Hil

“Having evidence of being wronged does not stop you from being judged as in the wrong.”
― Sara Ahmed, Complaint!

“When a complaint about a hostile environment collides with another complaint, that collision reproduces the hostile environment. To identify an environment as hostile is to be identified as hostile, as causing damage. You can become a “malicious complainer,” even though the complaint that is taken forward is not your complaint but the complaint made about you. And so we learn: it becomes more damaging to call a person, department, or institution transphobic than to be transphobic. We also learn: not all complaints are nonreproductive labor. In fact, complaints are more likely to get uptake when they are made against those who are trying to intervene in the reproduction of a problem. Reproduction is also about immanence: what is reproduced tends to be what we are”
― Sara Ahmed, Complaint!

“It happens all too often that bosses view employees as lesser beings who can be degraded without conscience; that employees view their bosses as tyrants to be toppled; and that peers view one another as enemy combatants. When this is the toxic culture of guidance, criticism is a weapon rather than a tool for improvement; it makes the giver feel powerful and the receiver feel awful. Even praise can feel more like a backhanded compliment than a celebration of work well done. “Well, you got it right this time.”
― Kim Malone Scott, Radical Candor: Be a Kick-Ass Boss Without Losing Your Humanity

“I came to theory because I was hurting—the pain within me was so intense that I could not go on living. I came to theory desperate, wanting to comprehend—to grasp what was happening around and within me. Most importantly, I wanted to make the hurt go away. I saw in theory then a location for healing.”
― bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom