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Her book Relational Remembering: Rethinking the Memory Wars made substantial interventions in debates about "false memory" syndrome, responding particularly to the ways that understanding memory as dynamic and relational has been critiqued by "false memory" sceptics. Campbell observed that women who recovered memories of past abuse were often discredited by people -- often in courts of law -- who claimed that their memory was unsound because they had fashioned their memories in conversations with therapists. In these cases, women are rendered unreliable or sullied rememberers through, among other things, storehouse, individuated conceptions of memory. Campbell's claim here is that memory is not a storehouse, nor individual. So it is not a failure of memory that we need others to articulate and understand our past experiences; others are necessary to our memory.

— Against Purity by Alexis Shotwell (Page 76 - 77)

Memory is held not only, or perhaps even not primarily, in our skull. Rather, it might be best understood as "held" within precisely the complex network of relationships that shapes affect and personhood. In thinking about Campbell's claim that we need a relational view of memory, recall her argument that having a discursive community can help us express free-style feelings and that expression is in key ways involved in having feelings that do not fit into preset, well-established emotions. Campbell frames memory as collaborative, too.

— Against Purity by Alexis Shotwell (Page 75)

Living well might feel impossible, and certainly living purely is impossible. The slate has never been clean, and we can't wipe off the surface to start fresh -- there's no "fresh" to start. Endocrine-disrupting soap doesn't offer a purity made simple because there isn't one. All there is, while things perpetually fall apart, is the possibility of acting from where we are. Being against purity means that there is no primordial state we might wish to get back to, no Eden we have desecrated, no pretoxic body we might uncover through enough chia seeds and kombucha. There is not a preracial state we could access, erasing histories of slavery, forced labor on railroads, colonialism, genocide, and their concomitant responsibilities and requirements. There is no food we can eat, clothing we can buy, or energy we can use without deepening our ties to complex webs of suffering.

This book champions the usefulness of thinking about complicity and compromise as a starting point for action.

— Against Purity by Alexis Shotwell (Page 11 - 12)

I was as indifferent to human gender as it was possible to be without being unconscious.

— System Collapse by Martha Wells (The Murderbot Diaries, #7)