Giselle London

“it all has the same rotten root: pronatalism. The ideology, that is, that says “parents are more important than non-parents, and that families are more respectable and more valid than single people.”
― Ruby Warrington, Women Without Kids: The Revolutionary Rise of an Unsung Sisterhood

“shift in Caliban and the Witch—in which she posits that the very purpose of the witch hunts that accompanied this era, for example, was to put control of women’s bodies and reproductive function into the hands of the newly minted owning class: wealthy white men, a.k.a. the founding fathers of patriarchy. Said “witches” represented “a world of female subjects that capitalism had to destroy: the heretic, the healer, the disobedient wife, the woman who dared to live alone.” Among them, many a woman without kids. Women in turn whose life choices went against the requirements of the developing capitalist machine, which demanded a continual source of fresh “labor-power” (i.e., people) in order to fulfill its mandate of perpetual growth.”
― Ruby Warrington, Women Without Kids: The Revolutionary Rise of an Unsung Sisterhood

“moist. What was it like to live in a time when one’s fate was not war, when one was not led by the craven and the corrupt, when one’s country was not a basket case kept alive only through the intravenous drip of American aid?”
― Viet Thanh Nguyen, The Sympathizer

“Your American puppet masters like to say that, but it’s stupid, he said. History, humanity, religion, this war tells us exactly the reverse. We are all guilty until proven innocent, as even the Americans have shown. Why else do they believe everyone is really Viet Cong? Why else do they shoot first and ask questions later? Because to them all yellow people are guilty until proven innocent. Americans are a confused people because they can’t admit this contradiction. They believe in a universe of divine justice where the human race is guilty of sin, but they also believe in a secular justice where human beings are presumed innocent. You can’t have both. You know how Americans deal with it? They pretend they are eternally innocent no matter how many times they lose their innocence. The problem is that those who insist on their innocence believe anything they do is just. At least we who believe in our own guilt know what dark things we can do.”
― Viet Thanh Nguyen, The Sympathizer