More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
The audience wants something to watch or read or hear. That’s what makes it an audience. And yet, as I looked around, I saw that the audience had a new job. At the particular historical moment where I found myself, a moment awash in bitter revelation, the audience had become something else: a group outraged freshly by new monsters, over and over and over. The audience thrills to the drama of denouncing the monster.
There is no longer any escaping biography. Even within my own lifetime, I’ve seen a massive shift. Biography used to be something you sought out, yearned for, actively pursued. Now it falls on your head all day long.
(And perhaps I come to you with my own kind of stain—the stain of being a certain kind of white middle-class feminist. Maybe you think my solutions will be typical of such a person. Maybe I thought the same thing. Maybe I assumed at first that my findings would reassert the tenets of liberalism. Maybe we’ll both be surprised.)
I always sat toward the back, popping snacks and cracking up and covering my eyes during the scary bits. I knew I was supposed to be a cultural arbiter, but I kept slipping up and being the audience.
what is feminism (or any liberation movement) if not a daily struggle against forces that are so large, so consuming, that those forces are invisible to—forgotten by, taken for granted by—the very people wielding them?
