who did not have rights or representation, who died because of the neglect of their government and families, has been ignored. This gaping hole of silence has been filled by the deaths of 2,752 people murdered by outside forces. The disallowed grief of twenty years of AIDS deaths was replaced by ritualized and institutionalized mourning of the acceptable dead. In this way, 9/11 is the gentrification of AIDS. The replacement of deaths that don’t matter with the deaths that do. It is the centerpiece of supremacy ideology, the idea that one person’s life is more important than another’s. That one person deserves rights that another does not deserve. That one person deserves representation that the other cannot be allowed to access. That one person’s death is negligible if he or she was poor, a person of color, a homosexual living in a state of oppositional sexual disobedience, while another death matters because that person was a trader, cop, or office worker presumed to be performing the job of Capital.”
― Sarah Schulman, The Gentrification of the Mind: Witness to a Lost Imagination