Catapult

“White women can oscillate between their gender and their race, between being the oppressed and the oppressor. Women of color are never permitted to exist outside of these constraints: we are both women and people of color and we are always seen and treated as such.”
― Ruby Hamad, White Tears/Brown Scars: How White Feminism Betrays Women of Color

“Sometimes, though no one ever asks, I say that it was moving to the East Coast that led me to understand that I was raced—to understand that the gaze upon my body bore the effects of a system far larger than me. I could no longer think of myself as a neutral subject; no one was, and in that realization there was a kind of relief. Emboldened by my reading, I began to consider my own Asian-Americanness, and within it to draw a distinction between East and Southeast Asian, finally acknowledging the effects of being a repeatedly colonized subject—the ways women who looked like me had been degraded and degraded. Because I was emphatically a brown girl fucking, I related to the term ABJECT so much that I made endless puns about it: ABJECT PERMENANCE, ABJECT STORY, ABJECT OF YOUR AFFECTION. For that was how I felt, melodramatic as it was: cast-off, objectified. Kristeva was the spotlight that illuminated my condition.”
― Larissa Pham, Pop Song: Adventures in Art & Intimacy

“Yes, it is true women of color have been the targets of a setup of monumental proportions, something that amounts to nothing short of a covert war against us. But it is also true that these attacks are their own proof of just how serious a threat to the status quo all women of color really are. So serious, in fact, that the very concept of the innocent white woman was constructed to keep us firmly in our place.”
― Ruby Hamad, White Tears/Brown Scars: How White Feminism Betrays Women of Color

“She wanted someone ... who worked with his hands and not with words. Want. She wanted. She needed. The words resounded in her head as she went out the door to the street. And maybe it was the cool wind that hit her in the face, or the moon that still hung in the sky, full and yellow, or the fact that she was still drunk and was going back to her bed alone at one thirty in the morning, but the words hurt her. She felt again, for the second time that night, humiliated and sick of herself.”
― Paulina Flores, Humiliation