silverglamour > silverglamour's Quotes

“I don’t believe rape is inevitable or natural. If I did, I would have no reason to be here. If I did, my political practice would be different than it is. Have you ever wondered why we [women] are not just in armed combat against you? It’s not because there’s a shortage of kitchen knives in this country. It is because we believe in your humanity, against all the evidence.”
― Andrea Dworkin

“To the Western academic, the subjectivity and activism of transfeminized Third-Worlders is a distant concern next to their rhetorical utility as a ‘venerated’, vaunted “Third-Sex”, casting “primitive yet Enlightened” non-Western cultures as curious gender-practitioners from whom the West has so much to learn. All the while, the ways in which Third-Sexed populations like hijra identify with womanhood and organize for legal recognition as women are utterly elided; as Serano grimly notes of Nanda’s Gender Diversity in Whipping Girl, the “gender-diversity” of the Orientalized non-Western culture is a sacred cow for many academics who concern themselves with queerness and (supposedly) feminism, a crucial cudgel with which to beat and berate the “medicalized”, “Western” transsexual. Transition healthcare that is socio-economically out of reach for many Third World trans women is derided as “imperialism” while the transmisogynistic model of “Third-Sexing”, first imposed by our own cultures and then legitimized by Western academics, is simply considered scholarship. Many Westerners, it seems, would happily let my sisters languish without means or care just to reinforce their own worldviews.”
― Talia Bhatt, Trans/Rad/Fem

“The vast majority of conservative women are not in fact ignorant about patriarchy or their limited role in it, but have adopted a certain fatalistic attitude. To them, liberation from patriarchy is neither possible nor worth fighting for, as it would be no better than tilting at windmills. Better to accept that a woman is modest, domestic, a home-maker and child-rearer, and to perform according to those standards. In exchange, they receive the stability and security that a man who has claimed them can provide, a certain safety located within having to manage a single man’s desires and needs. This ‘traditional’ life protects them, shelters them from the wider world which remains hostile and misogynistic, and is thus the ‘smart’ choice, one that all women ought to wisely and maturely accept.”
― Talia Bhatt, Trans/Rad/Fem

“The longstanding effort to "colorize" feminist theory by inserting the experiences of women of color represents at best genuine efforts to reduce bias in Women's Studies. But at its worst, colorization also contains elements of both voyeurism and academic colonialism. As a result of new technologies and perceived profitability, we can now watch black-and-white movie classics in color. While the tinted images we are offered may be more palatable to the modern viewer, we are still watching the same old movie that was offered to us before. Movie colorization adds little of substance-its contributions remain cosmetic. Similarly, women of color allegedly can teach White feminists nothing about feminism, but must confine ourselves to "colorizing" preexisting feminist theory. Rather than seeing women of color as fully human individuals, we are treated as the additive sum of our categories.”
― Patricia Hill Collins, On Intellectual Activism

“There is no thing as a single-issue struggle because we do not live single-issue lives.”
― Audre Lorde

“Your silence will not protect you.”
― Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches

“Nobody in the world, nobody in history, has ever gotten their freedom by appealing to the moral sense of the people who were oppressing them.”
― Assata Shakur, Assata: An Autobiography