Parker

“A major challenge of this movement is to do the work that will create more humane, habitable environments for people in prison without bolstering the permanence of the prison system. How, then, do we accomplish this balancing act of passionately attending to the needs of prisoners- calling for less violent conditions, an end to state sexual assault, improved physical and mental health care, greater access to drug programs, better educational work opportunities, unionization of prison labor, more connections with families and communities, shorter or alternative sentencing- and at the same time call for alternatives to sentencing altogether, no more prison construction, and abolitionist strategies that question the place of prison in our future?”
― Angela Y. Davis

“It is absurd, Barthes says, to try to flee from language's assertive nature 'adding to each sentence some little phrase of uncertainty, as if anything that came out of language could make language tremble.' My writing is riddled with such tics of uncertainty. I have no excuse or solution, save to allow myself the tremblings, then go back in later and slash them out. In this way I edit myself into a boldness that is neither native nor foreign to me.”
― Maggie Nelson, The Argonauts

“Healing imagery is also problematic because it implies that the damage being done is primarily emotional. The goal becomes one of "getting along" better by being nicer and more tolerant toward one another, forgiving and forgetting, living in more authentic ways. I don’t object to this goal, but it ignores the fact that a lot of the trouble doesn’t begin and end with interpersonal relations and emotional wounds. Much of it is embedded in structures of power and inequality that shape almost every aspect of life in this society, from economics to politics to religion to schools and the family. The idea that we’re going to get out of this by somehow getting to a place where we’re kinder and more sensitive to one another ignores most of what we have to overcome. It sets us up to walk right past the trouble toward an alternative that doesn’t exist and can’t exist until we do something about what creates privilege and oppression in the first place. And that is something that needs to be changed, not healed.”
― Allan G. Johnson, Privilege, Power, and Difference

“But whatever I am, or have since become, I know now that slipperiness isn’t all of it. I know now that a studied evasiveness has its own limitations, its own ways of inhibiting certain forms of happiness and pleasure. The pleasure of abiding. The pleasure of insistence, of persistence. The pleasure of obligation, the pleasure of dependency. The pleasures of ordinary devotion. The pleasure of recognizing that one may have to undergo the same realizations, write the same notes in the margin, return to the same themes in one’s work, relearn the same emotional truths, write the same book over and over again—not because one is stupid or obstinate or incapable of change, but because such revisitations constitute a life.”
― Maggie Nelson, The Argonauts