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Because gender is already relational, we don't just need the freedom to change our own gendered selves; we need the freedom to change the gendered world. Taking up practices of freedom through shaping open normativities, through claiming beauty in the face of invisibility (or worse), changes social relations and, thus, the world. This nonvoluntarist activity might not look like any freedom associated with the liberal-individual self, though it may require the recognition and dignity affiliated with that subject position. It will, however, be more adequate to our messy, complex, hopeful lives. For those lives, we need practices of open normativities to pursue visions and practices hospitable for worlds to come, to determine what deserves a future.

— Against Purity by Alexis Shotwell (Page 163)

So we can ask, what happens if we use this narrative to make these changes in the world? If we say: atrazine is bad because gender and sex switching is bad, same-sex sex is bad, bodily changes we call disability are bad, and especially sex selection that results in fewer boy babies is bad, what happens? If the badness that we're pointing to happens to line up perfectly with the way we tend to organize power in human life already then two thing seem to be a problem. One is that this narrative reinforces the way we currently organize power in human life. The other is that if there aren't resasons to do things for the love of the frogs, we reinforce the ways humans organize power in the world altogether, which is currently ruining our shared world.

— Against Purity by Alexis Shotwell

“The point in interrogating these classificatory infracstructures, in order to de-centre the human, is not to put animals or other things on a pedestal or to include them, but to begin to map our interdependencies in larger systems of relational re/production. To simply include or valorize non-humans would deny the obligations humans bear as complexly thinking animals capable of solving some of the major social and ecological problems we've created” (Kier 2010, 306). What is it to care humanly without thinking that humans are the most important thing in the picture? If we want to do both, we need to have some way of caring about atrazine's effects on humans while also caring about its effects on frogs. So, to take an indicator species model is to care instrumentally — we think about the frogs because of what they might tell us about what could happen to humans. [...] Naming and noticing might be a way to care humanly, but not instumentally, to recognize and value the fact that the frogs and the toads and the lizards have their own life that we are just tuning into. This is why I'm interested in projects of ordinary people (which doesn't mean that people can't have training in ecology and still be ordinary people). They, we, you, are using ways of noticing and technologies of noticing, like naming, that don't fundamentally have an allegiance to apparatuses of thinking shaped as a practice of dominion over the natural or social world.

— Against Purity by Alexis Shotwell (Page 98 - 99)

She argues that "the reconstructive view of memory does not suggest that we can undo or remake facts about the past, or will away the damage of the past by thinking about it differently. It rather stresses that how we remember can change the significance of the past for the future" (Campbell 2014, 148). If we understand memory as situated in the present, as at least partially collective in nature, as reflecting present interests and needs, and as offering multiple ways "in" to respecting the past, we might begin to do justice to that past in all its relationally constituted richness. [...] Here as in chapter 1, thinking about the past is important to the account of being against purity for two reasons: First, recognizing the contingency and malleability of what happened in the past reminds us that the world we experience now is a product of complex social relations, which continue to have ramifying effects in the present. Second, attending to how we remember the past calls on us to consider how and why we remember, and to recognize that these practices are situated and invested rather than natural and inevitable.

— Against Purity by Alexis Shotwell (Page 61 - 62)

Consider that some people think that they "just don't see race", or that poverty doesn't exist in their community, or that Indigenous people aren't part of their national consciousness. One way to understand what is at play here is through imagining a kind of benign ignorance—people just haven't been taught the facts of the situation, and so they can't be held responsible for not understanding how race, poverty, indigeneity, and more, are present in their lives. If this were the problem, just giving people more and better information would correct their knowledge problem. But we don't just have a knowledge problem—we have a habit-of-being problem; the problem of whiteness is a problem of what we expect, our ways of being, bodily-ness, and how we understand ourselves as "placed" in time. Whiteness is a problem of being shaped to think that other people are the problem. Another way to understand this dynamic is to realize the very complex entanglement of practices and habit of ignorance, repression, and active disavowal that constitute an active settler process of not telling, not seeing, and not understanding the truth of the matter, which is a truth of being shaped as the legacy of the harms of the past.

— Against Purity by Alexis Shotwell (Page 38)

There is a viscous porosity of flesh — my flesh and the flesh of the world. This porosity is a hinge through which we are of and in the world. I refer to it as viscous, for there are membranes that effect the interactions. These membranes of various types — skin and flesh, prejudgments and symbolic imaginaries, habits and embodients.

— Against Purity by Alexis Shotwell (Page 92)