Intersectionality Quotes

“Girls like me seemed to be the object of the conversations and not full participants, because we were a problem to be solved, not people in our own right.”
― Mikki Kendall, Hood Feminism: Notes from the Women That a Movement Forgot

“Our beliefs about bodies disproportionately impact those whose race, gender, sexual orientation, ability, and age deviate from our default notions. The further from the default, the greater the impact. We are all affected - but not equally.”
― Sonya Renee Taylor, The Body Is Not an Apology: The Power of Radical Self-Love

“To truly be antiracist is to be feminist. To truly be feminist is to be antiracist. [...] We cannot be antiracist if we are homophobic or transphobic. [...] All Black lives include those of poor transgender Black women, perhaps the most violated and oppressed of all the Black intersectional groups.”
― Ibram X. Kendi, How to Be an Antiracist

“Understanding the interconnected nature of oppression will help us realize the interconnected nature of liberation.”
― Aditi Mayer

“I understood intersectionality—the way that white supremacy props up patriarchy props up poverty props up environmental destruction props up white supremacy again—on a gut level, even if I didn’t know to call it “intersectionality” yet. I understood that sex workers are often stigmatized, barred from claiming their full humanity, by sexist culture and feminist movements alike. I understood that the idea of “The Closet” applied to so much more than just queer people, that we are all in a closet of one kind or another. And, contrary to all of my actions since, I understood that high heels and back problems were, in fact, related. What stands out to me most is that, at the age of seventeen, I seem to have understood the full stakes of what I was doing. I understood that by challenging gender norms and conventional masculinity, I was challenging, well, everything. Through challenging the idea of manhood, of being “a good man,” of “manning up,” I was burrowing deep into the core of power, privilege, and hierarchy. On a gut level, I understood that my freedom and liberation were wrapped up with those of so many others who were facing oppression.”
― Jacob Tobia, Sissy: A Coming-of-Gender Story

“Black feminism emerged as a theoretical and practical effort demonstrating that race, gender, and class are inseparable in the social worlds we inhabit. At the time of its emergence, Black women were frequently asked to choose whether the Black movement or the women’s movement was most important. The response was that this was the wrong question.”
― Angela Y. Davis, Freedom is a Constant Struggle: Ferguson, Palestine and the Foundations of a Movement

“...I am struck by how these pitiers unknowingly give voice to the deepest of truths: they cannot imagine this kind of life.”
― Amanda Leduc, Disfigured: On Fairy Tales, Disability, and Making Space

“The same patriarchy that oppresses women oppresses nonhuman animals. Farmed animals and “housewives,” “lab” animals and prostitutes, dancing bears and girls in the sex trade—all have too long been exploited by the same patriarchal hierarchy wherein the comparatively weak are exploited for the benefit of the powerful.”
― Lisa Kemmerer, Speaking Up for Animals: An Anthology of Women's Voices

“As I encouraged black women to become active feminists, I was told that we should not become “women’s libbers” because racism was the oppressive force in our lives—not sexism. To both groups I voiced my conviction that the struggle to end racism and the struggle to end sexism were naturally intertwined, that to make them separate was to deny a basic truth of our existence, that race and sex are both immutable facets of human identity.”
― bell hooks, Ain't I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism

“I walk over to the plus size section, wondering why my sizes have to be in a special section of the store and not mixed in with the other sizes. There is a definite divide, as if a shirt with a 3X tag will contaminate the other clothes. I look through the clothes-there's not much to choose from. Just two racks compared to a whole store full of options for thinner girls.”
― Renée Watson, Watch Us Rise

“There are those who would find my call for the study of intersectionality as 'old hat', the recitation of a 'mantra'. I would remind them that mantras are designed for repetition precisely because each repetitive act is expected to construct new meanings.”
― Avtar Brah, Cartographies of Diaspora: Contesting Identities

“There is narcissism in [the] white feminist refusal of intersectionality, this privileging of gender over race, class and other categories of oppression.”
― Alison Phipps, Me, Not You: The Trouble with Mainstream Feminism

“I have always loved feminism’s readiness to viciously rip into the flesh of misogyny, to stick its chin out defiantly and scare the living daylights out of mediocre men.”
― Reni Eddo-Lodge, Why I'm No Longer Talking to White People About Race

“To learn how people describe their understanding of their lives is very
illuminating, for ‘ideas are the conscious expression – real or illusory – of (our) actual relations and activities’, because ‘social existence determines consciousness’ [Marx]. Given that our existence is shaped by the capitalist mode of production, experience, to be fully understood in its broader social and political implications, has to be situated in the context of the capitalist forces and relations that produce it. Experience in itself, however, is suspect because, dialectically, it is a unity of opposites; it is unique, personal, insightful and revealing, and, at the same time, thoroughly social, partial, mystifying, itself the product of historical forces about which individuals may know little or nothing about. Given the emancipatory goals of the RGC [race-gender-class] perspective, it is through the analytical tools of Marxist theory that it can move forward, beyond the impasse revealed by the constant reiteration of variations on the ‘interlocking’ metaphor.”
― Martha A. Gimenez, Marx, Women, and Capitalist Social Reproduction: Marxist Feminist Essays

“Intersectionality and the recognition and confrontation of our privilege, can make us better people with better lives.”
― Ijeoma Oluo, So You Want to Talk About Race

“Even with the onset of contemporary animal advocacy, and the unavoidability of at least some knowledge of what goes on in slaughterhouses and
on factory farms, most of us choose to look away—even feminists. Collectively, feminists remain largely unaware of the well-documented links between the exploitation of women and girls, and the exploitation of cows, sows, and hens.”
― Lisa Kemmerer, Speaking Up for Animals: An Anthology of Women's Voices

“Even with the onset of contemporary animal advocacy, and the unavoidability of at least some knowledge of what goes on in slaughterhouses and on factory farms, most of us choose to look away—even feminists. Collectively, feminists remain largely unaware of the well-documented links between the exploitation of women and girls, and the exploitation of cows, sows, and hens.”
― Lisa Kemmerer, Speaking Up for Animals: An Anthology of Women's Voices

“Feminists lobby against sex wage discrepancies, gays fight homophobic laws, and the physically challenged demand greater access—each fighting for injustices that affect their lives, and/or the lives of their loved ones. Yet these dedicated activists usually fail to make even a slight change in their consumer choices for the sake of other much more egregiously oppressed and exploited individuals. While it is important to fight for one’s own liberation, it is counterproductive (not to mention selfish and small minded) to fight for one’s own liberation while willfully continuing to oppress others who are yet lower on the rungs of hierarchy.”
― Lisa Kemmerer, Speaking Up for Animals: An Anthology of Women's Voices

“While fighting for liberation, it makes no sense for feminists to trample on gays, for gays to trample on the physically challenged, or for the physically challenged to trample on feminists. It also makes no sense for any of these social justice activists to willfully exploit factory farmed animals. Can we not at least avoid exploiting and dominating others while working for our personal liberation?”
― Lisa Kemmerer, Speaking Up for Animals: An Anthology of Women's Voices

“Those who are aware of history, of patriarchy and of the feminist movement, tend to understand how difficult it is—and how important—for people to rethink basic behaviors in order to bring about deep and lasting change. We must rethink how we speak, how we spend our time, and what we consume. This is as true for fighting sexism as it is for fighting speciesism—or any other form of domination, exploitation, and oppression. We must change our lives first, and most fundamentally. . . . [Feminists] can and must choose not to continue to exploit nonhuman animals while working to liberate girls and women”
― Lisa Kemmerer, Speaking Up for Animals: An Anthology of Women's Voices

“Oppressions are linked. We cannot free human beings without freeing cows, sows, and hens along with women and men who are systematically oppressed by those in power. Rather than seek to fight our way up the patriarchal ladder, those working for social justice need to dismantle hierarchies, and cease to exploit all those who are less powerful—even if we must give up a few culinary favorites in the process . . . . Each of us decides, over the course of our daily lives, whether we will ignore the suffering of nonhuman animals . . . . We choose where our money goes, and in the process, we choose whether to boycott cruelty and support change, or melt ambiguously back into the masses.”
― Lisa Kemmerer, Speaking Up for Animals: An Anthology of Women's Voices

“. . . no human being would wish to trade places with nonhuman animals in factory farms or laboratories. . . . The legal status of women and nonwhite racialized minorities has improved markedly in the past fifty years; matters have grown considerably worse for nonhuman animals.”
― Lisa Kemmerer, Sister Species: Women, Animals and Social Justice

“In theory, intersectionality builds coalitions by getting different minority groups to recognize that their griefs all have common, intersecting causes. In practice, it breeds division and resentment among the coalition it is trying to build.

Rather than leveling an alleged racial- and gender-based hierarchy of power, it inverts it, putting the supposedly least privileged persons at the top. The result is a self-narrowing bullying culture of privilege checking, because each group is trying to one-up the others in the rankings of who is most oppressed so that their niche concerns receive the most attention. Intersectionality replaces the call to recognize our shared humanity and the common goal of equal rights with a compulsion to divide us into smaller and smaller groups.”
― Newt Gingrich, Understanding Trump

“Violence against women is a pivot for the intersecting systems of heteropatriarchy, racial capitalism and colonialism. It results from the tussle for material and emotional resources, between commodity production and the reproduction of human life.”
― Alison Phipps, Me, Not You: The Trouble with Mainstream Feminism

“Colonial feminists are concerned with ‘liberating’ Other women, not critiquing colonial capitalism and its neoliberal successor. Colonial feminists condemn the burqa, but not the wars waged or fought by proxy in the service of resource accumulation, trade routes and pipelines, enabling and supporting autocratic and fundamentalist regimes.”
― Alison Phipps , Me, Not You: The Trouble with Mainstream Feminism

“In the Christian tradition, the function of the “prophetic” (far from being about soothsaying the future) is about speaking truth to power in the face of injustice. The prophets in the Biblical tradition were disruptive voices in the face of systemic failures to protect the most vulnerable. In our context, the prophetic is a disruption of power and privilege in much the same way as a stick in the spokes- an attempt to immediately stop the forward momentum of harmful and oppressive dynamics. The disruption becomes necessary- even critical- when our mutual and social commitments (including grassroots realities, governmental systems, religious communities, etc.) fail to protect the marginalized- or worse, contribute to their oppression.”
― Jamie Arpin-Ricci

“You deserve so much more than just to be tolerated. You deserve to be loved for exactly who and what you are right now. This, of course, is a double-edged sword. This also means you must return the favor. Learn more about racism and sexism and ableism, too. You, unfortunately, are probably already well aware of how much homophobia can hurt, inside and out. Learning more about how different kinds of oppression work and where they intersect will help you build better bridges with others and create a safe and respectful...culture for everyone. Bullies are almost always outnumbered by the bullied. We just need to organize.”
― Ivan Coyote

“The key theoretical and political question is not, therefore, how class (in the Marxist sense) ‘intersects’ with the various identities where individuals are presumably located, but how to differentiate between the effects of capitalist class power upon large and heterogeneous (in terms of identity) sectors of the working class, and the effects of identity-based interactions and conflicts within those sectors.”
― Martha A. Gimenez, Marx, Women, and Capitalist Social Reproduction: Marxist Feminist Essays

“Denial of the fundamental role of class relations and struggles in the production of oppression and inequality defines intersectionality’s macro-level assumptions about the relationship among its key elements. Regardless of the politicised vocabulary, i.e. references in the intersectionality literature to imperialism, capitalism, neoliberalism, class, and so on, intersectionality – like the RGC perspective that preceded it – is an abstract analytical framework which, like sociology, approaches the study of social phenomena ahistorically, i.e. in abstraction from their capitalist conditions of possibility”
― Martha A. Gimenez, Marx, Women, and Capitalist Social Reproduction: Marxist Feminist Essays

“...today class has been reduced to another ‘ism’; i.e. to another form oppression which, together with gender and race, integrate a sort of mantra, something that everyone ought to include in theorising and research, though, to my knowledge, theorising about it remains at the level of metaphors (e.g. interweaving, interaction, interconnection, etc.)”
― Martha A. Gimenez, Marx, Women, and Capitalist Social Reproduction: Marxist Feminist Essays